Trump’s budget would cut at least $4.7 billion from programs at HUD and the EPA that support healthy housing and lead pollution cleanup efforts, a Reuters analysis found
A firm, outspoken protest upon such inroads upon intellectual independence as are being made in Germany and other parts of the world today was one of the most important results of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Boston.
The resolution adopted by this principal organization of the nation’s scientists will also be read with significance in some parts of our country where with less openness and without a flying of banners of oppression damaging curtailments of intellectual freedom have been made.
Headed “A Declaration On Intellectual Freedom,” the pronouncement reads:
“The American Association for the Advancement of Science feels grave concern over persistent and threatening inroads upon intellectual freedom which have been made in recent times in many parts of the world.
“Our existing liberties have been won through ages of struggle and at enormous costs. If these are lost or seriously impaired there can be no hope of continued progress in science, of justice in government, of international or domestic peace, or even of lasting material well-being.
“We regard the suppression of independent thought and of its free expression as a major crime against civilization itself. Yet oppression of this sort has been inflicted upon investigators, scholars, teachers and professional men in many ways, whether by governmental action, administrative coercion, or extra-legal violence. We feel it our duty to denounce all such actions as intolerable forms of tyranny.
“There can be no compromise on this issue for even the commonwealth of learning cannot endure ‘half slave and half free.’
“By our life and training as scientists and by our heritage as Americans we must stand for freedom.”
(Below this article from 1938 is the manifesto that was signed by these scientists and which very well applies today against the current war on science happening from the Trump and GOP administration in power both in the Federal government and in the majority of state governorships and many state legislatures.)
Group of Scientists Issue Anti-Fascist Manifesto – 1938
Three Nobel Prize Winners, 64 Academicians, and 85 College Presidents Among the 1,284 Signers
Counting among its 1,284 signers, three Nobel prize winners, 64 members of the National Academy of Sciences and 85 college presidents, a ringing denunciation of Nazi and Fascist attacks on scientific freedom was issued by a committee of distinguished American men of science.
“We publicly condemn the Fascist position toward science . . . . In the present historical epoch democracy alone can preserve intellectual freedom,” the manifesto states.
Citing ruthless Nazi persecution of scientists – 1600 teachers and scientists had been driven from their posts by the fall of 1936 – the manifesto asserts that “any attack upon freedom of thought in one sphere, even as non-political a sphere as theoretical physics is in effect an attack on democracy itself.”
Persecution of Jews and “racial” theories of science, publication of one of which furnishes the occasion for this document, are condemned in no uncertain terms. “The racial theories which they (the Fascists) advocate have been demolished time and again.”
The three Nobel prize winners who are among the signers are Dr. Irving Langmuir, associate director of the General Electric Research Laboratory and chemistry prize winner in 1932; Prof. Robert A. Millikan, director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, California Institute of Technology and 1923 physics award recipient; and Prof. Harold C. Urey, Columbia University physical chemist honored with the 1923 chemistry prize for the discovery of heavy hydrogen.
The signers, who represent 167 universities and research institutes through the country, pledge themselves to bend their efforts to prevent themselves or America from suffering a similar fate.
The sponsoring committee and the list of signers itself are studded with the names of the noted figures of American science, including many present and former presidents of leading scientific societies. Among the signers and a member of the sponsoring committee is Prof. Wesley C. Mitchell, Columbia University economist who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Prof. Franz Boas, former president of the AAAS and the dean of American anthropologists, is a member of the sponsoring committee, as is Prof. Urey. Others on the committee are Prof. Karl M. Bowman of New York University and director of the division of psychiatry of the New York City Department of Hospitals; Dr. John P. Peters of Yale University and secretary of the Committee of Physicians which has been battling the American Medical Association on behalf of group medical care. Dr. Henry E. Sigerist, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of the History of Medicine; Prof. D. J. Struik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician and editor of “Science and Society”; and Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, professor of pathology and former dean of the Yale Medical School.
Besides those named above, some of the prominent signers include Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Prof. Anton J. Carlson, University of Chicago physiologist; Prof. Clark Wissler, Yale University anthropologist and curator-in-chief of the department of anthropology at the American museum of Natural History; Prof. Edwin G. Conklin of Princeton, past president of the AAAS and president of Science Service; and Prof. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard, co-chairman of the Medical Bureau and north American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.
Manifesto by 1,284 Noted U.S. Scientists Denounces Racialism, Fascist Position on Science
December 11, 1938
NEW YORK (Dec. 9)
The fascist position toward science and the racial theory were denounced today in a manifesto signed by 1,284 American scientists, including three Nobel prize winners, which summoned their colleagues to the defense of democracy to avoid the fate of scientists in totalitarian states.
The manifesto was made public by a committee of prominent scientists headed by Prof. Franz Boas, dean of American anthropologists, who said. “The present outrages in Germany have made it all the more necessary for American scientists to take a firm anti-fascist stand. We are sure that the great majority of German scientists and the German people as a whole abhor fascism. The thousands of teachers and scientists who have been exiled since Hitler came to power bear testimony to the incompatibility of Fascism and science.”
“Our manifesto,” Dr. Boas Added, “declares that we scientists have the moral obligation to educate the American people against all false and unscientific doctrines, such as the racial nonsense of the Nazis. The agents of fascism in this country are becoming more and more active, and we must join with all men of good will in defending democracy today if we are to avoid the fate of our colleagues in Germany, Austria and Italy.
The other members of the committee making public the manifesto are professors Karl M. Bowman, New York University psychiatrist; Wesley Clair Mitchell, Columbia University economist; John P. Peters, Yale University medical scientist; Dr. Henry E. Sigerisy, John Hopkins University medical scientist; D. J. Struik, Massachusetts institute of technology mathematician; Harold C. Urey and Milton C. Winternitz, Yale Pathologist.
UREY, MILLIKAN, LANGMUIR AMONG SIGNERS
The three Nobel Prize winners signing the manifesto are prof. Urey, Columbia University chemist; Prof. Robert A. Millikan, California institute of technology physicist, and Dr. Irving Langmuir, chemist. The signers include 64 members of the National Academy of Sciences.
The manifesto follows:
“In an article entitled ‘the pragmatic and dogmatic spirit in physics,’ which appeared in the April 30 issue of nature (with strong editorial disapproval), wide publicity is given to the official nazi position on science and scientific research. In essence, the article is an attack on all theoretical physics, and, by obvious implication, on scientific theory in general. It introduces the official racialism of the Nazis to divide physicists into good, i.e. non-theoretical and ‘Aryan,’ and bad, i.e., theoretical and Jewish. Similar notions have appeared in many popular magazines and scientific journals in Germany, in the addresses and writings of the Minister of education, of university rectors and deans, of scientists and non-scientists. apart from racial theories, furthermore, science and art are subject to ruthless political censorship. These ideas have found concrete expression in the dismissal and persecution of over 1,600 teachers and scientists (By the fall of 1936) from German Universities and research institutes (and now Austria and Italy too), and in the restriction of higher education to students having the ‘proper’ political and racial qualifications.
GOAL OF SCIENCE STRESSED
“American scientists, trained in a tradition of intellectual freedom, hold fast to their conviction, that, in the words of the resolution adopted by the American association for the Advancement of Science, ‘Science is wholly independent of national boundaries and races and creeds and can flourish only when there is peace and intellectual freedom.’ If science, to quote the AAAS resolution again, is to ‘continue to advance and spread more abundantly its benefits to all mankind — and who can attack that goal — then the man of science has a moral obligation to fulfill. He must educate the people against the acceptance of all false and unscientific doctrines which appear before them in the guise of science, regardless of their origin. only in that way can he insure those conditions of peace and freedom which are essential for him and for the progress of all mankind.
“It is in this light that we publicly condemn the fascist position towards science. The racial theories which they advocate have been demolished time and again. We need only point to the work of Heinrich hertz in physics, fritz Haber and Richard Willstatter in chemistry, Ludwig Traube, Paul Ehrlich, and August Wassermann in biology and medicine, all German Jews and all empirical scientists. The charge that theory leads ‘to a crippling of experimental research’ is tantamount to a denial of the whole history of modern physics. From Copernicus and Kepler on, all the great figures in western science have insisted, in deed or in word, upon the futility of experimental research divorced from theory.
“We firmly believe that in the present historical epoch democracy alone can preserve intellectual freedom. Any attack upon freedom of thought in one sphere, even as non-political a sphere as theoretical physics, is in effect an attack on democracy itself. When men like James Franck, Albert Einstein, or Thomas Mann may no longer continue their work, whether the reason is race, creed, or belief, all mankind suffers the loss. they must be defended in their right to speak the truth as they understand it. If we American scientists wish to avoid a similar fate, if we wish to see the world continue to progress and prosper, we must bend our efforts to that end now.”
In a statement Monday, Sessions said he would not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a roughly 30-member advisory panel of scientists, judges, crime lab leaders, prosecutors and defense lawyers chartered by the Obama administration in 2013.
{ . . . }
The action marked the latest break by Sessions, a former federal prosecutor, with Obama-era priorities. The former senator from Alabama last week announced that top aides will review agreements reached with troubled police forces nationwide to ensure the pacts to overhaul departments do not counter the Trump administration’s goals of combating violent crime and promoting police safety and morale .
This could mean that efforts to have community policing programs that are more appropriate to the communities they serve – are being altered or even ended. The Trump administration’s war on science, scientific fact, documentary evidence and scientific fact collection with its inherent checks and balances of peer review continues obviously unabated – now at the Justice Department as well as at the EPA, NOAA, BLM and other agencies.
cricketdiane, 04-13-2017
**
Also noted from the article above – this warning from scientists involved in the forensic commission at the Justice Department –
Even before the announcement not to renew the national commission, several commission members from outside the Justice Department warned against ending its work, saying the Trump administration has made several moves to reduce the role of science and independent scientists in policymaking.
In a letter Thursday, six leading research scientists on the panel urged re-upping the commission for an additional two years, saying, “for too long, decisions regarding forensic science have been made without the input of the research science community.”
The administration is seeking a nearly 20 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget, including to its satellite division, The Washington Post reported. That includes significant cuts to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which has produced research that disproved the notion of a global warming pause. NOAA’s satellites provide invaluable data on climate change that are used by researchers throughout the world. The NOAA cuts target the Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research, which conducts the bulk of the agency’s climate research.
That’s on top of proposed reductions to climate research at U.S. EPA, including a 40 percent cut to the Office of Research and Development, which runs much of EPA’s major research. The cuts specify work on climate change, air and water quality, and chemical safety. The Trump administration also has proposed 20 percent staffing reduction at EPA.
The plan covers $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending. (The more detailed May budget will also cover changes to mandatory social welfare programs and interest payments on the national debt.) The discretionary pot is now roughly split between defense and nondefense agencies. But Trump wants to hike spending on defense and national security by 10%, and pay for that $54 billion increase by cutting spending at all other agencies. To get there, Trump would cut nearly 20% at NIH and DOE science programs, and make even larger research reductions at EPA and NOAA. In contrast, NASA overall would receive only a 1% cut, although its earth sciences division would shrink by 6%.
Trump Lays Groundwork for Federal Government Reorganization
by
Shannon Pettypiece
April 11, 2017, 11:00 PM EDT April 12, 2017, 7:48 AM EDT
President Donald Trump is issuing a presidential memorandum that will call for a rethinking of the entire structure of the federal government, a move that could eventually lead to a downsizing of the overall workforce and changes to the basic functions and responsibilities of many agencies.
The order, which will go into effect Thursday . . .
Bureau of Land Management Changes Website Homepage to Coal Bed Photo
byAVALON ZOPPO
The Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Interior Department, recently quietly changed its homepage website photo to a large bed of coal.
The photo was first posted around 6 p.m. on March 31, agency spokeswoman Kristen Lenhardt told NBC News on Thursday.
Before the switch, the website showcased a picture of two people wearing backpacks while standing atop a grassy mountain.
[ . . . ]
The change comes a week after Interior Ryan Secretary Zinke signed an order lifting the government’s ban on coal-mining leases on federal land, which was put in place under the Obama administration.
Trump may make major changes to the way we measure the strength of the US economy
Bob Bryan
Feb. 21, 2017, 12:34 PM
The new way of thinking would leave out what are known as re-exports, or exports of goods originally imported from another country, from the exports side of the equation while still counting the good as an import.
For instance, if a widget was imported from China, that would count toward the deficit as an import. If that widget is then sold from the US to a retailer in the UK, it would not count as an export in the ledger, making the deficit increase.
The effect of this would be a massive ballooning of the current US trade deficit, according to economists, which would allow the Trump team to paint the US as a loser in the international economy.
“Transparently a stunt to make the numbers look worse in order to shout at trading partners,” Pantheon Macro chief economist Ian Shepherdson told Politico’s Ben White about the change. “There’s no clamour for this shift among economists, and assuming the BEA continues to publish the data on the old (current) basis, I don’t think anyone will take any notice of the new data. Haven’t they got anything better to do?”
Additionally, the Journal said that non-political appointees at the Federal trade Commission strongly objected to the new idea but submitted updated figures using the new measure anyway.
(etc.)
According to reports on Friday from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the official White House projections were set at 3% to 3.5% GDP growth in the coming years – much higher than the 1.9% projected by the Congressional Budget Office and 1.8% from the Federal Reserve.
The Post’s Catherine Rampell and the Journal’s Nick Timiraos reported that staffers at the Council of Economic Advisors were told to start with the 3% to 3.5% projections and work backward from there, rather than building their assessment from the current economic conditions.
The Department of Agriculture would absorb a 21 percent, $4.7 billion reduction. The Department of the Interior, headed by former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, would see a 12 percent, $1.5 billion cut.
Both agencies would see reduced funding for new federal land acquisitions through the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that’s been consistently supported by Montana’s congressional delegation. The budget document was unclear whether the $120 million in offshore oil royalties that now go to LWCF would be diverted to other areas or shifted to maintaining and investing in existing parks, refuges and public lands.
[ . . . ]
The Agriculture budget would also reduce funding for USDA statistical capabilities and Service Centers while encouraging “private sector conservation planning.” It plans to save $95 million from the Rural Business and Cooperative Service and eliminates the International Food for Education program, stating it “lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented to reduce food insecurity.”
It would eliminate $498 million in duplicative USDA water and wastewater loans and grants, saying rural communities could be served by private-sector financing or other federal investments such as the EPA’s state revolving funds. However, the EPA has its own budget slated for a 31 percent, $2.6 billion cut.
Dan Kanninen, formerly the Obama administration’s White House liaison at the EPA, said Trump nominees at the EPA, Education, and Housing and Urban Development, which Ben Carson now runs, are “ideologically bent against the mission and against the agency but they have no idea what the agency does.”
“It is certainly ideological and it is certainly ignorance and it is disdain for the fundamental institution of government — what Steve Bannon means by tearing down our institutions,” said Kanninen, now vice president for issues and advocacy at the Smoot Tewes group.
“What Mr. Trump does across the board is create doubt about our institutions,” he said. “It is to his advantage to tear down institutions.”
With the aim of “making government work again,” the Trump White House on Thursday unveiled a $1.1 trillion budget blueprint for discretionary spending in fiscal 2017 and 2018 that would abolish 19 agencies and eliminate thousands of agency jobs.
[ . . . ]
The agency-by-agency plans include eliminating dozens of grant programs at the Education and Commerce departments—many of them related to climate change. And Trump would eliminate the following agencies:
The African Development Foundation;
the Appalachian Regional Commission;
the Chemical Safety Board;
the Corporation for National and Community Service;
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting;
the Delta Regional Authority;
the Denali Commission;
the Institute of Museum and Library Services;
the Inter-American Foundation;
the U.S. Trade and Development Agency;
the Legal Services Corporation;
the National Endowment for the Arts;
the National Endowment for the Humanities;
the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation;
the Northern Border Regional Commission;
the Overseas Private Investment Corporation;
the United States Institute of Peace;
the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness;
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Many of those agencies have been on the target lists of conservative budget hawks for many years.
[ . . . ]
While applauding the Trump plan to offset spending hikes in fiscal 2018, she warned that debt and deficits would continue to rise. And “such aggressive domestic discretionary cuts will be hard to sustain given that this area of the budget has already undergone large cuts and is projected to grow more slowly than inflation,” she said.
One agency facing elimination under the Trump budget, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, sent Government Executive the following statement: “Museums and libraries throughout the nation provide critical resources and services that contribute significantly to Americans’ economic development, education, health and well-being. The grants and programs that IMLS administers are helping libraries and museums make a tremendous difference in the communities they serve, whether by facilitating family learning, sustaining cultural heritage or by stimulating economic development through job training and skills development.”
Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said in a statement, “The elimination of federal funding to CPB would initially devastate and ultimately destroy public media’s role in early childhood education, public safety, connecting citizens to our history, and promoting civil discussions for Americans in rural and urban communities alike.”
On the whole, Trump has never been viewed more negatively on matters of truth. A Quinnipiac University poll this week found that 60 per cent of Americans think he is dishonest, a new high. Time ran a cover story on Trump with the headline “Is truth dead?” The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long Trump-friendly, accused him of damaging his presidency with a “seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.”
Yet Trump has also managed a remarkable feat: maintaining a reputation among millions of Americans as a man of rare honesty at the same time as he launches an unprecedented daily barrage of Oval Office lies.
[ . . . ]
Charlie Sykes, the Trump critic and former conservative talk radio host in Wisconsin, says there is an “alternative reality bubble” within the right, created in part by conservative media. Trump, he said, is both developing and exploiting this “post-truth environment,” elevating once-fringe conspiracy theorists and propagandists who will then amplify his lies.
Well worth going over and reading the entire article – explains it very well with quotes from people expressing why they believe Trump even though they know he is lying.
**
These articles from 2010 and 2014 are examples of the right wing war on facts that has been ongoing for decades. An alternative fact bubble has not only been created but maintained that now alters what many Americans perceive as the facts about various subjects including science, history, the value of education and academics, economics, among many others.
An idea that has been promoted as well, is that facts are a matter of opinion and that one’s opinion changes what the facts are. In application, this means we have, in America, radio stations, right-wing controlled cable news / entertainment shows that have been telling Americans that facts are not only open to interpretation as to their value and meaning, but also that the facts themselves are based in opinion or essentially no more than an opinion and consequently, not facts at all.
Obviously, whether a person decides by opinion that rain is occurring – rain is nonetheless a fact and without some protection from it and good judgment based on that fact, that rain will continue as a fact with whatever dangers it represents. The only real thing that will happen considering rain that is occurring to be only an opinion, is for the person believing that to put themselves in unnecessary and predictable difficulties of getting wet, driving too fast for conditions and maybe harming their life and health or that of others – as a result.
In the two articles below, there are indications of this thrust to change facts, alter facts that are available concerning subject matter and erase the substantive value of facts as a critical foundation of reasoning and judgment. In climate science, the removal of the subject from text books, policy, agencies, websites, government research – does not change the facts about its impacts and dangers. It only makes our country less capable of mounting successful efforts to either positively influence those changes or to mitigate damages and harms that will occur as a result.
In economics and macro-economics, the same is true when the facts are deleted, altered, dismissed, discredited or denied. And, facts in every other arena and focus tend to the same result when treated as mere opinion rather than substance of reality.
cricketdiane, 03-26-2017
Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
**
As Trump targets energy rules, oil companies downplay their impact
Thursday, 23 Mar 2017 | 11:08 AM ET
President Donald Trump’s White House has said his plans to slash environmental regulations will trigger a new energy boom and help the United States drill its way to independence from foreign oil.
[ . . . a discussion from oil industry financiers that regulation change doesn’t impact them]
Refiners have also long complained that environmental regulations have stymied attempts to build new refineries and that they have borne the brunt of costly rules requiring them to blend biofuels into their gasoline.
Still, some energy analysts and regulation experts point out that the biggest drivers for these industries, too, tend to be supply and demand — not regulation.
The abundance of cheap natural gas is seen as the biggest obstacle to reviving coal country, since both fuels compete for space in the furnaces of U.S. power plants. For refiners, the key driver for profitability is the differential between the price of their raw material, crude oil, and the fuels they make with it.
“Supply and demand are the fundamental forces driving markets,” said Coglianese, the University of Pennsylvania law professor. “Regulation is relatively trivial.”
The order is expected to end a de facto ban on building new coal power plants in the country, a moratorium on coal mining and the end of far-reaching climate regulations on states.
According to a draft copy of the “Energy Independence” executive order reviewed by the Washington Examiner, the first target on the menu will be the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan and New Source standard for power plants.
The draft order states that the power plan would cost $39 billion a year, based on a previous industry-funded study by NERA Consulting that the draft order cites to justify ending the Obama administration’s version of the plan,
[ . . . ]
The order also looks to rein in the New Source power plant standard, which the coal industry refers to as EPA’s de facto ban on building new coal plants. The regulation requires that all new coal plants be outfitted with expensive carbon capture technology, which the industry argues is cost prohibitive and makes building new coal plants next to impossible.
But since both climate rules are being reviewed in federal court, the Trump order also directs the attorney general to request all courts reviewing the climate rules to hold the cases in abeyance, or remand them back to EPA while the administration reviews them.
In addition, the order directs the Interior Department to lift its moratorium on issuing new coal leases to open up mining again.
It also calls for an interagency working group to “reconsider” the Social Cost of Carbon, which is the metric the Obama administration used to justify the cost of its regulations, while directing the White House Council on Environmental Quality to rescind an agency-wide directive by the Obama administration to include climate change in all environmental reviews of projects.
The White House intends to unravel the Clean Power Plan without providing a replacement, according to a source briefed on the issue.
An executive order expected to be released next week also instructs the Justice Department to effectively withdraw its legal defense of the climate rule in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The move aligns the White House with about two dozen Republican state attorneys general who are challenging the way the rule restricts greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.
The result, if successful, would mean the case is “frozen in place,” the source said, preventing the D.C. Circuit, which has six judges appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans, from issuing an opinion this spring . . .
[ . . .]
That raises questions about whether EPA would fail to satisfy legal requirements to regulate carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants.
The agency in 2009, responding to the Supreme Court, determined that greenhouse gases endanger human health. That requires EPA to regulate emissions, and the agency did that by promulgating the Clean Power Plan.
“I think, as a matter of law, that carbon is a pollutant has been settled,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush. “EPA has to act once you have that kind of a finding.”
[ . . . ]
The administration anticipates that. The executive order instructs EPA to “revise or rescind” the Clean Power Plan, wording that’s meant to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act by letting EPA, not the White House, determine the fate of the rule.
The agency will then go through the long rulemaking process. But rather than promulgating a new rule, it will terminate an existing one. It will post notice and take comments and then put out a proposed rule. After accepting more comment, the action will be finalized. Then the administration is “off to the races in court,” the source said.
Solve for ‘X’: Trump’s war on facts extends to undermining key federal statistics
How do you run an economy without statistics? Poorly, that’s how. But that’s what we’re in for if we muzzle and starve the agencies that gather this context — a fate that seems likely under the current management.
By MIKE MEYERS
FEBRUARY 24, 2017 — 6:28PM
How tempting to gauge reality by self-fashioned yardsticks. Economists rightly worry that the Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration will do just that.
For years, Congress has been slashing budgets for gathering economic statistics — blithely acting as if calculating mass layoffs, worker pay and benefits, exports and imports, or income disparity between regions is a boondoggle.
A new president averse to facts he doesn’t like could further vandalize honest portraits of economic performance.
[ . . . ]
The consequences could be a federal government that ignores warnings of economic distress and makes misguided policy choices that leave millions of Americas the poorer for it. Calculated chaos — or, rather, chaos born of miscalculation.
Just this month, the Trump administration has embarked on distorting economic reality.
The White House privately has pondered changing the way trade balances are measured — to artificially balloon the size of U.S. trade deficits, the Wall Street Journal reported. Like magic, a $63.1 billion trade deficit with Mexico last year would become a $115.4 billion deficit.
Fabricated fears would be a call to arms for extreme policies on trade favored by the White House.
An earth day tshirt for everyday – it says – “After all the trees are gone, what’s the next plan?”
Which is only too true – that our trees seem to be prevalent and yet, they are being removed at a staggering rate after taking many years to grow in the first place . . . and blights are striking them from the chemicals around us every day – in the air, in the soil and in the water.
Look at any satellite map in real time and there are huge areas of clear cutting, and smoke from fires where they are burning the wood taken down there – around the world. Every day there are hundreds of these, not just a few and it has been that way for so many years without slowing down any . . .
**
So, I want to add this –
Over 35 years ago, the pollution of our rivers, streams and air was vicious and substantial. On any day in our cities, it could easily be seen. There was a push to get industries to stop pouring their industrial waste chemical products into our streams, rivers, creeks, harbors and oceans – but the only real result is that these industries moved their operations to other countries and other parts of our country to continue doing things in the exact same way or even to a greater extent without regard for the damaging nature of what they were doing.
There was also a push to get industries to put filters on their smokestacks to remove the chemicals that were being poured into the air every moment of every day and night – at that point, over thirty years ago – those filters and filter systems would have cost about $200 each per smokestack, but industries and corporations in America didn’t want to do that. They considered it a prohibitive and an unreasonable request being placed upon them and so instead of spending something less that $30,000 to put filters on every smokestack or air release of their chemical by-products across the nation, they spent millions instead on lawyers, lobbyists and political campaigning, public relations propaganda efforts against having to install the filters and eventually, on fighting fines for doing it . . .
Why would that have ever made sense?
In the 80’s, it would have cost about $1200 per filter system for each smokestack and still they would not do it – and spent even more millions on lobbying, lawyers to fight the application of any anti-pollution rules on them, millions more as individual companies and industry associations to fight against having these regulations put into effect and on pr campaigns, ads and disinformation campaigns to persuade the public that these kinds of regulations were harmful to their own economic well-being.
Well, when the industries finally had to put filters on their plants – many of the corporations (American corporations, born, built and bred in America) decided to take their operations to other countries and used our tax money to help them do it – and then continued polluting in the same manner. (Or in some cases, the companies put their operations in states where they could continuously put off abiding by any and all of these regulations and requirements which has left much of the Southern states in an unalterable state of pollution long after the North’s industrial states refused to put up with it any longer . . . )
My question on this Earth Day – is why can’t it be both? But, it just never is . . . Why couldn’t companies and industries have simply put the filters on their plants in the first place when it was easy enough to look outside or across any city in America and see the smog as deep as brown muck could possibly be across the entire sky? They spent thousands of times more in fighting against adding those filters and not dumping their waste products into the ground or streams than it would’ve ever cost them just to have done things a little differently in the first place . . .
And, now – those same corporations have taken those operations for the last twenty years into every other area of the planet to pollute these as well in the same ways that thirty plus years ago, they already knew beyond any doubt – were harmful to people, to animals, to continued survival of life in those areas over any appreciable time period and known to be damaging for multiple generations, sometimes even hundreds of years beyond today.
That corporate players would choose to do that, their shareholders consider it to be okay and decision-makers in the countries around the world would put up with it – is beyond my understanding. The industrialized China leaves a trail of the same toxic bed that we have destituted our own nation doing over so many years from Detroit to Los Angeles . . .
When I saw “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” with its vast images of unsurpassed beauty of China’s natural, un-industrialized, unpolluted wild spaces, I remembered what America would have looked like at one time, when the water was clean, the air breathable and the soil a place where children could play without taking lead into every pore of their skin . . .
But, in my lifetime – America has lain a toxic bed over its toxic bed from a hundred years ago, with corporate choices still being made that defy all good sense about it. And, if it was only a choice about money – then the millions upon millions – and even hundreds of millions that corporations are spending fighting against not polluting water sources, soil and air would be exchanged for adding the fourteen things they need to do to simply not pollute as a part of their operations (which would cost in the hundreds of thousands one time and last for years, save money and not require millions to be spent on lobbying and lawyers to continue fighting against all of us who want a better future for our country and for our planet.)
**
Instead of Los Angeles getting cleaner air – which was nothing but muck in the 1960’s where people couldn’t walk to school or work regularly, and where people weren’t supposed to go outside or allow their children to go outside to play or walk most days of the year –
what we have now –
is an entire planet that way, plus much of the rural Southern US with the same heavy layer of smog across places from Carrollton, Ga. to Mobile, Ala. and throughout Louisiana and Texas . . with massively polluted air, soils and streams AND with extreme weather events that go beyond our human tolerance range commonly occurring. . .
(that human tolerance and survival range is actually a pretty slim range) . . .
Damn.
**
From Bhopal to West Virgina –
…..
And it has only grown worse. Happy Earth Day 2012.
– cricketdiane
**
NEW ORLEANS — A new study finds that Louisiana’s second Gulf of Mexico dead zone stretches at least from the Chandeleur Sound off Louisiana to Alabama’s Dauphin Island — and could be bigger.
( . . .)
In 2010, the foundation checked a 1,050-square-mile area in the Chandeleur Sound and found that it held too little oxygen to support life. The area found last July was 250 square miles.
“This is four times larger than the region found in 2010, because a much larger area was surveyed,” Lopez wrote in a news release. A wider look is likely to find a still bigger area, possibly extending into the area off the Florida Panhandle, he said in an interview.
Monthly checks at two waterbottom sites off of Alabama, 12 and 25 miles out in the Gulf, also have found low oxygen levels “with some regularity” during the summer, said Ron Kiene, a marine sciences professor at the University of South Alabama and a faculty member at Dauphin Island Sea Lab. Another half-dozen stations closer to shore occasionally show hypoxia, he said.
When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.
But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.
E.P.A. officials told her, she said, that her findings were altered because of pressure from the Office of Legal Counsel of the White House under Ronald Reagan. A spokesman for the E.P.A. declined to comment.
“It was shameful,” Weston Wilson, the E.P.A. whistleblower, said in a recent interview about the study. He explained that five of the seven members of that study’s peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry.
Politics Seen to Limit E.P.A. in Regulation of Natural Gas
Published: March 3, 2011 (NY Times)
For example, the agency had planned to call last year for a moratorium on the gas-drilling technique known as hydrofracking in the New York City watershed, according to internal documents, but the advice was removed from the publicly released letter sent to New York.
(from the first page of the article above)
***
My Note –
I watched Dick Morris last night on O’Reilly over on the FoxNews broadcast repeat, “No Compromise,” “No Compromise,” when they were talking about the current Republican efforts and plans in Wisconsin and in Washington and elsewhere. (generally – it would be worth going back to find the exact moments when he said it because the facial expressions and interaction with O’Reilly along with Dick’s body language say a lot.)
He was also there promoting his book which Mr. Morris claims is the plan to be taken for the Republicans to win in 2012 and in every state where these barely won elections have given them a place to push their agenda to specifically gut all the programs in place now.
As I was reading some of the things about hydrofracking the other day, (which was an thoroughly extensive article, I’ll go get the link) and thinking that they’ve known these things the whole time, why wasn’t something created to fix this. And, then found this article today which explains a lot. A program that is forced to alter scientific and researched results cannot possibly define what the problems are that must be addressed and “fixed”.
When the EPA and other scientists were not allowed to report their findings compelling action based on the science and the actual facts of the situation, it left problems unaddressed, unsolved and unfunded for the solutions to be developed.
At any time, our universities could have researched solutions for these waste products from hydrofracking, it could very easily be solved with an addition of a system, process or neutralizing effort to reclaim those contaminants from the water. Our business leaders could have encouraged the finding of those solutions to be added to what is being used by the natural gas drillers that are using hydrofracking processes. Right now, each one spends something around $2 million dollars a year to have the waste water dumped into the rivers or water treatment systems which are not capable of handling it. For $2 million dollars, surely there are systems which could be defined, created and added which would reclaim the radioactive and other toxic chemical products from the water before adding it to the existing water systems and rivers.
In fact, it probably wouldn’t cost $2 million dollars and it would provide excess revenue streams to collect and sell these other “elements” to industries who are desperate to have them. It isn’t good thinking, nor good business to create the problems, pretend the problems don’t exist, pressure Congress and the EPA to hinder the facts about these problems being reported or studied and defined, nor to ignore these problems in need of solutions.
It says that the intentions of the Republican Party members now planning to further their previous agendas with the same heavy hand as always with an insistence on “No Compromise” – will end with no loss for profit-makers, no requirements for change to how profit-makers are doing things now and no regulations to force them to take into account the science and safety and pollution of what they are doing in order to do it a different way or add solutions to accommodate fixing those problems (issues).
That has already been a costly way to do things. And, what I don’t think the Republicans understand whose power plays are now creating chaos, distraction and waste of Congressional and state resources in time and decision-making, is that we are all on the same team. We all want natural gas prices and production costs to be kept low to have it available to us at the most reasonable price possible. But, we don’t want to pollute the bed where we all most sleep and thoroughly contaminate the only water we have to drink.
The Republicans have cut the super fund cleanup funding for many, many years. And, they forced certain research, studies and science about these chemicals involved in the need for superfund cleanup to be “edited” in their content. The only thing that has done is to leave the problems to us now, including the health disasters that have been created. There is no escape from it.
If the rules of this war the Republicans have declared on America are “no compromise” as we have seen for the last two years with their complete “no” to everything that needed to be done for regulating the financial system gamers, for food safety inspections, for consumer safety commission working for the safety of American citizens rather than for the industries they are supposed to watchdog, etc., etc., etc., – then “no compromise” for our safety needs to be what America’s citizens and communities demand too.
No more compromise on wastes being sent into our water systems that have any harmful, toxic chemicals in them. The industries who are doing that can simply stop doing it right now. No compromise.
Mayor Bloomberg is very staunch about non-smoking in his city because of his concerns about the cancer it can cause. He was on the show about the Tobacco Wars on cnbc broadcast yesterday, describing how important to stop this because of cancer. So, why is there a petroleum cesspool in Brooklyn that hasn’t been cleaned up for over fifty years? He’s so concerned. Everyone that has lived in those areas that have been exposed to it have either died of cancer or get cancer or watch their children die from cancer – there are birth defects that are known to be higher in that area, cancers higher in that area and he is worried about the people smoking?
It doesn’t make any sense. And, there are places in the New York City area which will be affected by the hydrofracking wastes that are going into the water table, going into the rivers untreated to take out the radioactive and chemical wastes that are dumped by hundreds of millions of gallons into it, and sure to make its way into the drinking water available to every single member of Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City.
Surely he would find that an abomination. Any Republican that would sit in Washington and decide to fight against the EPA having power to do something about it also wouldn’t want their own children to drink that water downstream from these dumping sites and then watch the results over the course of their lives. They certainly wouldn’t want to drink that water everyday, cook with it, wash their collards with it, wash themselves in it and feed it to those they love.
See, this could be fixed. It just needs to be shown for what it is, the problems defined, funded and fixed. The business owners need to be reasonable and seek solutions that work better and more cheaply than what they are doing already which is known to be polluting (and is expensive, as well.) Funding for solutions can be offered when the problems are defined by the science unfettered, unedited and unhindered. The goals are the same. We all want a better, safer place to live to raise our families and we want cheap natural gas as a fuel and heating source. Can’t we do both?
Aren’t we smart enough to do both?
– cricketdiane
***
Also mentioned in the New York Times article –
“I am confident this study, if truly focused on hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, last April to the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, “will prove the process indisputably safe and acceptable.”
Last September, Senator James M. Inhofe, also a Republican from Oklahoma, wrote to agency officials to offer his guidance about who should be allowed to review the research.
“We caution against potential panelists who have been longtime critics of hydraulic fracturing,” he wrote in a letter.
Over their careers, the two lawmakers from Oklahoma, a major drilling state, have been among the Senate’s top 20 recipients of oil and gas campaign contributions, according to federal data.
(and)
These topics were cut from the current study plan, even though E.P.A. officials have acknowledged that sewage treatment plants are not able to treat drilling waste fully before it is discharged into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking water intake plants. While the current study plan clearly indicates that the agency plans to research various types of radioactivity concerns related to natural gas drilling, this river modeling, which E.P.A. scientists say is important, has been removed.
The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
***
¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.
¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.
¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.
Mr. McCurdy, whose plant discharges into the Clarion River, which flows into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, said his plant was taking about 20,000 gallons of drilling waste per day.
Like most of the sewage treatment plant operators interviewed, Mr. McCurdy said his plant was not equipped to remove radioactive material and was not required to test for it.
Documents filed by drillers with the state, though, show that in 2009 his facility was sent water from wells whose wastewater was laced with radium at 275 times the drinking-water standard and with other types of radiation at more than 780 times the standard.
***
I really want anyone interested in this and in their quality of life to go read this entire article above and the one from the New York Times at the beginning of this post. Do not take these few excerpts by my interest in it as the only important parts of these articles. They are well written, well- researched and hold a lot of critical information that the public (everyone in the public) needs to know. I’m using these for a specific line of thought that I have right now, which is that the creation of solutions to treat this wastewater need to be developed right now which will reclaim the toxic and radioactive elements from it before being sent into our water systems. It looks like a pressing need, the politics involved with what our Republican leaders backed by the oil and gas industry are trying not to get done with it make this very dangerous to the public throughout the country, and I think it can be fixed because I want to believe that. I don’t want my family dealing with the results of doing nothing but what they are doing already. Enough is enough.
– cricketdiane
***
And I noticed this the other day which is very important – (from the EU_)
Use of hazardous chemicals to be made safer
Published: 06 January 2011
In a drive to improve worker safety and consumer protection, the EU’s chemicals watchdog is set to publish in the coming months an inventory of over 20,000 chemicals declared hazardous by manufacturers and importers.
The inventory “will significantly improve safety by providing up-to-date information on all the hazardous substances that are on the EU market today,” said Geert Dancet, executive director of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
(etc.)
An EU regulation on the classification, labelling and packaging of chemical substances and mixtures (CLP) requires companies to classify, label and package appropriately hazardous chemicals before placing them on the market.
It aims to protect workers, consumers and the environment by means of labelling which reflects the potential hazardous effects of dangerous substances.
The regulation will implement at EU level the United Nations’ Globally Harmonised System (GHS) for classification and labelling of chemical substances and mixtures.
European agency calls for limiting use of eight chemicals
20 December 2010, 17:11 CET
“These substances are in wide dispersive use, which means that not only are they used everywhere, but there is also a risk of exposure to humans and the environment,” the head of ECHA’s risk management unit Remi Lefevre told AFP.
The agency is calling for the chemicals, which are either cancer-causing or harmful to reproduction, to be used only with express permission from the European Commission.
All but one of the chemicals are used in large volumes in Europe, including chemicals found in various pigments and plasticisers, and one substance used in explosives.
Chemicals/REACH: six dangerous substances to be phased out by the EU
EU News – 18 Feb 2011 08:22
Six substances of very high concern will be banned within the next three to five years unless an authorisation has been granted to individual companies for their use.
These substances are carcinogenic, toxic for reproduction or persist in the environment and accumulate in living organisms.
European Commission Vice President Antonio Tajani, responsible for industry and entrepreneurship said: “Today’s decision is an example of the successful implementation of REACH and of how sustainability can be combined with competitiveness. It will encourage industry to develop alternatives and foster innovation.”
The following 6 chemicals are the first entrants in the Annex XIV:
5-ter-butyl-2,4,6-trinito-m-xylene (musk xylene),
4,4′-diaminodiphenylmethane (MDA),
hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD),
bis(2-ethylexyl) phthalate (DEHP),
benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP) and
dibutyl phthalate (DBP).
***
Big oil’s big cleanup in Brooklyn (or lack thereof, my note) –
October 20, 2010|By Allan Chernoff, CNN Senior Correspondent
Beneath the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, New York, is a giant oil spill that BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron are slowly cleaning up.
The oil companies have been at it for three decades, putting into perspective BP’s pledge to residents of the Gulf states that its cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon spill will go on for “as long as it takes” to “make this right.”
This spill is different though. The oil is trapped in the ground, sitting on top of the water table, across more than 50 acres of residential and industrial blocks. In some areas it’s 3 feet under; at other points it’s as much as 50 feet underground. And some of the oil has been sitting there for 150 years.
(and)
But to neighborhood residents who complain of health effects, the cleanup is far too slow.
“This is Patrick McManis and he had stomach cancer. And this is my mother. My mother had the cervix cancer,” said Theresa Breznak shuffling through rosary cards of family and friends on Diamond Street who have been stricken with cancer.
“A lot of breast cancer. This is one of my best friends, she had breast cancer. And now her sister has it.” Breznak counts 40 people on the block who have either battled or died from cancer. (etc.)
The environmental mess goes back to the 1860s when oil refineries dotted the landscape along Newtown Creek (which the Environmental Protection Agency recently declared a Superfund site.) For a century, oil companies operated in the neighborhood, allowing petroleum to seep into the ground and spill into the water.
(also)
“It’s emissions that are coming out of the ground. Some of them have been known to be benzene fumes, which is a known carcinogen,” complains Tommy Stagg, another life-long resident of Diamond Street.In all, the energy companies have extracted more than 11 million gallons of petroleum since the early ’80s. But, last year New York state estimated there was still about 14 million gallons of oil remaining below the ground here.
The companies are extracting oil at a rate of about 900,000 gallons a year by injecting water into the ground at various sites around the neighborhood, then pumping out petroleum. At that rate, it’ll be well over a decade before the neighborhood is cleaned up.
My Note –
Okay, the New York City residents and leaders do understand that ground water doesn’t stay in the boroughs where they’ve made lines on a map between them, right? I mean – they understand that water, air, underground water, streams, water table resources and anything contaminating them – migrates wherever, right?
– cricketdiane
***
I am adding the category “Democracy” to this post because when people cannot safely live where they live – there isn’t any democracy, liberty or freedom being insured to these American citizens. Whether it is the love canal mess, or the disaster in the making all this time in Brooklyn and now from these wastewater disposal disasters as by-products of hydrofracking, the sicknesses and ill health generally takes away all the freedoms, liberty, democracy and opportunities guaranteed to individual citizens of America, as well as destroying personal potentials to a great life or accomplishment or enjoyment or the pursuit of happiness and any of a vast number of other things.
(scroll down the page under the map for sites with why they have been removed from the superfund cleanup lists either through actual remediation or political pressure)
***
(They’ve been finding these WWI munitions, arsenic, lewisite and other chemical weapons components on Washington, D.C.’s American University campus and the surrounding neighborhood since 1993, including some Lewisite and buried lab contents recently in September and October of 2009. The area is still filled with arsenic from the WWI chemical weapons lab and test firing compound that were originally in the area. – my note)
Washington D.C. Chemical Munitions
EPA ID# DCD983971136
NPL Status: Not on NPL
50th and Massachusettes
Washington, DC 20015
District of Columbia
Contacts
Remedial Project Manager
Steven Hirsh
215-814-3352
hirsh.steven@epa.gov
Community Involvement Coordinator
William Hudson
215-814-5532
hudson.william@epa.gov
Region 3 | Mid-Atlantic Cleanup | Mid-Atlantic Superfund |EPA Home | EPA Superfund Homepage
Washington, D.C. Army Chemical Munitions (Spring Valley)
Current Site Information
EPA Region 3 (Mid-Atlantic)
Delaware
New Castle County
2 miles southwest of the City of New Castle
EPA ID# DCD983971136
1st Congressional District
Last Update: January 2009
Other Names
Spring Valley
Current Site Status
( . . . )
The USACE (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) completed excavation of a a munitions pit on a residential property adjacent to, and owned by the American University. USACE is completing test trenching and arsenic contaminated soil removal at this and the adjoining property. All work at these two properties is expected to be complete in the fall of 2009. USACE is planning for destruction of recovered chemical and conventional munitions.
The USACE has sampled approximately 1,500 for arsenic to date. Twenty seven additional properties were added to the site in 2006 based on a review of real estate records. Sampling of these properties and land owned by the District within the site is complete. EPA and the District Department of Environment are issuing comfort letters to property owners where sampling and any required remediation has been completed. USACE is attempting to gain access to all properties not previously sampled (approximately 10), and 5 properties where sampling revealed arsenic above 20ppm, the site cleanup goal.
In September of 2005 ATSDR issued a Health Consultation for the Spring Valley Site. ATSDR recommended additional sampling of soil, groundwater and air in specific locations within the Spring Valley Site. The DC Council approved funding for a health study and a contract was awarded to Johns Hopkins for that study, and a report was released in 2007. The report concludes that the health of Spring Valley residents is good; better than National averages and consistent with a reference community with similar demographics. Additional DC funding may be allocated for follow-on work in FY’2010.
In late 2003 perchlorate was discovered in groundwater at the site. A groundwater study is underway. Thirty nine monitoring wells have been installed near the Dalecarlia reservoir, adjacent to waste and munition disposal sites in the Spring Valley neighborhood and in other selected locations. Groundwater sampling data collected between 2005 and 2007 has identified two locations in the site where groundwater is contaminated with perchlorate, and one location where groundwater is contaminated with arsenic at elevated levels. The groundwater study continues in 2009 and 2010 with installation of additional monitoring wells including four deep wells and another round of well and surface water sampling.
RAB meetings over the past year have focused the arsenic clean-up; disposal of recovered munitions, chemical sampling other than arsenic, completing site work and pursuit of additional funding to accelerate the cleanup. For more detailed information and updates on RAB issues, public meetings, and background, please access USACE’s web site by clicking on the Spring Valley internet site below:
The Army maintains a Spring Valley internet site.
Site Description
Spring Valley is located in the Northwest section of the District of Columbia, including the American University. During WWI this area was known as the American University Experimental Station and Camp Leach, a 660-acre facility used as a research and test center for chemical weapons. The experimental station and chemical laboratories were located on American University property.
In January, 1993 a contractor who was digging a utility trench unearthed World War I munitions in the Spring Valley area of the District of Columbia. During further investigations, munitions were discovered in pits located on the Korean Ambassador property, adjacent to American University and additional pits were also found on the adjacent residential property. The pit excavation and other work at the Korean property has been completed. An additional pit on the adjacent residence found numerous additional munitions and the work has not been completed yet. That work began in 2007 and was completed in 2009.
Arsenic-contaminated soil has been removed from the Child Development Center play area on American University. Soil removal actions have been completed on several American University Lots and at approximately 90 residential properties. Approximately 50 residential properties still require soil removal. All soil removal at residential properties should be complete in 2009. Soil remediation at Federal and District owned property is scheduled for 2010.
The site-wide soil cleanup standard for arsenic has been finalized at 20 ppm by EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers and the DC Health Department. The Mayor’s Science Advisory Panel has approved this standard. The arsenic contamination is the result of chemical warfare research carried out at the American University Experimental Station during WWI.
The Army Corps of Engineers budget for this site is approximately $11 million dollars per year. Site work is expected to continue thru 2011.
The USACE has completed excavation of lab waste and debris in an area near the boundary of the American University known as Lot 18. Numerous empty (scrap) munition and several intact bottles were removed from the site. One of the bottles was found to contain a small amount of Lewisite, a blister agent used at the site; a second bottle was found to contain mustard gas. Other chemical agent degradation products have been found in sealed containers. The USACE began excavation of additional lab debris in an adjacent area of the American University in 2008 and will complete the action in 2009.
Contaminant descriptions and risk factors are available from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an arm of the CDC.
The chemicals date to WWI, during which chemical weapons resulted in a million casualties and about 26,000 deaths. This area, Spring Valley, is home to Diane Feinstein and AG Eric Holder. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George HW Bush all lived there before entering the White House.
The yard that causes the most concern is between the official residence of South Korea’s ambassador, Han Duk-soo, and the white-columned house of American University’s president, Cornelius Kerwin. Previous digs unearthed more than 300 munitions and chemical weapons debris on the South Korean property and toxic chemicals beside the AU house. (and the playground where children were playing and soccer had been practiced for years by University students, my note – and homes in the area where the toxic stuff was eeking up into their homes.)
A little more about the Washington, D.C. / Spring Valley toxic site –
Norton (D-D.C.) was given a status report by the corps, which has been directing the $170 million, 16-year cleanup of the munitions that are buried in scattered sites in the District’s Spring Valley neighborhood.
This month, workers were surprised when they found a flask containing residue of the blistering agent mustard buried in the yard of a vacant house in the 4800 block of Glenbrook Road NW. Officials said they had thought cleanup at that site was almost finished.
During World War I Spring Valley was an undeveloped area that the army used for testing chemical weapons. During excavations for new construction workers found unexploded ordnance, and scientists have found high levels of arsenic in the soil. The Army Corps of Engineers has undergone extensive testing and clean-up efforts in select parts of Spring Valley, a process that has been going on for years.
Several embassy residences are located in the neighborhood, such as the ambassador’s houses of South Korea, Bahrain, Qatar, and Yemen. Spring Valley’s median home sale price in 2007 was US$2.725 and in 2008 $3.022 million.[2]
[ All Sites | District of Columbia | Delaware | Federal Facilities | Maryland | Pennsylvania | Virginia | West Virginia ]
Site Name EPA ID NPL Status City County Zip State
Once a busy cargo transportation hub, the canal’s fate has mirrored the decline of domestic shipping via water. A legacy of serious environmental problems has troubled the area from the time the canal was first built out of the local tidalwetlands and fresh waterstreams. In recent years, there has been a call once again for environmental cleanup. In addition, development pressures have brought speculation that the wetlands of the Gowanus should serve waterfront economic development needs which may not be compatible with environmental restoration.
With much fanfare the US Army Corps of Engineers completed their last dredging of the canal in 1955 and soon afterward abandoned its regular dredging schedule, deeming it to be no longer cost effective. Brooklyn’s fuel trade was already converting from coal and artificial gas to petroleum, which was served by the wider and deeper Newtown Creek, and natural gas, which arrived by pipeline. With the early 1960s growth of containerisation, New York’s loss of industrial waterfront jobs during this period was evident on the canal and, with the failure of the city sewage and pump station infrastructure along the canal, Gowanus was used as a derelict dumping place. Remaining barge traffic mostly carried fuel oil, sand, gravel and scrap metal. At this point, the issue of revitalizing of the Gowanus area was raised.
In 1975 the City of New York established a Gowanus Industrial Renewal Plan for the area, which remains in effect until the year 2011. Since 1975, the surrounding community has been calling for the city, state, and federal governments to bring the full power of the Clean Water Act to bear on the environmental conditions left behind in this once thriving urban/industrial waterway.
The opaqueness of the Gowanus water obstructs sunlight to one third of the six feet needed for aquatic plant growth. Rising gas bubbles betray the decomposition of sewage sludge that on a ripe, warm day produces the canal’s notable stench. The murky depths of the canal conceal the remnants of its industrial past: cement, oil, mercury, lead, PCBs, coal tar, and other contaminants. In 1951, with the opening of the elevated Gowanus Expressway over the waterway, easy access for trucks and cars catalyzed industry slightly, but with 150 thousand vehicles passing overhead each day the expressway also deposits tons of toxic emissions into the air and water beneath.[6]
( . . . )
In 2002, the United States Army Corps of Engineers entered into a cost-sharing agreement with the DEP to collaborate on a $5 million Ecosystem Restoration Feasibility Study of the Gowanus Canal area to be completed in 2005, studying possible alternatives for ecosystem restoration such as dredging, and wetland and habitatrestoration. Discussions turned to breaking down the hard edges of the canal in order to restore some of the natural processes to improve the overall environment of the Gowanus wetlands area. The DEP also initiated the Gowanus Canal Use and Standards Attainment project, to meet the City’s obligations under the Clean Water Act. As of the summer 2009, the joint NYC/Army Corps Feasibility study has not been completed.[1]
In February 2009, the city of New York granted a zoning change to the developer, Toll Brothers Inc., allowing for a 480-unit, twelve-story, super-block residential project, the first permitted along the waterway.
In April 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed that the canal be listed as a Superfund cleanup site.[14] This action was supported by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which had requested help from EPA to address the canal’s environmental problems. In May 2009, the city stepped forward to oppose the Superfund listing and offered, for the first time, to produce a Gowanus cleanup plan that would match the work of a Superfund cleanup, but with a promise to accomplish it faster. The city stated that it could now achieve a faster cleanup than EPA because the city would fund the cleanup through taxpayer dollars from the state and city levels, while the EPA would seek its funding from the polluters.[15] On March 4, 2010, the EPA announced that it had placed the Gowanus Canal on its Superfund National Priorities List. [16][17]
A comprehensive survey of the drinking water for more than 28 million Americans has detected the widespread but low-level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals.
Little was known about people’s exposure to such compounds from drinking water, so Shane Snyder and colleagues at the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas screened tap water from 19 US water utilities for 51 different compounds. The surveys were carried out between 2006 and 2007.
The 11 most frequently detected compounds – all found at extremely low concentrations – were:
• Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease
• Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases
• TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology
• Trimethoprim, another antibiotic
Christian Daughton of the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory says that neither this nor other recent water assessments give cause for health concern. “But several point to the potential for risk – especially for the fetus and those with severely compromised health.”
Daughton says the contamination surveys help people realise how they are intimately and inseparably connected with their environment. “The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment also serves to make us acutely aware of the chemical sea that surrounds us,” he says.
About the above chemicals and pharmaceuticals found in water and the idea that it really makes no difference – the words to apply are “cumulative effects.” No one is drinking just one drop of water like that which they analyzed. The amount of water consumed in a day isn’t even accurate because of how many things were cooked in water, grown with water from public water sources, how many water sources permeated the skin each day, how many days, months and years these things were continuously consumed or a part of everyday living and the manner in which these chemicals and pharmaceuticals interact with the existing body chemistry and cell metabolism. It isn’t just a problem for those with compromised health, babies and children – it is affecting everyone negatively.
And, since that isn’t the only thing in the ground water being used to water our fields, nor is it the only toxic chemistry in our drinking water and the water sources where our drinking water is derived – the chemical questions it raises are phenomenal. And, they are phenomenal in very bad health consequences for nearly all of our population, all of our children, all of our wildlife, and all of our future generations in the United States. This might need to get fixed right now instead of waiting another thirty years to do it.
“Drinking water with elevated levels of radium and uranium – which are found in … and water – may cause cancer after several years,” the US Environmental …
BELLINGHAM, Wash., March 1 (UPI) — Scientists say a pioneering system providing safe drinking water for millions of people in Asia is now being tested in …
A new health study found drinking water in 31 out of 35 U.S. cities contaminated by a dangerous form of chromium known as hexavalent chromium.
The recent studies by environmental and public health groups shed new light on the extent of drinking water contamination in America and the potential sources of that contamination. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) commissioned water sampling and testing for hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium-6. The results, published in the report Chromium-6 in U.S. Tap Water, found that more than 26 million people are serviced by the water utilities in the 31 cities where chromium-6 was detected. However, the report represents a one-time “snapshot” of the water quality in 35 cities, and without regular monitoring, the full threat to public health is unknown.
Chromium is found in many forms, and the two most prevalent forms are trivalent chromium (chromium-3) and chromium-6. In small amounts, chromium-3 is a vital nutrient needed for healthy human metabolism, but chromium-6 is a known carcinogen and dangerous even in small amounts. Chromium-6 was the toxin contaminating the drinking water of Hinkley, CA, the case made famous by the 2000 film Erin Brockovich. California is currently the only state that requires water utilities to test for hexavalent chromium.
California environmental officials recently revised a proposed “public health goal” for chromium-6 in drinking water. The state’s environmental agency originally proposed a goal of 0.06 parts per billion (ppb) of hexavalent chromium in tap water. That figure was lowered to 0.02 ppb to better protect vulnerable populations such as children. However, the EWG report states that California’s water testing methods cannot detect levels of hexavalent chromium in amounts below 1 ppb, 16 times higher than what the state considers the maximum safe level. (etc.)
The report, EPA’s Blind Spot: Hexavalent Chromium in Coal Ash, draws on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports and other studies to identify 28 coal ash dump sites in 17 states that have contaminated groundwater with chromium at levels far above the public health goal proposed by the state of California. According to the report’s authors, the contaminated coal ash dump sites “are likely the tip of the iceberg,” and EPA regulators are operating with a “blind spot” that misses this significant source of water contamination.
The report also uncovered a study by an electric utility industry group, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), that found that 97 to 100 percent of the chromium leaching from coal ash impoundments is the deadly chromium-6. This industry study tested water at 29 coal ash landfills and ponds, finding chromium-6 at 15 coal ash dump sites at levels hundreds of times greater than the proposed California goal. However, the locations of these dumps are unknown, identified only by a number.
The other gross source of Hexavalant Chromium is in the mixing facilities for cement and concrete, especially the high white variety and through the processes in use today in nearly every community – these sources become easily airborne. These could be fixed easily, but in more communities they are allowed to become airborne and fill the air and homes in the surrounding neighborhoods, (and schools, and businesses, and anywhere the citizens might be breathing or ingesting things that have been coated with it when the dust settles from the air.)
– cricketdiane
***
Also – from recent budget hearings for the EPA opening comments by Barbara Boxer (D, Calif.) –
In stark contrast to the President’s support for EPA’s essential work to protect our children and families, the recently passed House Continuing Resolution would cut EPA’s overall budget — and the critical public health protections EPA provides — by 30 percent this year. This represents the largest cut to any Federal agency.
It would cut an astounding $2 billion from EPA’s water infrastructure and water quality protection programs. These cuts mean that our drinking water has a far greater chance of contamination. These cuts also mean thousands of jobs lost – jobs that relate to clean water infrastructure.
The CR would cut funds to clean up and redevelop brownfields by 30 percent from 2010 enacted levels – threatening the 5,000 jobs that EPA estimates this program supports.
The House budget would slash 45 percent from the 2010 enacted level for federal aid to state, local and tribal governments to protect our communities from dangerous pollution.
It also includes backdoor efforts to undermine EPA authorities that protect the air we breathe and the water we drink.
These attempts to undercut landmark public health protections comes as EPA just released a new report showing that the Clean Air Act provides $30 in benefits for every $1 invested. This report also shows that the Clean Air Act prevented 160,000 cases of premature mortality, 130,000 heart attacks, 13 million lost work days and 1.7 million asthma attacks in the year 2010 alone.
We are facing tough economic times, but tough times call for intelligent decision-making and wisdom, not reckless cuts that will do more harm than good – cuts that will lead to illness and premature death.
We must protect the health of our children, while also building clean technology industries that can fuel the nation’s economy in the coming decades.
We have seen that protecting the health of our families and economic growth go hand in hand. Since the year Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, US GDP has risen by 207 percent.
The United States is also the world’s largest producer and consumer of environmental technology goods and services. This industry has approximately 119,000 firms. It supports almost 1.7 million jobs and generates $300 billion in revenues — including $43.8 billion in exports. Why take an axe to these industries?
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BARBARA BOXER FULL COMMITTEE HEARING: “HEARING ON THE PRESIDENT’S PROPOSED EPA BUDGET FOR FY 2012”
States News Service
March 2, 2011
***
The characteristic greenish-gray to brown color of ordinary Portland cement derives from a number of transitional elements in its chemical composition. These are, in descending order of coloring effect, chromium, manganese, iron, copper, vanadium, nickel and titanium. The amount of these in white cement is minimized as far as possible. Cr2O3 is kept below 0.003%, Mn2O3 is kept below 0.03%, and Fe2O3 is kept below 0.35% in the clinker. The other elements are usually not a significant problem. Portland cement is usually made from cheap, quarried raw materials, and these usually contain substantial amounts of Cr, Mn and Fe.
In Scandinavia, France and the UK, the level of chromium(VI), which is considered to be toxic and a major skin irritant, may not exceed 2 ppm (parts per million).
“The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality was informed this week that the Arizona Portland Cement Co. failed a second round of testing for emissions of hazardous air pollutants at the company’s Rillito plant near Tucson. The latest round of testing, performed in January 2003 by the company, is designed to ensure that the facility complies with federal standards governing the emissions of dioxins and furans, which are byproducts of the manufacturing process.” [14] Cement Reviews’ “Environmental News” web page details case after case of environmental problems with cement manufacturing.[15]
CEMEX (BMV: CEMEX / NYSE: CX) is the world’s largest building materials supplier and third largest cement producer.[1] Founded in Mexico in 1906, the company is based in Monterrey, Mexico. CEMEX has operations extending around the world, with production facilities in 50 countries in North America, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
As of late 2003, CEMEX had annual cement production capability of 82 million tons and over 25,000 employees. Lorenzo Zambrano is the current chairman and chief executive officer. About one-third of the company’s sales come from its Mexico operations, a quarter from its plants in the U.S., 15% from Spain, and smaller percentages from its plants around the world.[citation needed]
CEMEX currently operates on four continents, with 66 cement plants, 2,000 ready-mix-concrete facilities, 400 quarries, 260 distribution centers and 80 marine terminals.[2] The company’s world headquarters are in San Pedro Garza García, a city that is part of the Monterrey metropolitan area in the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León. [3][4][5][6][7]
CEMEX has been accused of violating environmental laws in the United States. Environmental watchdog groups and the United States Environmental Protection Agency are threatening to file suit claiming the company has committed numerous violations of the Clean Air Act in Lyons, Colorado.[19] The United States Environmental Protection Agency has also filed suit against CEMEX in Victorville, California, claiming the company failed to install modern air pollution controls, despite spending millions in renovations.[20]
In the United Kingdom, CEMEX was originally fined £400,000 on October 2006 after hazardous dust was deposited up to three miles (5 km) away from its Rugby works. The fine was the highest ever given under the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control regulations, and was also the highest for an Environment Agency prosecution for six years.[21]. The fine was however judged excessive by the Court of Appeal and so reduced to £50,000.[22].
During tests conducted from June 10 to August 5, 2008, the Monterey Bay (California) Unified Air Pollution Control District reported high levels of Chromium VI, also known as Hexavalent Chromium, a cancer causing chemical agent, at an elementary school and fire department in Davenport, California. Chromium VI is the contaminant that inspired the movie, “Erin Brockovich“. The toxic substance apparently originated from dust emitted by the Cemex Cement plant in Davenport, as the levels of Chromium VI measured eight times the air district’s acceptable level at Pacific Elementary School and 10 times at the Davenport Fire Department. Both are located less than a half-mile from CEMEX.[23] Chromium VI may have been unwittingly produced at the CEMEX plant in Davenport for the last seven years. According to Ed Kendig, the executive director of the Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District, it’s “highly possible” that Chromium VI continues to be produced across the country as an accidental, previously unknown byproduct of the cement-making process.[24]
In 2007, the EPA filed a complaint against CEMEX for violating federal air regulations at its Victorville, CA plant, and in 2006, CEMEX was cited for violations at plants in Santa Barbara and Michigan. [24]
In April 2007, CEMEX announced that it had installed a £6.5 million dust abatement system at the same works in Rugby, which had cut particulate emissions by 80%. The site comes under the auspices of the EU Waste Incineration Directive as it burns waste tyres for fuel. There are concerns over the impact on both the environment and human health from this practice, although it is common practice in many cement works.[25].
Fly ash is one of the residues generated in combustion, and comprises the fine particles that rise with the flue gases. Ash which does not rise is termed bottom ash. In an industrial context, fly ash usually refers to ash produced during combustion of coal. Fly ash is generally captured by electrostatic precipitators or other particle filtration equipments before the flue gases reach the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, and together with bottom ash removed from the bottom of the furnace is in this case jointly known as coal ash. Depending upon the source and makeup of the coal being burned, the components of fly ash vary considerably, but all fly ash includes substantial amounts of silicon dioxide (SiO2) (both amorphous and crystalline) and calcium oxide (CaO), both being endemic ingredients in many coal-bearing rock strata.
In the past, fly ash was generally released into the atmosphere, but pollution control equipment mandated in recent decades now require that it be captured prior to release. In the US, fly ash is generally stored at coal power plants or placed in landfills. About 43 percent is recycled,[3] often used to supplement Portland cement in concrete production. Some have expressed health concerns about this.[4]
Ash used as a cement replacement must meet strict construction standards, ….. amounts of chromium(VI) contaminated leather sludges in Alcanena, Portugal. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash – Cached – Similar
Chromium VI Directive. The Chromium (VI) Directive (2003/53/EC) applies to cement and products containing cement marketed in the EU from 17th January 2005. … http://www.whd.co.uk/Concrete/cementandchromiu.html – Cached – Similar
By the time an employee becomes aware of a cement burn, much damage has …. Adding ferrous sulfate to portland cement may lower the Cr(VI) content of the … http://www.osha.gov/dsg/guidance/cement-guidance.html – Cached – Similar
43 Grade cement is used for pre-cast concrete production and sleeper manufacture … In Scandinavia, France and the UK, the level of chromium(VI), which is thought to be toxic and a major skin … Resourse :- http://en.wikipedia.org … cementindustry.blogspot.com/ – Cached – Similar
Ash used as a cement replacement must meet strict construction standards, but no standard …. This process was used to stabilize large amounts of chromium(VI) … Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; … http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/fly+ash – Cached
anagrams crosswords example wikipedia Ebay catalog translations … Many asphaltic concrete pavements contain fly ash. … a raw feed for manufacturing portland cement clinker, as well as for skid control on icy roads. … boron, cadmium, chromium, chromium VI, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum,selenium, …
dictionary.sensagent.com/coal+combustion+products/en-en/ – Cached
Fly Ash Resource Center- splash page. Wikipedia Reference from Wikipedia… boron, cadmium, chromium, chromium VI, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, ….. Promotes the use of fly ash as an additive in concrete and cement products. … http://www.kosmix.com/topic/fly_ash – Cached
Chromium VI Directive. The Chromium (VI) Directive (2003/53/EC) applies to cement and products containing cement marketed in the EU from 17th January 2005. … http://www.whd.co.uk/Concrete/cementandchromiu.html – Cached – Similar
**
and – Perchlorate – (look it up sometime)
Perchlorate in Drinking Water
Last Update: January 7, 2011
Perchlorate is a regulated drinking water contaminant in California, with a maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 6 micrograms per liter (µg/L). The MCL became effective October 2007. For information provided to public water systems by the CDPH Drinking Water Program about the implementation of the MCL and the scheduling of monitoring, see links at the bottom of this page.
Perchlorate and its salts are used in solid propellant for rockets, missiles, and fireworks, and elsewhere (e.g., production of matches, flares, pyrotechnics, ordnance, and explosives). Their use can lead to releases of perchlorate into the environment. Perchlorate’s interference with iodide uptake by the thyroid gland can decrease production of thyroid hormones, which are needed for prenatal and postnatal growth and development, as well as for normal metabolism and mental function in the adult. Its effects on the thyroid gland are the basis of the 6-µg/L public health goal (PHG) established in 2004 by Cal/EPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. (PHGs contribute to the development of MCLs, as described here.) In January 2011, OEHHA released a draft technical support document for a 1-µg/L PHG for perchlorate.
Monitoring, first in 1997 by the Drinking Water Program and then by public water systems, showed perchlorate to be a widespread drinking water contaminant, occurring in several hundred wells, mostly in southern California (see early findings). Perchlorate was also found in the Colorado River, an important source of water for drinking and irrigation, where its presence resulted from contamination from ammonium perchlorate manufacturing facilities in Nevada.
Final Regulatory Determination for Perchlorate in Drinking Water
EPA has decided to regulate perchlorate under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The science that has lead to this decision has been peer reviewed by independent scientists and public health experts including the National Academy of Sciences. This decision reverses a 2008 preliminary determination, and considers input from almost 39,000 public commenters on multiple public notices (May 2007, October 2008, and August 2009) related to perchlorate. This action notifies interested parties of EPA’s decision to regulate perchlorate, but does not in itself impose any requirements on public water systems (PWSs). However, this action initiates a process to develop and establish a national primary drinking water regulation (NPDWR). Once the NPDWR is finalized, certain PWSs will be required to take action to comply with the regulation in accordance with the schedule specified in the regulation.
EPA is replacing the existing preliminary remediation goal of 24.5 ppb with the interim health advisory value of 15 ppb. This goal will be used as a consideration when establishing cleanup levels for perchlorate at Superfund sites.
Thaumasite is a silicate mineral with chemical formula Ca3Si(OH)6(CO3)(SO4)·12H2O. It occurs as colorless to white prismatic hexagonal crystals, typically as acicular radiating groups. It also occurs as fibrous masses. Its Mohs hardness is 3.5 and it has a specific gravity of 1.88 to 1.90. Optically it is uniaxial negative with indices of refraction of nω = 1.507 and nε = 1.468.
Thaumasite can also be formed along with other calcium-silicate hydrates (CSH) during cement alteration, especially when sulfate attack develops.
It was first described in 1878 in Sweden and named from the Greek, “thaumazein”, to be surprised, in reference to its unusual composition with carbonate, sulfate and hydroxysilicate anions.[3]
Another quite surprising feature of thaumasite is the presence of non-tetrahedral silicon in its crystal lattice.[4][5][citation needed] Indeed, an atypic octahedral configuration is observed for Si present in thaumasite in the form of hexahydroxysilicate: [Si(OH)6]2−, a species exhibiting a geometry similar to that of the hexafluorosilicate [SiF6]2−.
Isn’t that the best?
Thaumasite (white) with prehnite (green) from Fairfax Quarry, Virginia
***
Very interesting . . .
– cricketdiane
***
Here is more about the hydrofracking waste water discussions –
The contaminants still remaining, including radioactive materials, could find their way into drinking water and aquatic species that may be used for food. …
It’s important to note that the radiation levels in the drinking water are extremely low, on the order of parts per trillion. However, as KHOU reports, the tendency among environmental health experts and the EPA, is to regard any level as potentially dangerous to human health.
He said drinking water with any amount of alpha particles, even when consumed in amounts below federal legal limits, raises your risk to develop health problems or, in rare cases, cancer. Examples of alpha particles found in the Gulf Coast region are those from uranium, radium and other minerals.
Ozonoff describes alpha particles as a type of radiation that would not typically harm you unless inhaled or ingested. He warns, once you take it inside your body, your health risks immediately begin to rise.
“It can’t penetrate very far, but when it hits something it does a ferocious amount of damage,” he said. “If I were to drink it, then many parts of your body are within knife-wielding distance of an alpha particle.”
Part II aired last night and it reveals what appears to be scientific malpractice on the part of Texas Commission on Environmental Quality scientists. One expert in the KHOU story called it a “cover-up.”
For more than 20 years, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality under-reported the amount of radiation found in drinking water provided by communities all across Texas. As a result, health risks to people consuming the water have been underestimated in many water systems where radioactive contaminants are present.
Here’s what happened in a nutshell, according to KHOU: An independent lab would test the water for radioactive contaminants and submit the data, as is standard, with a margin of error built-in. Rather than report the full results to the EPA, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would always pick the lower end of the margin of error in an apparent attempt to keep water utilities from exceeding federal radiation limits.
And it gets worse. In 2000, the EPA explicitly told TCEQ to stop playing games with the margin of error. But for nine more years, TCEQ continued the practice, until a 2009 EPA audit finally put a stop to it. Is this what Rick Perry means when he talks about standing up to the feds?
We examine three of the film’s claims: Claim 1: Fracking is polluting underground sources of drinking water. The film highlights the risk but overstates it …
And here is more information that pertains to why this is critical to be fixed right now – (and has been known to need a solution for far too long to not be solved already) –
Certain rock types naturally contain radioactive elements referred to as NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials). When a source of drinking water comes in contact with NORM-bearing rocks, radionuclides may accumulate in the water to levels of concern. The predominant radionuclides found in water include:
As water is treated to remove impurities, radionuclides may collect and eventually build up in filters, tanks, and pipes at treatment plants. The small amounts of NORM present in the source water may concentrate in sediment or sludges. Because the NORM is concentrated due to human activity, it is classified as TENORM (Technologically Enhanced Radioactive Material). Most of this waste is disposed in landfills and lagoons, or is applied to agricultural fields.
On down the page, it says –
Land Spreading/Soil Conditioning
About 20 percent of sludge is disposed of by land application to improve soil conditions or to fertilize the soil. The sludge is plowed directly into the soil to limit water runoff and for sanitary reasons. Recently proposed rules may prohibit this practice on agriculture land.
Deep-Well Injection
Deep-well injection involves the pumping of sludge into a stable geologic formation. Deep-well injection is not commonly used and is specifically prohibited in the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. Because of its potential adverse impact on groundwater aquifers, EPA uses its authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act to control and also discourage this practice.
Landfills
Approximately 30 percent of generated sludge is disposed of in landfills. Contaminated materials are typically covered and compacted on a daily basis. Features such as clay layers are emplaced above and below the buried waste to prevent radon emissions and radionuclides from leaching into the groundwater.
Lagoons
Approximately 42 percent of sludge is disposed of in lagoons. Any radium present in the sludge will settle in bottom sediments which may have to be periodically dredged and properly disposed of.
Ion-Exchange and Activated Charcoal
Ion-exchange resins are used on smaller water supply systems to soften water by replacing Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions with Na+ ions. In the process, about 95 percent of the radium is also removed . However, the resins are usually back washed for reuse rather than being disposed. The backwash water, which contains radium, is typically discharged to storm sewers, underground injection wells or septic tanks, or is back washed to another ion-exchange column for the selective removal of radium. Radionuclide content eventually builds up in the resin after prolonged usage.
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/drinking-water.html(it has a lot more information – But, my note is that the quantity of wastewater and its radioactive contents from the hydrofracking process in over 71,000 natural gas wells in Pennsylvania alone are massively greater quantities than any system could clean or decontaminate.)
***
Scientists want to help regulators decide safety of chemicals
Groups representing 40,000 researchers and clinicians are urging federal agencies responsible for the safety of chemicals to examine the subtle impact a chemical might have on the human body rather than simply ask whether it is toxic.
A well-known example would be bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in plastic goods for decades, Hunt said. The chemical can leach from products into food and drink, and federal health officials say it is found in the urine of more than 90 percent of Americans.
The government has long said that BPA is safe, based on studies that show levels of BPA used in commercial products are not toxic – meaning they would not kill – humans.
But a growing body of research by endocrinologists, molecular biologists, reproductive specialists and others over the past 15 years has shown that low levels of BPA can cause changes in activity at the cellular level that cause health effects over time in laboratory animals. (etc.)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 3, 2011; 3:57 PM
***
My Note –
In the 1960’s and 1970’s efforts were made to start fixing these things and for over 42 years they have not been fixed. Only a very small percentage of the persistent pollution has been tackled. In fact, with the amount of money that industries and businesses have spent on attorneys, public relations firms, lobbyists, lobbyists on top of lobbyists, US Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbyists, PACs, special interest groups to persuade the public through the media, fighting regulations in every single state and across the world, and fighting legislation and regulations in the Federal government, fighting the EPA, putting off making changes, changing their operations to other countries in some cases where they could continue polluting – and buying Republican Party candidates to serve their interests – they could’ve just put the damn filters on the smokestacks and rendered the wastewater into a neutralized safe contaminant free resource and made the same profits or even greater at the same time.
But no.
Oh yeah – and the amount of money they’ve spent on decrying scientific studies, hindering them, legislating against them, legislating against their findings, lobbying and applying political pressure against those findings, undermining the credibility of those findings, etc., ad nauseum – they could’ve afforded to have designed systems that would never have polluted in the first place. That is some ridiculous sums of money that have spent over the last forty years and certainly been spent across multiple industries, through a multitude of corporations and industry / trade associations, through business associations, and think tanks and public relations consultants, and political donations and on and on and on – they could’ve just solved the damn problems for less than a quarter of one tenth of one percent of what they’ve spent fighting against doing anything about it.
And, worst of all –
The families of these business leaders have been just as subjected to these pollutants as the rest of us whether they know it or not. And, some of those decision-makers who refused to be told what to do with their business and refused to stop doing their business in ways that polluted everybody and everything – are dead now as a direct result of the pollutants they unleashed on America. Why don’t they know that?
It is just stupid.
– cricketdiane
***
Do they really think that it can’t get them if they are rich enough to go skiing in the Alps and go vacation in the beautiful coasts of the world and live in their elegant protected homes? What planet is their food coming from? What air do they think they are breathing?
Oh wait, the Republicans up there in Washington that are gutting the budgets to the EPA and serving the business interests that paid for their campaigns don’t believe that mankind has had any negative effects on nature. And, they don’t believe that water with radioactive contaminants in it which were dumped upstream nearly on top of where the drinking water is taken could even remotely have anything to do with them or their families. Yeah – right. And if they don’t believe it will hurt anything then it won’t.
That’s what they’ve been doing for the entire course of my adult lifetime and now I can honestly say, that my childhood was subjected to it, my children’s lifetimes have been subjected to it and my grandchildren’s lives have been subjected to it. My cousins, grandparents and parents have been subjected to it and every single person that I have ever known. Some have died horribly from cancers although they never smoked a day in their lives. It wasn’t smoking that killed them nor caused the cancers they’ve endured. But, there is a very good chance that the horrendous chemicals consistently poured into the environment in every single state, every rural area, every suburb, every city and every water source for every moment of every day over the last fifty years and more – could very well have caused those cancers, nightmarish suffering and deaths prematurely.
From a New York Times investigative article about Natural Gas Wells – that use hydraulic fracturing – and the wastewater produced by it –
Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.
So, why can’t they just reclaim these materials and sell them, including the radioactive elements which are obviously in the wastewater in a defined volume already? It isn’t like they have to go look for it.
Report oiled shoreline or request volunteer information: (866)-448-5816
Submit alternative response technology, services or products: (281) 366-5511
Submit your vessel for the Vessel of Opportunity Program: (281) 366-5511
Submit a claim for damages: (800) 440-0858
Report oiled wildlife: (866) 557-1401
Key contact numbers
Report oiled shoreline or request volunteer information: (866) 448-5816
Submit alternative response technology, services or products: (281) 366-5511
Submit your vessel for the Vessel of Opportunity Program: (281) 366-5511
Submit a claim for damages: (800) 440-0858
Report oiled wildlife: (866) 557-1401
Deepwater Horizon Incident
Joint Information Center
Phone: (713) 323-1670
(713) 323-1671
UNIFIED COMMAND URGES CITIZENS TO HELP PROTECT LOUISIANA’S COAST
BY NOT TAMPERING WITH BOOM
HOUMA, La. – The Unified Command today released a public service announcement (PSA) regarding boom vandalism currently taking place on Louisiana waters.
The PSA urges citizens to help protect Louisiana’s shoreline and marshes by not cutting, tampering or moving boom currently in place. Boom is an essential part of the ongoing response efforts and by damaging boom, the effort to protect Louisiana’s coastline and natural inhabitants is jeopardized.
Citizens are encouraged to report any boom vandalism to local law enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard or by calling (866) 448-5816.
The Unified Command has been established to manage response operations to the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A Unified Command links the organizations responding to an incident and provides a process for those organizations to make consensus decisions. The Houma Unified Command is responsible for all operations in Louisiana.
Deepwater Horizon Response The vacuum barges in Louisiana have been deemed safe to re-join the fight against the oil spill in the Gulf. The vacuum barges were temporarily removed from service after safety concerns occurred including stability and the lack of lifesaving and firefighting equipment. All concerns have been addressed and the vessels …are safe for all crewmembers aboard. Read more: http://ht.ly/20189
I received a comment on my post which I will put here about a test that anyone can do (non-invasive) for benzene exposure. It costs 36 pounds and can be purchased online. However, I’ve only briefly looked into it and what I want to do is find the other tests available for the specific chemicals that are in the crude oil and dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico air and water such that people can take those samples themselves and test what is there.
We have a lot of boats going out into those areas and if many are taking samples where the fumes are assaulting them – maybe a better idea of the overall health risks can be developed and proven in ways that the EPA and health agencies cannot ignore. As much as they know it is dangerous, they continue to say it doesn’t require respirators or eye protection for those being exposed to the crude oil and dispersant and crude oil burnoff vapors concentrated in the area and coming ashore.
This is the one of those tests. This one is for exposure to benzene. It doesn’t say how quickly after exposure that the test has to be made for it to be correct. And, there are other tests available to get information about what is in the air and water including some handheld devices used for sampling that tech teams, scientists, some environmental groups, miners and industries use. I will look for them.
This one is from the company BIOMARK. This is the comment I received –
Those involved with the oil spill clean-up and those living and working close to the affected shoreline will be exposed to benzene. With airborne monitoring it is not possible to say exactly how much benzene an individual has been exposed to. Biomonitoring, the measurment of a chemical or a breakdown product from that chemical in the body of an individual allows a much more accurate measurment of a persons exposure to that harmful chemical. For example the measurement of a specific urinary metabolite of benzene called S-PMA allows a persons exposure to benzene to be determined. Biomark Limited have recently launched a simple to use and cost-effective benzene biomonitoing test. This test allows large numbers of sample to be taken and quickly measured. Details of this test can be found at http://www.biomark.co.uk. The test is available on-line to individuals, environmental organisations, companies and governments. This test could be a very powerful tool for determining benzene exposure and assessing the long-term inpact of this environmental disaster.
CONTACT DETAILS –
Biomark Limited
14 Camelot Way
Thornhill
Cardiff
CF14 9AN
Biomark Limited
Registered in England and Wales Company No. 6034383
Biomark’s test measures the urinary biomarker S-phenylmercapturic acid (S-PMA). S-PMA is specific to benzene and presence of this metabolite in urine confirms inhalation, ingestion or absorption of this harmful chemical.
On Tuesday, June 15, the NOAA Ship Pisces reported a dead sperm whale floating 77 miles due south of the Deepwater Horizon spill site. NOAA is currently in the process of conducting thorough testing to determine the circumstances surrounding the mammal’s death, as well as collect information about its life. This is the first dead whale reported since BP’s rig exploded on April 20 It was not found in oiled waters; however, its location of death is unknown.
As soon as the whale was sighted, Pisces Field Party Chief Paul Felts called the marine mammal hotline to report the finding to the Wildlife Branch of the Unified Command and NOAA’s marine mammal experts.
Based on the estimated size of the whale, scientists believe it is a sub-adult. Its condition suggests it may have been dead for between several days to more than a week. Although it was not found in oiled water, NOAA marine mammal experts are using hindcasting analysis to look into the location from which the whale carcass may have drifted.
While it is impossible to confirm whether exposure to oil was the cause of death, NOAA is reviewing whether factors such as ship strikes and entanglement can be eliminated. Samples collected from this carcass will be stored under proper protocols and handed off when the Pisces comes to port on July 2, or possibly if another boat is sent to meet the Pisces. Full analysis of the samples will take several weeks.
In accordance with the Wildlife Branch protocols, NOAA’s Southeast Regional Marine Mammal Stranding Coordinator Blair Mase requested that the NOAA field crew take photographs of the approximately 25-foot whale, collect skin swab for oil analysis, collect blubber and skin samples for analysis, and measure its height in the water. Although the whale is very decomposed, the photographs and samples will help scientists better understand how long it has been dead. The blubber and skin samples will be used for genetic analysis and to determine the sex of the animal. Measurements of the whale floating in the water will be used to determine how far and how fast it might have floated from where it died. The carcass has been marked so that aerial reconnaissance teams will be able to identify the individual and will not report it as a new mortality.
NOAA and the Unified Command Wildlife Branch have had numerous reports of sperm whales seen swimming in the oil, but this is the first confirmed report of a dead whale since the BP oil spill began. NOAA remains concerned about sperm whales, which are the only endangered resident cetaceans in the upper Gulf of Mexico. Sperm whales spend most of their time in the upper Gulf offshore area, live at depth in areas where subsurface dispersants and oil are present, and feed on deepwater squid, which may also be impacted by the oil and dispersants.
The NOAA Ship Gordon Gunter sailed yesterday for a multi-week cruise to do photo identification, assessments, tagging, biopsies, and prey-density studies for sperm whales and Bryde’s whales. Nearshore and offshore response efforts are continuing, and include investigations to determine cause of death or illness for dolphins that have stranded and aerial surveys for cetaceans throughout the area. The information gained from these efforts will help assess the impacts of this event on cetaceans in the Gulf of Mexico.
Two of the things I’ve noticed in the last few days about the oil spill –
1. That the five biggest oil companies are paying ZERO royalties for the 141 wells they are operating in the Gulf of Mexico. (said by a Representative in the Hearings earlier this week. I looked it up and apparently that is true.)
2. That the ideas, products, inventions, and solutions being put into the email to the Senators, Representatives, the Department of Energy and elsewhere including on the BP website form page are going to a team of six people somewhere in the Unified Command and they’ve received 100,000 plus – maybe because they are all shipping them over to the same place when people and companies are sending the ideas to them.
And, although Tony Hayward yesterday in hearings said that they are incorporating some of those ideas into the oil spill recovery and oil spill containment and well containment – there is no evidence of that, except where local leaders are putting them to use in a few cases on their own. But, they are not using the ideas being submitted to BP or the Unified Command because those are not being made available to them.
– cricketdiane
***
Finally, CNN is showing a few pictures where people working in the spill areas do have a few respirators. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA is speaking now about the respirators and suggesting that now they are saying that some workers are being told to wear respirators. But apparently that is not being required in the areas of the marshes and many other places.
One thing he just noted – (on CNN) is that to include requirements for respirators is to require a fit test and another test to make sure they are being used correctly so as not to be damaging to the heart and in the heat – these respirators are apparently very difficult on the body as well. Hmmmm……
So, he is excusing the fact that OSHA is not requiring those standing in oil in the marshes or on boats being subjected to the oil or leaning over the oil in the marshes to clean it up with absorbent towels from the grasses who are being exposed to benzene and other chemical hazards found in crude oil.
Hmmm……..
Testing the air, testing the water – finding too little chemicals to be of concern but meanwhile – people are being overcome by the fumes and made sick by them. What is wrong with this picture? Why does it continue to be wrong? And is this the best we can offer these workers, respirators that are worse than what they would be breathing even when it is known to be extremely hazardous chemicals? That mentality of how much trouble it would be to fit test everyone who might need to be using a respirator.
***
By the way –
I’m very glad that the $20 Billion dollars was put into an escrow account by BP and I’m very proud of our President and our team in the White House for their tough negotiations with BP’s Chairman and executives to accomplish it.
However, I’ve noticed that there are already statements made by Tony Hayward yesterday about these funds being expected to cover virtually everything for the next ten years and I don’t think that is realistic. What is realistic is that having this money set aside into escrow will protect it in the event that BP, its subsidiaries involved in this event or by separation of the oil spill event into a separate company – that any of them go into bankruptcy. That is important as is that the money is protected in the event of a merger or the numerous ways that corporate structures can be manipulated to sidestep continuing financial liabilities.
And, the other thing I noticed is how much Mr. Barton of Texas spoke directly for the views of the Republican Party yesterday in the hearings as he apologized to BP for the “shakedown”. When he was speaking, he mentioned that he found it distasteful that a business or an individual legitimately at fault could be required to set aside some measure of assets in this way (my paraphrase – what he said was even better).
The thing is that he and his Republican counterparts decided during the Reagan years forward, that any business, corporation or individual who was found accused (long before being found guilty in any court of law or mounting any sufficient defense,) of violating any number of US laws would immediately find their homes, businesses, vehicles, properties, assets, bank accounts, belongings and every other thing confiscated by the law enforcement agencies of the US. If that is not a shakedown – I don’t know what is.
And long before any of the cases could go to court, all that property was confiscated and often, auctioned off before it was ever ascertained that the action had been appropriate in the first place. So, get off it – The Republican Party policy makers had determined to do that and to push for sovereignty laws across the US and to push lower and lower what standards could be used to facilitate taking property through eminent domain laws, including to use them for the mineral rights under our national public lands, national parks, and federal lands.
Mr. BP representative Barton (R) Texas didn’t mind when all that has been going on and the Republican Party were the ones who decided on it being that way. So, what is their problem when one of their favorite friends have to put up a bit of money for what they’ve done. In fact, based on the laws of the United States as the Republicans have remade them, all of BP’s assets could be frozen right now and literally confiscated – all of it.
And, on CNN yesterday – although I’ve noted it on earlier posts and elsewhere online it can be found through the US Treasury Department, the State Department and through International Petroleum websites – BP owns and operates facilities in conjunction with Iran and for Iran and together serves the needs of Iran. CNN noted that one massive investor with 24 million shares of BP stock was found to be Iran’s own – but I don’t know that it can be substantiated by the public. The laws of the United States and the European Union, along with the UN facilitators and other agencies within the US departments do know however, as does the UK government oversight members. So, that will get fixed before it is all over.
What struck me most yesterday watching the two hearings yesterday – the subcommittee with BP and the other one with the Minerals Management Service – was to watch the sidestepping of the Republicans in the MMS hearings of the subcommittee on natural resources.
Instead of using the time to ask pertinent and appropriate questions to investigate the situation and others that may be accidents waiting to happen, at least two of the Republican representatives used that time to push, push, push Republican Party policy position paper statements about the oil drilling moratorium on the 33 wells in deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico.
I wish they would use the time properly or just shut up and let somebody else do it. What a waste of time, effort and opportunity when Republicans are doing it that way when in this once in a lifetime hearing event when decisions and investigations are occurring – they use it as a chance to further intentionally instigate and promote oil industry interests in a continuing stream of read and re-read statements straight out of the Republican party conservative thinktanks and Wall Street backers consumed with the Oil play.
How could they do that? And, I was proud to see some of the Republican Representatives in the hearings with Tony Hayward of BP finally getting into the real deal of trying to understand what has happened, why it happened, how it might happen again even yet, and how the recovery efforts are being done. At first their statements were the same old stuff and then they started getting angry with the bullshit too.
BP doesn’t seem much like an oil company and I can see now why the other oil executives from the large oil companies in hearings earlier started distancing themselves away from BP. It seems that the executives in BP have acted more like Wall Street members than oil industry members. Maybe their only job is to maneuver deals, manage mergers and sustain the corporate hierarchy to cut costs, deliver layoffs, drop overhead and increase profits as a result.
Maybe they have no abilities to fund and implement reasonable safety measures and safe operations in that business and corporate model as it is now. To them (given that structure) – safety measures and R&D into better, safer ways would simply look like a column on a balance sheet to cheat out of the needed resources in order to boost profits on a continually short term basis but always immediately out in front of them. They could literally say that safety was their first priority even as severe financial and resource cuts were made to each and every safety system and safety based measure in use.
Of the 461 turtles verified from April 30 to June 16, a total of 355 stranded turtles were found dead, 34 stranded alive. Four of those subsequently died. Four live stranded turtles were released, and 26 live stranded turtles are being cared for at rehabilitation centers. Turtle strandings during this time period have been much higher in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle than in previous years for this same time period. This may be due in part to increased detection and reporting, but this does not fully account for the increase.
The above note from June 16, 2010 – NOAA website –
And as noted elsewhere – from NOAA ships – there are thousands of sea cucumbers dead in the waters that have been observed and photographs taken of their numbers floating dead in the waters along with man of war, jellyfish, and other similar animals floating dead in the Gulf of Mexico waters.
I haven’t found the condition of the coral reefs at the pinnacles however, there was a mention on CNN by some members of local governments that the bottom of Barataria Bay is covered in oil and oil mixed with dispersants, tar balls and thick gooey oil product.
(my note)
***
There were also nests destroyed and pelican chicks and eggs along the coastal marshes that were reported in the last couple days where they had either been stepped on by cleanup workers or bags of petroleum crude oil had been thrown over on top of them awaiting collection of those bags. It doesn’t make sense – do you know there are UV protective clothing with specially made fabrics to be cool that are used in Death Valley and Sahara races and neck bandanas made in Australia that cool the body. There have to be the better designed respiration equipment somewhere and yet, everywhere I look, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and workers hired to cleanup or place boom are not required to wear respirators and none of these things listed above are available to them even though the heat index in some areas is around 110.
Its as if I am watching a cleanup and recovery operation designed in the 1960 time period predating the computer access to all these things across the world and prior to the time when these products and their companion technologies existed. It is also as if none of the things that have been known for the last one hundred years, especially throughout the last fifty years have been added to the mix of what is available to bring to bear on a situation from knowledge and information to products, inventions, discoveries and options.
It is maddening. And, I still think that the contractors are getting more of the decision making about who and what and where assets are placed along with how they are used and which contractors or subcontractors are allowed to do them. That is the most insanely irresponsible manner to operate this approach that has ever existed ever. It is almost been worse than doing nothing at all in many cases and it ties up resources and assets which could be used to put them into permanently idling on the docks or out of the action which costs immeasurably every single minute it is happening.
That has to be changed immediately or it will go on this same way over the next six months of this operation and continue making it worse on a daily basis as reasonable courses of action are withheld.
– cricketdiane
***
Oh yeah and yesterday, Mr. Hayward said that the find at Macondo Prospect where the Deepwater Horizon was drilling was expected to yield 100 million barrels but there were items I posted on earlier posts which indicated that BP was expecting it to be a find much larger than that of around a billion barrels. He had to know that and one thing I noticed is that he did know about that argument on the Deepwater Horizon which had been reported by a number of employees had been “repudiated” under oath at another investigative hearing. So, isn’t that interesting considering that vast array of things he either didn’t know or didn’t testify to in a correct manner such as him saying that everyone on the Deepwater Horizon rig agreed to go forward on the operation despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary of what he said.
Apparently, he didn’t mind saying that however, knowing damn full well it wasn’t true when he said it – not only once, but twice during these hearings.
– cricketdiane
***
And why is it that oil rigs and semi-permanent drilling rigs and semisubmersible rigs or whatever oil drilling platforms can be used in the Gulf of Mexico and our national waters that register in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere but skimming boats and other types of recovery vessels can’t come help us that are registered in other nations? Does that make any sense at all? Are they just making up this stuff as they go along or is it that rules are applied just however it suits depending on whose benefit they want to serve?
I still don’t understand why the Coast Guard stopped those boats from getting the oil out of the marshes and sent them back to port – why couldn’t they just hand them some lifejackets and a fire extinguisher temporarily with an inspection for those things to be added appropriately once the boats were taken back to port after getting up the oil for the day? Some of this stuff just absolutely defies any good sense whatsoever.
Now, they’ve made it harder to get the NOAA forecast for the oil spill. I went to the NOAA incident page and then where it used to be easy to get the current map, now it is a separate page which my computer browser insisted in through an untrusted site, then it leads to a pdf that is incomplete. And, maybe the onshore trajectory has been divided up from the offshore trajectory maps. Also – as if it isn’t bad enough that their information typically runs a full day behind – now its harder to get it, slow and difficult to share. Thanks a lot for denouncing every concept of transparency. Do they have nothing better to do than try to botch up the only three things that were actually working correctly or close at least?
Whose goals are causing these aberrations from the Incident Response Team?
In fact the map that it sent me to see – is from 06-04-10. God, I hate them.
Another work of Jane Lubchenco, no doubt. She is such a piece of work. Wasn’t she the one saying that there was no chance this oil would come ashore and that it wouldn’t get into the loop current and that the amount of release was only 5,000 barrels a day long after it was known that was a lie?
I don’t doubt she and the Commerce Department is manipulating things to serve the interests of the tourism industry or who the hell ever this time that is lobbying them to make things appear better than they are and to thwart the truth being made available to the American people and the international communities. I think she isn’t a member of the scientific community at all. She acts more like an administrator (and one with specific interests benefiting business and industry) than anyone with concerns for the biological species in the Gulf of Mexico. Nor does her emphasis seem to be transparency and availability of information easily accessible to the American people. I’ve had it with the whole bunch of them. They are going to keep mucking up things until finally they do find themselves brought up to tar and feathering – and I don’t mean in the nice chambers of the House Congressional hearings either.
It is just a matter of time.
– cricketdiane
Here is the nearshore trajectory map for the oil spill from today – only available now as a pdf unless I go to the Chinese websites, European websites and Persian websites that will allow me to get it as an html doc or jpg image – what kind of bullshit is that?
I tried printing the trajectory map for today and I was going to scan it so I could post it and although the document properties says it will print – it isn’t printing. Not only did it buggar my computer waiting to see the thing after sending me to the one for 06-03/04-10 first off the bat – then it won’t print.
They aren’t trying to make this all better – they are trying to avoid, evade, make things far more difficult than they already are, deny people the protective gear that would maintain their health and well-being, stop the use of any other things to fight the spill than those things on the “original plans” which used techniques, products and methods that didn’t work even in 1969 when they were also used without change from then to now and they are doing everything possible to thwart any full public disclosure of the facts from any and all sources. That isn’t American. That isn’t freedom of the speech. That isn’t their job. That isn’t effectively fighting this spill and recovery of the ocean and coasts from this oil spill nightmare. That isn’t fixing the spill nor the containment of the well. Who the hell are they serving?
NOAA Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill nearshore and onshore trajectory map for 06-18-10
There is another map which shows the offshore trajectory – and apparently – the expansiveness of it is part of why they are making it harder to post around the internet. Gee, do they really think that nobody on this planet can see what is going on in the Gulf of Mexico or is it simply to make it harder so people will stop making it available?
What a waste of resources the indecent incident command group has become – they aren’t trying to deal with this – they are doing something to keep the information about how many animals are killed out of the public eye and to keep these documents from being readily available at every turn, including those from the Minerals Management Service which were submitted in the first place about this operation and those about the Spill Response Plans which have to be accessed in person at the federal depositories with an id check and “shakedown” to make sure somebody isn’t coming in there to do something foul . . .
That was put into place by the Bush administration but this was not – this is the current incident command groups doing this shit including preventing our media from taking pictures of animals and birds covered with oil or speaking to workers and using the funds intended to get Gulf Coast towns and coastal areas prepared to keep the oil off the beaches and out of the estuaries which is being diverted to cover toys for the state police and other goodies they want like studying whether cows (who don’t reside at the Gulf Coast nor drink sea water) are getting crude oil or its constituents in their drinking water from the Gulf Coast oil spill. It is horrendous.
This isn’t America. I don’t know if it is the nation of fealty to whom but it isn’t the United States of America. But, then it probably hasn’t been for my entire adult lifetime and I just didn’t know what to do about it. As I have watched police brutality across this country for the least and most petty offenses like jaywalking or refusing to sign a citation – while the greatest of thieves and murderers like Goldman Sachs and BP go free – there are no words to describe the what the historical evidence suggests as the yield of such things. It is not going to work, to put it mildly and our leaders having filled our streets with cameras, and surveillance online and unwarranted search and seizure laws, unwarranted phone and electronic surveillance laws and similar heavy handed coverage of armies of police in multiple layers of police and 16 layers of national security agencies – I would say they have been expecting it wouldn’t work for a long, long time.
But, this is different. Just wait and see.
– cricketdiane
And do you know this is one of the largest oil field finds in North America – United States in a hundred years – and they are burning off our much needed petroleum resources from this find that belong to our Nation?
Subsea operational update:
•
For the last 12 hours on June 17th (noon to midnight), approximately 8,020 barrels of oil were collected and approximately 4,770 barrels of oil and 24.5 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.
•
Optimization of the dual recovery system continues; on June 17th, total oil recovered was aprox. 25,290 barrels.
approximately 16,020 barrels of oil were collected,
approximately 9,270 barrels of oil were flared,
and approximately 50.3 million cubic feet of natural gas were flared.
•
Total oil recovered from both the LMRP Cap and Q4000 systems since they were implemented is approximately 204,200 barrels.
•
The free standing riser installation is progressing for the long term containment option.
•
The next update will be provided at 6:00pm CDT on June 18, 2010.
Updated June 18 at 9:00am CDT / 3:00pm BST
***
From the CNN coverage – right now – The American people want Republicans like Cheri Jacobus, Representative Barton and Michelle Bachman along with their other Republican cronies of all varieties to shut the fuck up – that is enough. They caused this problem and as usual – somebody else has to fix it and the American people have to pay for it. The entire Republican Party including that bitch are not worth the space between their ears that apparently is taken up by recorded materials input by the oil industry, Wall Street and the Republican Party. They can all go to hell.
And as usual – they want it to be twenty or thirty years from now when the “little people” and “small people” get anything to make up for lost families, lost communities, lost health and lost incomes from some disaster that was directly caused by the Republican Party policies of the last thirty years.
Who spawned these demonic Republican and Corporate entities that have spread sickness, disease, murder, death and suffering across such wide swaths of time and measure? The permanent and irrevocable damages they have caused by direct intervention of de-regulation, big business favored laws and self-regulation of their activities has cost our entire economy, our future and our communities irretrievably. They caused the biggest bailouts necessary in the history of our world, the biggest disasters economic and ecological in the history of our world, the biggest unemployment in the history of our world and at the same time, made it more difficult for small businesses and start up businesses with such a host of trite and petty regulations and fees as to be no more than an intentional stumbling block and hindrance to anyone interested in starting or having a business in America.
That is only the tip of the iceberg in the real lives they have destroyed, the real deaths they have caused and the real suffering that continues unabated to this day – I would hope they would all be given a bath in the Gulf of Mexico as it is today at their re-imaging of America. And, in fact – they ought to have to be placed in that crude oil killing everything out there in the Gulf of Mexico. It would be the first of several things that would be appropriate to what they’ve done. But, no – they get air time, kudos and money in a never ending stream along with every respect and fealty from vast arenas. The fires of hell are awaiting them for doing this to people and to our nation – yet they still worship that brass bull on the street of New York and they still are given the honor of seats of power and money even as their damages continue to be experienced and will be for multiple generations.
If it wasn’t for the Republicans in power all these years, we already would be far from dependent on foreign oil because we would be driving our cars and trucks powered by many other things. Our air would be clean and it would have cost nearly nothing in comparison to the damages that have been done which must be cleaned up now in every nation on the earth from their horrendous shoddy business practices. And, it could’ve been profits plus safety throughout the entire time – it never had to be this way. It is what they wanted. And, our nation would’ve been seeing an entirely different event today in the Gulf of Mexico from the pride of having resourced the largest find in the last hundred years to successfully and safely harvesting it for our nation’s petroleum needs as well as being able to buy virtually every other possible source of fuels for transportation and types of vehicles.
But no – Representative Barton and his Republican cronies didn’t want that.
They wanted to fill the Gulf of Mexico with a crude oil petroleum toxic dispersant swamp that gives no value to the American people but to watch our national resources being burned off into the air and watch the full and complete destruction of every last wildlife resource that we’ve had for centuries. Goddamn every one of those bastards. There isn’t anything strong enough to say about them. They were the decision makers and then to have the audacity to send Michelle Bachman onto a CNN show to explain how the Obama administration was responsible for bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when the Bush administration Republicans did that and accuse the administration of causing this disaster when their use of the Minerals Management Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management to steal every last national resource and give it damn near for free to the corporations they have been serving – no. Damn hell – no.
and Ms. Palin and Republican Stevens who decided to create cutouts in the national wildlife preserves of Alaska to make it possible to drill for oil there, strip mine for minerals there and destroy the last remaining wildlife preservation areas – need to be treated to prison cells for absolute treason and violations of every treaty and law we’ve ever signed about it. And, they did do it with intention – absolute intention. Yeah – using our USGS to define the shale oil and minerals so that your friends in industries, mining and oil companies can destroy the last of the lands and mineral resources in our nation to line their own pockets – no, just don’t even get me started. It is and has been treachery of the highest order serving interests that do not serve our nation at all but certainly serve those foreign corporations and nations that came to harvest and profit from these activities while robbing the American people and the American Treasury blind and bankrupting every state along the way along with many generations to come.
Who decided to remake the Highways Safety and Transportation board into an industry representative and agent working for the auto industry?
The Republican Party did that.
Who decided to remake the Consumer Product Safety Board into an agency representing the corporations they were supposed to be regulating and enforcing regulations upon?
The Republican Party did that too.
Who decided to remake the Department of Agriculture into a place that didn’t enforce regulations and inspections of our food supply to favor large corporations involved in food processing and food distribution?
The Republican Party did that one.
Who decided to remake the Minerals Management Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Interior into a giveaway program for our national resources, oil, natural gas, and minerals along with serving the interests of the oil and mining industries instead of America?
Hmmm? The Republican Party did that.
Who decided to remake our national economic foundation into a parlor game of casino gambling with financial instruments that destroyed our national economy, destroyed many of the world’s economies and decimated every state economy in our nation?
Yes, The Republican Party did that.
Who decided to serve up every agency in our federal and state governments to act as agents and representatives serving the interests of those industries they were missioned to regulate and supervise and make safe?
Republicans did that also.
And – Who decided that the FAA should serve the interests of airlines and air transportation companies instead of the public’s safety?
Well, gee – let’s see. Oh yeah, the Republicans did that too.
And who did they steal from and who is paying for what they did when they were doing it and are paying for it today?
I am.
And the American people across the board are paying for it – not the corporations, not the banks, not the bankers, not the CEOs, not the politicians, not the foreign interests stealing our national resources, not the old officials that made the decisions, and not the Republican Party.
Nope, I am paying for it.
My children are paying for it and have been paying for it their entire lives.
My family is paying for it.
My grandparents paid for it and my uncles and my aunts and my cousins and my friends have all paid for it.
The Republican Party and their conservative right-wing jackoffs took over our churches, bankrupted our American businesses of our last hundred and fifty years along with small businesses at the rate of 40,000 bankruptcies a month even today, foreclosed on houses that our families had paid on for many years, destroyed all the jobs that might possibly be available and made it possible for someone from Bahrain in Bahrain to get a business grant made to them from our small business administration while our businesses were denied any access to money and nothing but a sea of stupid, petty, trite and unwieldy state and federal legislated regulations and taxes and fees and can’t do’s and don’t do’s and won’t work’s and nonsense. It has been a nightmare of factual and exact proportions that has reached into every arena of life from walking through our neighborhoods destroyed and destitute to fighting for the few beds in homeless shelters to having no other recourse than to accept never having a home, an income or a life of any value.
There is no way to say how it is in the fullness of evil, horrific and decimations of life that have been done by these things at the hands of the Republicans who have run this country into the ground on top of us. And, I mean nearly everyone who are all paying for it while the people at the top thrive and smile and vacation and go to spas and play and fuck everything that isn’t nailed down regardless of its age or sex or sexual orientation.
Who remade the IRS into a bully that would beat small businesses out of the marketplace?
The Republicans did that.
Who remade the Small Business Administration into a clearinghouse for bankers to get loan candidates so the loans could be resold and profits made by a select few with no investment or risk whatsoever?
Republicans did that too.
Who remade the federal government into a whipping boy for state projects to blame while taking every last dime they could get to do with in whatever way they pleased including those things in violation of the Constitution and Federal laws?
Hmmm – let’s see – yes, that was the Republican Party that did that in every state they’ve run and in every government office they held, were appointed to or elected to and from every seat they used to serve their own agendas in the highest offices and Congressional and Senate seats in our nation.
The Truth – Republican ideas that have been in use these last thirty years are not from the Republican Party as it was originally created and mandated and are not in the manner of the principles which is its foundation and claim.
– cricketdiane
***
Now, I’ve paid for this shit the Republicans have done and so have my children and my children’s children as have my parents and my grandparents, my friends, my fellow citizens of America, my relations, my community, my state, and my family. There is nothing that our President today can do that will not be stopped by these same Republicans and their cronies behind the scenes and from their continuing positions of power in our churches, in our media, in our Congress and in our states. They want it the way they remade it and will not today nor every do anything to help fix it, to make the damages less severe, nor to correct the damages that have been done, nor to help solve the problems they’ve created. They like it this way. They want to keep it this way.
The Republicans and the Republican Party policies and interests do not serve the American people. They are serving something else and my guess is that whatever the Republican Party has been serving and is continuing to serve today is not user-friendly to humanity nor to continued life in America nor even to life on our planet in general. That is devoid of conjecture. Every evidence of fact points exactly to that in every case and every arena.
Don’t believe me? – look at the Gulf of Mexico and see if any living thing survives what they’ve done there. And at every turn, the Republican Party continues to work with every resource at their command to thwart fixing anything or correcting any of it or recovering from any of it or restoring any of it to something that supports life, families, individuals, communities and living into a future of decency and safe, thriving lifetimes.
Oh but wait – there’s more . . .
Who took the best and the brightest of our American people – young and strong to be killed, permanently maimed and their precious irreplaceable lives destroyed to fight in the deserts of hell to serve the industries’ interests of the Republican Party?
Hmmmm —-
Gee, let me think?
Who would’ve done that? And then gone to them and paid back their lives with nothing but an endless hole to sink our national tax dollars to rebuild while our own country and their lives has nothing?
Who did that?
Republicans and their idea of economic policy did that. Economics by the stimulation of that economy through war did that and those lives meant absolutely nothing to them in pursuit of Republican Party interests and thieving their own profits from it.
Who made these people that have been calling themselves Republicans because surely it was not anything of goodness, mercy, kindness, love nor nature nor God. Or is it just what they did with it that was somewhere twisted away from anything of good?
And Republicans and their idea of international interdependency as foreign policy has left our nation a big dead rock in the middle of two oceans, without any means to take care of our own national needs for survival and progress.
But, since they have enough money to live anywhere on the planet, why would that matter to any Republican Party policy maker, politician or big business interest backing them? Maybe they will live in France – no wait, there are bizarre floods there. Maybe they can live in Australia – no wait, the desertification is increasing exponentially there with wildfires and flooding consuming cities and territories in short periods of time. Maybe they can live in Saudi Arabia or Dubai – no wait, there are floods happening there, too where it has rarely been recorded in their entire history and the sandstorms are tremendous and far too common. Maybe they can live in Mexico and any number or other nations around the world – no, wait there are wars of discontent and economics there from the vast poverty they’ve created and sustained, along with the most vile pollution ever seen by mankind.
They still don’t get the reasonable interpretation of what has been found on other planets – there is no Kroger and limo service, no restaurants to cook their food and if they want to leave to come back as it suits them, that would be a problem – and yet, they didn’t mind destroying this planet as they went in order to have today what they could’ve never spent throughout the rest of history even if they started spending it twenty years ago.
There is no good in it. And yet, the Republican Party made the SEC into a porn feeding site as if it had nothing better it could be doing and funding it the whole way to serve the needs and interests of Wall Street instead of fairness and decency and financial responsibility for the American people’s interests as well as the interests of the international communities where it plays.
And the Republican Party continues to host great dinners at $10,000 a plate where President Bush and Vice President Cheney’s words are treated like a gospel from the right hand of God and where Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts are treated like prophets and saints even as the lies they spew forth resemble the very worst of disinformation campaigns and propaganda.
No wonder the rest of the world has surpassed us in damn near everything from science to technology to new discoveries to health to well-being to strong middle classes to greater distribution of higher education across greater populations of their people to magnificent creations, inventions, cities and buildings, to massive new technological advances in energy and fuels and electronics and engineering and architecture and physics and health and just about every damn thing else. And this – while our nations’ states are being forced to cut education resources to our people and our adults and to our children and to our university students and even to our business people.
It is insane. And, don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about because every last bit of this can be found almost anywhere, online – in books, in libraries around the world, in archives, in databanks, in government resources of nations around the world, in facts, in evidence, in scientific and social data, and in academic studies made to the highest scrutiny. This isn’t a matter of opinion. The facts are available to anyone.
What I don’t understand is why anyone would not be willing to look at it for themselves and decide.
– cricketdiane
***
And one more, then I’m going to go take a bath and wash the filth of this off of me –
Who took our peace officers intent on serving the community good and made them over into a psychotic anti-social abusive cruel and sadistic gang of thugs under the name of police?
The Republicans did that at every level and every state they’ve run.
Who took our national resources and polluted them, gave them away to industries and served nothing in return to the American people except the costs of cleaning it up and repairing the damages they caused?
The Republican Party did that.
Who took our valued information resources and data and changed it to result in a poor reflection of reality to serve their own purposes including the structuring of data about unemployment and our GDP to look better than the facts actually show?
The Republicans did that too.
And, who took the USGS and used it to serve the interests of mining companies owned by foreign nationals and to serve the interests of oil companies also owned by foreign entities – so they could rape, pillage and plunder our natural and national resources without returning much for it besides death, destruction and permanent damages to our nation?
Hmmmm…….
Republicans wanted it that way so they did it that way.
And one last one –
Who was it that decided to keep Americans poor, to prevent Americans from starting small business or establishing thriving businesses, to destroy educational resources and the opportunities to higher education to most Americans and to exclude over 60% of our population from participating in jobs, communities and opportunities in America including populations born and raised in America?
Republicans idea of a good time.
They can all go to hell. That is where they belong.
And, obviously there is not one moment that the Republican Party or its members and policy makers and pundits and politicians are ever going to help fix one single thing they have so utterly re-made into a destructive force on life and on mankind and on America’s people.
– cricketdiane
***
I didn’t tell them to do it that way.
(***(
From wikipedia –
The Gulf of Mexico (Spanish: Golfo de México) is the ninth largest[1]body of water in the world.
The basin contains a volume of roughly 660 quadrillion gallons (2.5 × 1015 m3).
The Gulf of Mexico’s eastern, north, and northwestern shores lie along the US states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The US portion of the Gulf coastline spans 1,680 miles (2,700 km), receiving water from thirty-three major rivers that drain 31 states.[6]
The outer margins of the wide continental shelves of Yucatán and Florida receive cooler, nutrient-enriched waters from the deep by a process known as upwelling, which stimulates plankton growth in the euphotic zone. This attracts fish, shrimp, and squid.[7]
Map of northern part of Gulf of Mexico - from wikipedia entry
Other important industries along the coast include shipping, petrochemical processing and storage, military use, paper manufacture, and tourism.
(and)
The gulf’s warm water temperature can feed powerful Atlantic hurricanes causing extensive human death and other destruction as happened with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In the Atlantic, a hurricane will draw up cool water from the depths and making it less likely that further hurricanes will follow in its wake (warm water being one of the preconditions necessary for their formation). However, the Gulf is shallower and its entire water column is warm. When a hurricane passes over, although the water temperature may drop it soon rebounds and becomes capable of supporting another tropical storm.[8]
The Gulf is considered aseismic: however, mild tremors have been recorded throughout history (usually 5.0 or less on the Richter scale).
A 6.0 tremor was recorded on September 10, 2006, 250 miles (400 km) off the coast of Florida which caused no damage, but could be felt throughout the Southeastern United States.
Various biota include chemosynthetic communities near cold seeps and nonchemosynthetic communities such as bacteria and other microbenthos, meiofauna, macrofauna, and megafauna(larger organisms such as crabs, sea pens, crinoids, and demersal fish and cetaceans including endangered ones) are living in the Gulf of Mexico.[11]
(and from another entry)
The Gulf Coast is a highly productive economic region with many industries relating to fishing, aerospace, agriculture, biomedical research, and tourism. The region is anchored by the cities of Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Tampa, all the centers of their respective metropolitan areas and containing large ports.
These landforms protect numerous bays and inlets providing as a barrier to oncoming waves. The central part of the Gulf Coast, from eastern Texas through Louisiana, consists primarily of marshland. The western part of the Gulf Coast, predominantly Florida, is dotted with many bays and inlets.
The Gulf Coast is a major center of economic activity. The marshlands along the Louisiana and Texas coasts provide breeding grounds and nurseries for ocean life that drive the fishing and shrimping industries. The Port of South Louisiana (between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Laplace) and the Port of Houston are two of the ten busiest ports in the world by cargo volume.[1] As of 2004, seven of the top ten busiest ports in the U.S. are on the Gulf Coast.[2]
The discovery of oil and gas deposits along the coast and offshore, combined with easy access to shipping, have made the Gulf Coast the heart of the U.S. petrochemical industry. The coast contains nearly 4,000 oil platforms.
Besides the above, the region features other important industries including aerospace and biomedical research, as well as older industries such as agriculture and — especially since the development of the Gulf Coast beginning in the 1920s and the increase in wealth throughout the United States — tourism.
The petrochemical industry, launched with the major discoveries of oil in Texas and spurred on by further discoveries in the Gulf waters, has been a vehicle for development in the central and western Gulf which has spawned development on a variety of fronts in these regions.
Texas in particular has benefited tremendously from this industry over the course of the 20th century and economic diversification has made the state a magnet for population and home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other U.S. state.
Florida has grown as well, driven to a great extent by its long established tourism industry but also by its position as a gateway to the Caribbean and Latin America.
As of 2006, these two states are the second and fourth most populous states in the nation, respectively (see this article).
Other areas of the Gulf Coast have benefited less, though economic development fueled by tourism has greatly increased property values along the coast, and is now a severe danger to the valuable but fragile ecosystems of the Gulf Coast.
The Division of Environmental Geology (DEG) offers AAPG members an opportunity to increase their knowledge about the environment and the petroleum industry. DEG approaches basic environmental issues from a geological standpoint, so the profession’s understanding of geological, geochemical, geophysical and hydrogeological principles and methodologies can be applied to environmental problems.
Of the 374 turtles verified from April 30 to June 11,
a total of 312 stranded turtles were found dead,
28 stranded alive. Four of those subsequently died.
Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico
24 Hour Trajectory Map: Jump down to Current Trajectory Maps on this page for full-sized versions.
As the nation’s leading scientific resource for oil spills, NOAA has been on the scene of the BP oil spill from the start, providing coordinated scientific weather and biological response services to federal, state and local organizations. More
So here is (below) the satellite photo from 06-09-10 cropped and contrast heightened from the original true color at MODIS / NASA –
AERONET_Stennis.2010160.terra.1km – Gulf of Mexico oil spill real color contrast enhanced from satellite photo taken 06-09-10
And this one is from 06-11-10, also cropped and contrast enhanced real color
AERONET_Stennis.2010162.terra.1km – Gulf of Mexico oil spill satellite photo real color enhanced contrast and cropped – taken on 06-11-10 by NASA / MODIS
***
MODIS / NASA / AERONET_Stennis.2010160.terra.1km – Gulf of Mexico – cropped, saturation and contrast heightened – satellite photo from 06-09-10
My Note –
I took the NASA photo of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill taken on 06-09-10 and enhanced the saturation, the hue and contrast a little to see what it shows and this is what resulted. Very interesting.
But, look what it was yesterday – when the satellite they are offering on the site for MODIS real time “rapidfire” site shows this – I enhanced and cropped this one also –
AERONET_Stennis.2010162.terra.1km – NASA/MODIS satellite photo of Gulf of Mexico oil spill taken on 06-11-10 with enhanced contrast and hue
This one doesn’t show how much farther east or south that the spill has covered and it looks like the entire well emitting the spill has moved. There is no longer a plume extending from the source although that is very unlikely since we can all see the continuing thrust of crude oil and methane coming from the well in the live video feeds. And, there is still oil coming into the marshes and other significant coastal areas. But, in the above photo it looks like the entire mass has strengthened, deepened and mover east as a block.
Maybe I’m looking at clouds, but I don’t think that’s it.
There is also the evidence above that the oil is in the intercoastal waterways as noted in news stories yesterday.
I did a little different version – here by enhancing the colors by saturation.
NASA / MODIS – AERONET_Stennis.2010162.terra.1km – Gulf of Mexico oil spill – satellite photo for 06-11-10 – cropped and color enhanced
(the altered color versions – I cropped the original to see just the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and then enhanced the contrast, hue and saturation of colors to strengthen them – which shows very interesting things about it – the original satellite photos including whatever most recent ones can be found above or over at ESA MERIS or at MODIS NASA, my note)
***
Water enters the Caribbean Sea from the southeast and literally piles up inside the basin. It moves northwest in a poorly defined and highly variable stream called the Caribbean Current. It flows out through channels between islands in the north. It is forced into the Gulf of Mexico through a narrow and fairly shallow channel called the Yucatan Strait, which separates Mexico and Cuba. Here, it is called the Yucatan Current. Currents in this channel can be fierce. They are the reason that scuba divers in Cozumel, an island off the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, do “drift dives.” That is, instead of trying to stay in one spot, a nearly impossible task in ripping, 2-knot currents, divers descent in one spot, drift with the current, and pop up in another, hoping that their dive boat was able to keep up with them.
This is the area that gives birth to the well-defined current system that eventually becomes the Gulf Stream. The Gulf of Mexico is much like the Caribbean, except that it has only one entrance, the Yucatan Strait, and one exit, the Florida Strait. The Yucatan Current goes as far north as it can before experiencing too much resistance from the water already in the Gulf. Then it turns right, toward the exit. The turn gives this stretch of the stream its name–the Loop Current. It is almost always in the eastern Gulf, but can make the turn anywhere from just north of the Yucatan Strait itself to very near the continental shelf south of Mobile, Alabama.
The water in the Loop Current exits the Gulf of Mexico through the Florida Strait between Florida and Cuba, where it is known as the Florida Current. It then passes between southeast Florida and the Bahamas and changes its name again, becoming the mighty Gulf Stream.
Map showing the formation of a eddy in the Gulf of Mexico. Click image for larger view.
Back in the Gulf of Mexico, the Loop Current itself seldom drifts into the western half of the basin, but its influence is extensive in this enormous cul-de-sac. Anywhere along the main path that the stream meanders a little too much to the right, eddies are pinched off, like a giant, unstable bubble that splits in two. Spinning clockwise at 2 or 3 mi an hour, some eddies are more than 100 mi in diameter. They carry their warm water westward over several months, strongly affecting currents in the western Gulf, but eventually lose steam and break apart when they hit the continental shelf off Texas or Mexico. Three or four such eddies may exist in the Gulf at any one time. Oil companies operating offshore keep a close eye on them, even naming them (I always thought “Nelson Eddy” was a good one). Sometimes they even have to stop operations as they pass, for fear that high currents might cause the failure of critical production or safety equipment.
Today, these buttes and mesas and coral reefs make up dozens of seafloor habitat islands encircling the Gulf from the Campeche Banks to the Florida Keys. They lay an average of 70 miles from today’s shoreline in depths averaging 200 to 300 feet — much like a bathtub ring left by former sea levels. Each feature is relatively small, ranging in size from one-fifth of a square mile to 460 square miles. The average size of the habitat islands is probably on the order of twenty square miles, with their combined area about one-third smaller than that of Mississippi Sound, and less than one-fifth of one percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s area.
While small, these habitat islands show astonishing biological productivity, owing to the structure each provides, to summits at or above the penetration of useful sunlight, and to proximity to land and continental nutrient supplies. But two attributes are even more important for the islands’ evolutionary and ecological distinction — their connection through the ages, and their stepping-stone locations in the Gulf of Mexico’s major patterns of ocean circulation. For thousands of years until now, they have all endured together as refugia, feeding and breeding grounds, and epicenters of productivity. They have been connected in time.
Their locations are of paramount significance for their roles as reservoirs, springboards, corridors, and destinations of marine life, including the Caribbean plants and animals swept into the Gulf through the Yucatan Strait.
***
The first segment of the Islands in the Stream expedition focused on the Gulf of Mexico, a region heavily influenced by gyres that disperse animals and plants over great distances. Click image for larger view.
This one above – yesterday the reason I found some of the things about the Deepwater Horizon BP Macondo Prospect oil field was because when I was looking for what the projections of yield for the oil wells there – I stumbled on the other – however, on looking at this entry above – it is evident that there are agency tools used for verifying processes to know how much oil is coming from the wells to facilitate royalties that are due or something. Very interesting.
I was thinking about the period of time before the well exploded at Deepwater Horizon / Macondo – when they were selling it to investors, shareholders, public, government or press, in financial press particularly – that BP would’ve had a pretty good idea of the extent of the yield they were expecting in barrels of oil per day which they probably stated in numerous public places and in their internal documents to the shareholders and board of directors to tell about the find.
Was that yield expected to be 200,000 barrels a day and now that well is gushing wide open without hindrance?
I’ll keep looking to find it but I bet they had to tell the MMS and Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management what they expected the yield to be.
Water Data >>
The water samples collected June 3, 2010 along the Gulf coast did not reveal elevated levels of chemicals usually found in oil.
Surface water results collected on May 21, 2010 at 11 stations along the coast of Louisiana were measured for two of the chemicals associated with dispersants (2-Butoxyethanol and 2-Ethylhexyl Alcohol) but did not detect either one.
Sediment
Sediment Data >>
The sediment samples collected through June 1, 2010 along the Gulf coast did not reveal elevated levels of chemicals usually found in oil.
Air
Air Data >>
EPA’s air monitoring conducted through June 10, 2010, has found that air quality levels for ozone and particulates are normal on the Gulf coastline for this time of year.
EPA has observed odor-causing pollutants associated with petroleum products along the coastline at low levels. Some of these chemicals may cause short-lived effects like headache, eye, nose and throat irritation, or nausea. People may be able to smell some of these chemicals at levels well below those that would cause short-term health problems.
My Note –
Except that these short-lived effects – and the long-term effects that are known from these chemicals are being reported among people working out in the ocean around the spill, involved in the cleanup and in communities along the shore. EPA is not testing for the constituents that make people sick – they are testing for ozone – which isn’t the problem and some level of particulate matter which may not include the higher levels of sooty carbons from the burnoffs that are being done. They have decided what tests to do and they are using information from ten days ago when the spill was farther from the coast – to tell people what might affect them today. It is bullshit.
And, people are getting sick from this petroleum and the toxic chemical dispersants which have more than the two chemicals they used tests to determine – finding none in the samples. Both of the chemicals they were testing for are air-borne volatiles / aromatics – they disperse into the air before that sample can be tested and lodge in people’s lungs long before the EPA will ever get a test done.
-cricketdiane
I expect so much more from the EPA than this. They are supposed to be on our side and on the side of safety and good health, not the oil industry. It does not help anyone to lie to them when decisions must be made immediately to protect their health and well-being.
***
In areas of the western Gulf of Mexico without eddies, circulation is influenced mostly by wind and rivers. These currents are not nearly as strong as within or near the eddies, but they do affect life in the Gulf. In the southwest Gulf, circulation generally proceeds from the Yucatan Strait westward, then north along the western boundary of the basin. Meanwhile, most of the water exiting the Mississippi River, along with oceanic water already in the northwest Gulf, heads west along the Louisiana coast toward Texas. When this water collides with water arriving from Mexico, generally somewhere between Corpus Christi and Galveston, it shoots eastward along the outer continental shelf as the “Texas Current.”
Circulation in the eastern Gulf is also affected by the Loop Current. Countercurrents and semi-permanent eddies are spun up by the Loop Current, presenting some interesting possibilities for the movement of creatures up and down Florida’s western continental shelf. South of the Florida Keys, a counterclockwise eddy known as the Portales Gyre spins persistently on the north side of the Florida Current. This feature may allow larvae from the southern end of the Keys, or from the main stream itself, to become entrained and deposited on the shallow coral reefs farther north.
Map showing current patterns throughout the Florida Keys. Note how clockwise and counterclockwise gyres exist shoreward of the Florida Current. These tend to carry larvae and spores from place to place throughout the region. Knowing where parent stocks are located and understanding how currents transport their young allow resource managers to protect important areas before they become overharvested. Click image for larger view.
Similar phenomena exist all along the route of this great stream. Though the names may change along the way, the Yucatan Current, the Loop Current, the Florida Current, the Gulf Stream, and all of the countercurrents and eddies they spawn carry with them the larvae and spores of tropical species from Belize, Mexico and other Caribbean locales.
Ocean currents cast plant spores, animal larvae, and even adult creatures over huge expanses, sometimes between distant, isolated islands. Currents are the ocean’s version of the breezes that disperse the seeds of dandelions and maples, and the spores of mushrooms. They are the “liquid wind” that supplies and replenishes habitats of every kind in the ocean realm.
To learn more:
For some great images of the whereabouts of satellite-tracked drifting buoys in the region, go to the NOAA Drifter Buoy Web site.
This page provides links to hundreds of images and videos of the living ocean, according to the following categories. Click on any image to view the entire collection.
Vertebrates: Fish / Skates and Eels / Sharks / Marine Mammals
Seafloor: Geologic features / Habitat / Bacterial Mats / Hydrates
***
Overview
Oil spill response and cleanup workers may be exposed to many different chemical, physical, biological, and psychological hazards. These hazards vary depending on the type and location of the oil spill, type and stage of response, degree of coordination between entities involved in response and recovery, and the workers’ specific tasks. Therefore, occupational and environmental hazards need to be identified, assessed, and monitored in each oil spill response.
Potential Hazards
Chemical exposures may include chemical dispersants, weathered crude oil, benzene and other volatile organic compounds, oil mist, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and diesel fumes. Physical hazards may include ergonomic hazards, excessive noise levels, sun exposure and heat stress. Injuries may occur due to slips, trips, and falls on slippery or uneven walking and working surfaces. Other safety hazards are associated with the use of tools, equipment, machinery, and vehicles. Biological hazards include possible exposure to biting or venomous insects or other animals. Psychological hazards may include witnessing traumatic injuries or death, inability to help affected wildlife, and fatigue.
Reducing Occupational Exposures while Working with
Dispersants During the Gulf Oil Spill Response
Dispersants are being used in the Gulf of Mexico response to remove oil from the surface of water where it can be especially harmful to the environment. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has prepared this document to guide workers involved in these efforts on ways to protect themselves from potential exposures. This fact sheet will be updated as new information on the types of dispersants being used in the response is received.
*
Dispersants are usually applied directly to the spilled oil by spraying from an airplane, helicopter, or vessel. Although dispersants are manufactured by many companies and their ingredients may differ, most contain a detergent and a solvent. The solvent allows the detergent to be applied. The detergent helps to break up the oil on the water surface into very small drops. These tiny oil drops are then able to easily mix with the water and be diluted.
*
Based on the information provided to NIOSH, two dispersants are currently being used for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response. These dispersants are COREXIT® EC9527A and COREXIT 9500 made by the Nalco Company in Naperville, Illinois. Both products contain 10‐30% sulfonic acid salt (detergent) and 1‐5% propylene glycol, which are regarded as non‐hazardous substances. In addition, COREXIT EC9527A contains between 30‐60% of 2‐butoxyethanol (solvent) and COREXIT 9500 contains between 10‐30% of petroleum distillates (solvent).
*
2‐butoxyethanol, also called butyl cellosolve, is a widely used cleaning agent. The potential human health effects of 2‐butoxyethanol have been studied.
*
Dispersants containing 2butoxyethanol may irritate the skin. 2‐butoxyethanol vapors or mists can cause respiratory irritation such as coughing. Several occupational exposure limits (OELs) have been established for 2‐butoxyethanol. The legally enforceable OEL in the United States is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL). For airborne 2butoxyethanol
the OSHA PEL is 50 parts per million (ppm) for up to a full work shift.
*
The NIOSH Recommended Exposure Limit (REL) for 2‐butoxyethanol is 5 ppm, also for up to a full work shift. The NIOSH REL is intended to minimize potential long‐term health effects to workers, primarily hemolysis of red blood cells (RBCs). Hemolysis of RBCs has been found in animals exposed to 2‐butoxyethanol, but recent data suggests that human RBCs are less susceptible to these effects. Both the OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL contain guidance to minimize skin contact with 2‐butoxyethanol.
*
Petroleum distillates are a colorless liquid with a gasoline‐or kerosene‐like odor. They are composed of a mixture of paraffins (C5 to C13) that may contain a small amount of aromatic hydrocarbons. Because dispersants containing petroleum distillates are sprayed and generate mists, OELs for mineral oil mist are applicable. Exposure to oil mist can cause irritation to the eyes, skin, or respiratory tract.
*
The OSHA PEL and NIOSH REL for mineral oil mist are 5 mg/m3 up to a full workshift. NIOSH also specifies a short‐term exposure limit for oil mist of 10 mg/m3, which is the average amount of oil mist a worker may be exposed to over 15 minutes without experiencing health effects. NIOSH also recommends preventing skin contact with oil mist.
*
To prevent harmful respiratory and dermal health effects NIOSH recommends reducing worker exposures to 2‐butoxyethanol, petroleum distillates and similar cleaning agents in dispersants. Workers can be protected by taking the following steps:
•
Mix and load dispersants in well ventilated areas.
•
Use automated spraying systems to apply dispersants when available.
•
Remain upwind of the mists that are generated if spray systems are manned.
• Wear nitrile gloves during mixing, loading, or spraying of dispersants to prevent skin irritation.
• Wear protective eyewear when mixing, loading, or spraying dispersants.
•
Wash hands and any other body parts exposed to dispersants thoroughly with soap and water.
• If personal air monitoring indicates the above steps are not effective at reducing exposures below applicable OELs, then respiratory protection would be needed. Respirators should be used as part of a comprehensive respiratory protection program that includes proper selection, training, and maintenance.
Worker Rights
You have the right to a safe workplace. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) was passed to prevent workers from being killed or seriously harmed at work. The law requires that employers provide their employees with working conditions that are free of known dangers. OSHA sets and enforces protective workplace safety and health standards. OSHA also provides information, training and assistance to workers and employers. Workers may file a complaint to have OSHA inspect their workplace if they
believe that their employer is not following OSHA standards or there are serious hazards. Contact OSHA at 1-800-321-OSHA (6742) if you have questions or want to file a complaint. We will keep your information confidential. We are here to help you.
For a comprehensive list of compliance requirements of OSHA standards or regulations, refer to Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
(My Note – but these do not include respirators despite petroleum having the same dangers as sniffing gasoline or kerosene – including headaches, brain damage, liver damage, lung damage, respiratory irritation and air passageways inflammation, throat irritation, eye irritation and can cause blindness, kidney damage, nausea, hallucinations, irritability, skin damage, hives or dermatitis, skin irritation, nasal irritation, coughing, gagging, throwing up, disorientation, and disorders of the blood. And the reason that these respirators are not being required even where workers are at the level of high concentrations of petroleum fumes and dispersant fumes working right over the areas where the oil spill is sitting around their boats or where they are being required to get even closer by leaning over to place booms or clean oil out of the marshes with paper towels – with the workers’ faces within a few inches of the oily surface – is because it would look bad and that might cause “hysteria” in the public.)
Look up gasoline sniffing which was a way kids were getting high – there is a wealth of information about what that causes in health damage. There is no difference with sniffing petroleum that gasoline is made from – except that it is more dangerous to health in small quantities even faster and more exponentially because it contains all of what is in gasoline, all of what is in kerosene, all of what is in jet fuel, all of what is in diesel fuel and motor oils, all of what is in a multitude of “petroleum distillates” all in the same place in high concentrations at once.
That there are no respirators being given to protect people’s eyes and bodies from being exposed to breathing in these fumes is intolerable and those effects will last forever. The short term exposure will be offered some kind of drugs to deal with symptoms, then the long term damage will be there in the “soft systems” of the body of workers including in the blood, in the soft tissue, in the cells of the body, in the liver, in the lining of the stomach and esophagus and lungs, in the kidneys and in the brain. Don’t believe me if you don’t want – look it up – what is known results of intentional sniffing of gasoline, diesel and kerosene and products that contain petroleum distillates, benzene and whatnot. There’s no way this is any less so – it is more.
When sniffing gas, the gas kills off the brain cells and the gas sniffer will eventually have dead spots in the brain, called brain holes by physicians. … www.deltadiscovery.com/Healthwise/healthwise.html
March 4, 2001
An Epidemic of Gas Sniffing Decimates Arctic Indian Tribe
By MARY ROGAN Photographs by ARLENE GOTTFRIED
Late last fall, in a remote village in the north of Labrador, native leaders took the extraordinary step of asking the government to take their children away. “The safety of these children is the paramount issue,” explained Paul Rich, Innu tribal chief, in a statement to the provincial government requesting the removal of nearly two dozen of the village’s children. “The ongoing situation is drastic, and we need to take drastic measures,” the plea continued. “We insist that these children be taken into care immediately.”
The children, residents of the village of Sheshatshiu, where 1,200 of the 2,000 members of Labrador’s Innu Nation live, are addicted to sniffing gasoline. On most days before Rich’s plea, they would stagger along the desolate gravel roads, beginning at dusk, sniffing gas from garbage bags and making their way to a camp deep in the woods outside of town. There, in groups as large as 40 or 50, they’d sniff gas until dawn. As the light broke through the trees, they’d shuffle through subzero temperatures toward home or the detox center in town, where they’d sleep off the effects of the gas. Some would vomit or pass out, and according to local health workers, several had become brain-damaged from the gas. In the past year, one 11-year-old boy died after setting himself on fire, and half a dozen others were severely burned after accidentally going up in flames.
<!—->
The Innu trace their problems with poverty and substance abuse to government relocations that forced them to give up their nomadic way of life. They also attribute their current state to the chronic physical and sexual abuse their children suffered when they were forced to attend Christian residential schools from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Today, more than half the 300 children in Sheshatshiu between the ages of 5 and 14 have sniffed gasoline, and at least 20 percent are regular users. It is a community where half of the adults are addicted to alcohol, 42 percent have thought actively about killing themselves and 28 percent have attempted suicide.
In Davis Inlet, the other Innu community in Labrador, more than 200 miles north of Sheshatshiu, the statistics are even grimmer. Ninety of the 154 Innu children there are chronic gas sniffers, and children as young as 6 have sniffed gas at least once. The London-based human rights group Survival International calls the Innu, whose suicide rate is 13 times as high as that of the rest of Canada, “the most suicide-ridden people in the world.”
The provincial government of Newfoundland, which governs Labrador, responded swiftly to Rich’s request. Three days after the plea, on Nov. 20, government social workers were flown in to Sheshatshiu to assess the gas-addicted kids. With help from Innu community workers, social workers went door to door talking to parents about the plan to take their children from them and assuring them they would be taken to a place where they would be cared for. “Most of the parents understood what was happening and agreed with our decision,” explained Paul Rich. “There were a few who didn’t. But there was nothing else we could do. If the parents can’t take care of these kids, we can’t leave them in the cold to sniff and die.” On Nov. 21, anxious parents huddled in the dark outside the town’s alcohol-treatment center, waiting for a bus that would take 21 of the most seriously addicted children to a military base in Goose Bay, 25 miles down the road. Inside, the children were distracted with treats of soda and chips and the promise of pizza once they got to Goose Bay. Peter Penashue, the president of the Innu Nation, was there, talking with parents and telling them that everything was going to be O.K. “I looked at the kids and thought, We’ve come a long way in 50 years to fall this far,” he would tell me later. “The sadness overwhelmed me.”
When the bus arrived around 7 p.m., the children were taken out one at a time so that they wouldn’t run off. As it pulled away, they smiled and waved out the windows like Fresh Air Fund kids leaving the city for a summer in the Catskills.
In Goose Bay, they were held in a barracks where half a dozen social workers cared for them. But beyond helping the children detoxify, the government has made it clear it has no long-term solution for them if they return to their ravaged community. Marilyn McCormack, the provincial director for Child, Youth and Family Services, says that in her 23 years as a social worker, the plight of the children of Sheshatshiu is among the worst she has ever seen.
At first, the children were agitated and nauseated coming off the gas, and social workers could do little beyond providing the basics for them: food, clothing, lots of juice to satisfy the intense thirst that was a symptom of their detoxing. When they began to talk, what they said was hair-raising. They described beatings and sexual abuse at the hands of their relatives. They talked about wondering each day whether they would get dinner at night, about seeing their parents get drunk and beat each other, about witnessing suicides and friends setting themselves on fire. They spoke in monotones, and it’s this deadness that McCormack found especially horrifying. “My children couldn’t survive what these children have survived,” she said. “I don’t know if I could survive. And yet they have so little expectation that anything will change.”
Of the 21 children taken from Sheshatshiu in late November, 19 are still in the care of the government, and they are expected to be moved into foster homes or alternate living arrangements. Two of them have returned to Sheshatshiu.
n Davis Inlet, the transfer of gas-addicted children to the authorities has been considerably more difficult. Unlike Paul Rich in Sheshatshiu, Simeon Tshakapesh, the chief in Davis Inlet, has insisted on negotiating with the government before handing over the children. Tshakapesh has been accused by individuals in the government and in the Innu community of holding the children hostage to larger Innu demands — requesting more money for Innu social services and demanding that treatment programs be run by Innu counselors who will emphasize native culture. One government official who insisted on anonymity said that the Innu in Davis Inlet also requested a guarantee that if doctors discovered the children had been sexually abused, no charges would be brought against the parents.
The degradation of the lives in Davis Inlet is impossible to exaggerate. There are about 100 houses there that are little more than shacks, their doors torn from the hinges and windows smashed. Several snowmobiles, from which children often steal gas, appear to have been set on fire, and outside of every house are mountains of garbage that have been tossed out of windows. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police office, at the foot of the village, is home to three officers, who, because of the stress of being here, work two-week rotations and then fly out for two weeks.
The R.C.M.P. officers told me I wouldn’t have to go far to find children sniffing gas. They’re easy to spot, one of them said, because they don’t put their arms in the sleeves of their coats. They hug the bags close to their chests and draw the fumes up through the collars of their jackets. The officers also said that sniffing gas is not illegal in Davis Inlet, so they are not allowed to take the bags away from the children. “All we can do is put them out when they set themselves on fire,” one officer added.
Outside, about 200 yards from the police office, the road was full of armless zombies. Their sleeves swung loosely at their sides, and their chins were tucked tight to their chests. No one looked to be more than 10 years old. I expected they would run away from a stranger, but they approached me eagerly. When I asked the smallest boy if he was sniffing gas, he laughed and said, “Yeah.” The air was saturated with the smell of gasoline, and the children shuffled along in large groups and in lonely pairs. When they spotted the photographer who was traveling with me, they laughed and pushed one another aside to get into the frame, shrieking: “Take my picture, I sniff gas. Take my picture, I sniff gas.”
In mid-December, the federal government reached an agreement with the Innu of Davis Inlet. In return for the construction of a detox center in Labrador and a continued commitment to restoring Innu culture, social workers could fly in before the end of the month to assess the situation, and the government could take the gas-addicted children to a facility in St. John’s, Newfoundland, at the beginning of the new year.
On Jan. 9, 16 of the community’s most seriously gas-addicted children, ranging in age from 10 to 18, were flown to St. John’s.
To date, 40 children have been removed from the town and put into treatment. Of the addicted children still in Davis Inlet, it’s unclear what, if anything, will be done for them. At the time I write this, the temperature has dipped to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and there are five feet of snow on the ground. The police officers are taking turns patrolling all day and night, trying to keep the gas-sniffing children from freezing to death.
Inhalant abuse, commonly called huffing, is the purposeful inhalation of chemical ….Brain damage may result in personality changes, diminished cognitive …
Damage of the brain plus other internal organs may be caused due to huffing including the heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs. Brain damage can result in the … http://www.drugalcohol-rehab.com/huffing.htm
– Jun 2Brain damage is typically seen with chronic long term use as opposed to short term exposure. Hypoxia can occur when inhalant users are huffing from a …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inhalant_abuse
Inhalant abuse: Is your child at risk?
Would you know if your teen were huffing? Consider the tell-tale signs of inhalant abuse — and what you can do to prevent it.
What’s so dangerous about a can of spray paint or deodorant? Plenty. Huffing these and other common household products can provide a quick high. As harmless as it may seem to kids, the risks of huffing and other types of inhalant abuse are real — and potentially lethal.
What are inhalants?
Many ordinary household products can serve as inhalants, including:
Hair spray
Room deodorizer
Nonstick cooking spray
Cleaning fluids
Spray paint
Paint thinner
Butane
Propane
Gasoline
What does it mean to huff an inhalant?
Huffing is sometimes used as a generic term for any type of inhalant abuse. Specifically, however, there are various ways to abuse inhalants:
Huffing. To huff an inhalant, you soak a rag in an inhalant and press the rag to your mouth.
Sniffing. To sniff an inhalant, you sniff or snort fumes from an aerosol container. You may even spray an aerosol product directly into your nose or mouth.
Bagging. To bag an inhalant, you inhale fumes from a product sprayed or poured into a plastic or paper bag.
At first, huffing, sniffing or bagging causes a sense of euphoria. Abusing the inhalant repeatedly over several hours can prolong or intensify the high. For many kids, inhalants provide a cheap and accessible alternative to alcohol — and it may happen more often than you think. In the United States alone, nearly 10 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have used inhalants at some point, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
What are the risks of inhalant abuse?
The initial euphoria of huffing, sniffing or bagging may be followed by dizziness, slurred speech, and loss of coordination, inhibition and control. Some kids become agitated or irritable. Hallucinations and delusions are possible.
If an inhalant causes the heart to begin working too hard, a rapid, irregular heartbeat (dysrhythmia) may trigger lethal heart failure — even for first-time inhalers. Chronic inhalant abuse can cause weakness, fatigue, and serious liver and kidney damage. Permanent brain damage and hearing loss are possible as well.
Other devastating effects of inhalant abuse may include:
Suffocation, when inhalants displace oxygen in the lungs
Seizures
Loss of consciousness
Death
What are the warning signs of inhalant abuse?
Inhalant abuse can be easy to conceal. Look for these warning signs:
Hidden rags, clothes or empty containers of products that may be abused
Chemical odors on breath or clothing
Paint or other stains on face, hands or clothing
Slurred or incoherent speech
Lack of coordination
Inattentiveness
Irritability
If your child has been abusing inhalants for some time, withdrawal symptoms — sleep disturbances, irritability, nausea, vomiting, sweating, rapid heartbeat, hallucinations or delusions — are possible.
Nov 24, 2005 … Petrol sniffing is a major source of illness, death and social dysfunction … These effects can last up to an hour, and longer if they keep sniffing. … has been replaced by fuel that you can’t sniff like Aviation gas…
Apr 27, 2005 … Initial effects of gas sniffing include hallucinations, euphoria, lethargy, loss of appetite, slurred speech and blurred vision, …
archives.cbc.ca/society/poverty/clips/11509/
The products to be aware of include: butane gas cigarette lighter refills, …Sniffing solvents may cause intoxication similar to the effects of alcohol. … http://www.thesite.org/…/drugsafety/…/solventabuse – United Kingdom
Organic solvents, such as gasoline, benzene, and related chemical substances, are toxic when inhaled for lengthy periods in unventilated areas, such as some industrial settings. Brief inhalation of these and similar substances can also produce many of the effects of alcohol intoxication and, sometimes, a hallucinogen-like “trip.” The best known example is glue-sniffing, which involves inhaling the organic solvents found in “hobby glue,” mainly toluene.
I just thought this part is interesting to note although it is not exactly what I was trying to find –
Dr. Nagle cites several references to nitrous-oxide intoxication in American medical publications of the early 1800s. There are also nineteenth-century American references to the use of nitrous oxide by students, indicating that N20 sniffing–– for its “exhilarating” effects 3 –– was endemic among American students. One young American medical student, Gardner Quincy Colton, decided–– like Sir Humphrey Davy–– that nitrous oxide might be profitably marketed in competition with alcohol as a recreational drug; when his first public demonstration of the gas netted him $535, he quit medical school and went into the nitrous-oxide business. An advertisement for his nitrous-oxide demonstration in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1844 read as follows:
A Grand Exhibition of the effects produced by inhaling Nitrous Oxide, Exhilarating or Laughing Gas! will be given at Union Hall this (Tuesday) Evening, Dec. 10th, 1844.
Forty gallons of Gas will be prepared and administered to all in the audience who desire to inhale it.
Twelve Young Men have volunteered to inhale the Gas, to commence the entertainment.
Eight Strong Men are engaged to occupy the front seats to protect those under the influence of the Gas from injuring themselves or others. This course is adopted that no apprehension of danger may be entertained. Probably no one will attempt to fight.
The effect of the Gas is to make those who inhale it either Laugh, Sing, Dance, Speak or Fight, and so forth, according to the leading trait of their character. They seem to retain consciousness enough not to say or do that which they would have occasion to regret.
N.B.–– The Gas will be administered only to gentlemen of the first respectability. The object is to make the entertainment in every respect a genteel affair. * 4
* The twenty-five-cent admission charge included a dose of N2O.
Among those who attended Colton’s Hartford demonstration was a young dentist, Horace Wells, who was particularly impressed when one of the nitrous-oxide sniffers tripped and fell to the ground, gashing his leg in the process. To the victim’s own astonishment, the wound was unaccompanied by pain. Wells questioned the young man closely about this–– and was so impressed by the absence of pain that the next day he had Colton pull one of his teeth under nitrous-oxide anesthesia. Feeling no pain, Wells exclaimed, “A new era in tooth-pulling!” Thereafter he used nitrous oxide on several patients in his Hartford dental practice–– and a few weeks later, on January 10, 1845, he demonstrated the use of nitrous oxide during surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Unfortunately, the patient came out of the anesthesia too soon and screamed in pain; Wells was laughed out of the hospital. 5 Despite this unfortunate inaugural, the use of N2O as an anesthetic spread, and the gas is in common use today for the reduction of pain during tooth extractions and other dental procedures, during childbirth, and (in association with other more potent and longer-acting anesthetics) during surgery. 6
***
Other organic solvents. These include a broad range of chemicals, many of them secured through the distillation of petroleum. When their vapors are inhaled, these can produce intoxication resembling alcoholic drunkenness–– and in some cases effects resembling those of a short hallucinogenic trip. Many, such as gasoline, are highly flammable and even explosive.
A wide variety of common household products contain these organic solvents, whose rapid evaporation speeds drying–– for example, paint thinners, lacquers, enamels, varnishes, varnish removers, glues and cements, cigarette lighter fluids, charcoal lighter fluids, fingernail polishes and polish removers, spot removers, and other dry-cleaning products.
The effects of inhaling gasoline fumes, Dr. Ewart A. Swinyard of the University of Utah College of Medicine points out in Goodman and Gilman’s textbook (1970), can be similar to those of drinking an alcoholic beverage. “The signs and symptoms include incoordination, restlessness, excitement, confusion, disorientation, ataxia, delirium, and, finally, coma that may last for a few hours to several days.” Most gasoline sniffers stop long before the severer symptoms set in, of course, just as most alcohol drinkers stop before they pass out cold. Repeated inhalation of gasoline fumes, Dr. Swinyard adds, “induces dizziness, giddiness, a ‘butterfly feeling,’ and hallucinations. If the desired end point is exceeded, unconsciousness results.” Dr. Swinyard adds that “prodromal symptoms such as headache, blurred vision, vertigo, ataxia, tinnitus, nausea, anorexia, and weakness are not uncommon” with low concentrations of gasoline fumes; and that chronic exposure to gasoline fumes may produce “muscular weakness, listlessness, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and weight loss” along with “neurological effects such as confusion, ataxia, tremor, paresthesias [itching], neuritis, and paralysis of peripheral and cranial nerves.” 28
**
If Dr. Swinyard is correct–– and there is no reason to doubt his long lists of signs and symptoms–– why does anyone sniff gasoline vapors? The answer becomes clear when we move from the confines of the pharmacological textbooks to the world of real children and young people. There it appears that gasoline sniffing, like numerous other common activities, makes you feel good (or better). One of the best descriptions of gasoline sniffing as it actually occurs was published in 1955 by the late A.E. (“Tajar”) Hamilton of the Hamilton School in Sheffield, Mass., in his classic account of children at work and play, Psychology and the Great God Fun. One day when the other children had gone on an expedition, Tajar Hamilton reports, he found a boy nicknamed Bullet with a can of gasoline and a gasoline-soaked rag. After a few preliminary questions, Tajar (with Bullet’s consent) turned on a recorder and preserved the dialogue for posterity.
Talar: Bullet, you said you would come up to the attic and tell me about the gasoline and the bicycles. Will you talk your story into the mike, just as you remember it?
Bullet: Well, I was awful mad when they said I couldn’t go on the trip. Sure I picked up the axe when Martha told me not to, but I put it back again. Then she said I couldn’t go, and Donnie was going, and when they all went I didn’t have anything to do to have fun and I began to get madder and madder all the time. It made me feel kind of sick to be so mad, so I went where they keep the gasoline can and I started to smell it.
Taiar: What made you want to smell gas, Bullet?
Bullet: Well, when you feel bad, you smell it and it makes you feel kind of hot and kind of drowsy, like you was floating through the air. It makes you feel sort of hot inside and different from the way you were before.
Taiar: And after you smelled the gas and felt better, what did you do?
Bullet: Then I began to feel mad again and had to do something, so I found a nail. It was an old rusty one, and I got a piece of board to push it with so it wouldn’t hurt my hand, and I made holes in all the tires except Donnie’s.
Taiar: Why not in Donnie’s?
Bullet: Because they’re solid and you can’t….
Taiar: And after you had punched all those holes what did you do?
Bullet: Mary hollered to come to dinner, so I went and we had hot dogs at the Council ring and then we had some games and then I didn’t feel so good, so I went and smelled the gas again.
Taiar: How long have you liked to smell gas, Bullet?
Bullet: Well, here at camp, ever since about two weeks after I came to the farm. I showed Donnie how to smell it. It makes you feel like you was in fairyland or somewhere else than where you are….
Tajar: Bullet, how come so much gas was spilled on the cellar floor?
Bullet: Oh, I just wanted to get more on my rag. If you have a lot it makes you sort of dream. It gets all dark and you see shooting stars in it, and this time I saw big flies flying in it. They were big and green and had white wings.
Taiar: And you feel better about yourself and about people after you have one of those dreams?
Bullet: Yep, until I begin to feel bad again, or get mad.
Tajar: Okay, Bullet, that’s all for now. Thank you for being truthful with me. 29
The solvents found in the other common household products listed above have effects on the whole quite similar to those Bullet described for gasoline. Whether these substances are addicting, or, indeed, what permanent effects if any result from recreational use, remains undetermined. In two bulletins of the National Clearinghouse for Poison Control Centers (a unit of the United States Public Health Service), one dated February-March 1962 and the other July-August 1964, Mr. Henry L. Verhulst and Dr. John J. Crotty reviewed both the older toxicological literature on organic solvents and recent laboratory studies on glue-sniffing in particular. The older literature was based on exposure among industrial workers who breathed solvent fumes eight hours a day, five days a week for months or years. The workers suffered adverse effects like those listed by Dr. Swinyard, as well as serious damage to the brain, liver, and kidneys.
Intoxication can be rapid, within one to five minutes. Depending on the method, the effects may last for minutes or several hours. Young people also sniff other substances such as glue, photocopier fluid, aerosols, paint thinner, cleaning and lighter fluids.
feeling not connected to surroundings (disassociation)
Followed by:
giddiness, feeling friendly
hallucinations, strange behaviours
muscle weakness, loss of motor co-ordination, slowed reflexes
slurred speech
impaired judgement
nausea, coughing, sneezing, increase in saliva
After sniffing, ‘hangovers’ and headache may last several days. There is some evidence that short-term petrol misuse does not cause permanent damage to the body.
Long-term effects of petrol sniffing
The following diagram outlines the long-term effects of petrol sniffing.
Arange of serious problems can result from sniffing petrol, including pneumonia, asphyxiation, burns, coma, seizures, malnutrition, permanent brain damage, injuries and sudden death. Other problems associated with sniffing petrol include dog bites and getting lost (Gell 1995:17-20).
‘Sudden sniffing deaths’ have mostly been associated with sniffing aerosol sprays, cleaning and correction fluids and glues. It is believed these substances cause the heart to react abnormally, causing irregular heart beats (National Information Service on Drug Abuse 1985:52-53).
Sniffing in pregnancy
It has been found that young women who have sniffed petrol often stop when they become pregnant. Even if a woman has stopped, she may have a smaller baby and may need additional health care during and after the pregnancy. There is some evidence of birth defects and disabilities in babies born to women who sniffed petrol (Lipson 1984:40).
Withdrawal
Regular use of inhalants leads to tolerance. Withdrawal symptoms may include chills, headaches, abdominal pains, muscular cramps and hallucinations (National Information Service on Drug Abuse 1985:14).
So, apparently people’s lives are not worth a $30 gas mask and some gloves and eye goggles to protect them from harm as afar as OSHA, the EPA, BP and the state governments are concerned. And, the health damages from petroleum and gasoline do not count when an oil company covers the Gulf of Mexico with it or an employer subjects their employees to it but in any other circumstance, it is dangerous with short-term and long term health consequences including permanent health damages.
Those respirators, (which they could probably get for $6 each wholesale in the trainload lot needed) could’ve been bought from the first and given to everyone but now we are given nothing but misinformation, run-arounds and questionable interpretations that are misleading such as the published info from the EPA saying that air, water, sediments are all safe with no sign of the crude oil that is known to be in it and offers information collected thirteen days ago as evidence of the safety when things are more dire today. That’s like saying the methane levels yesterday in a mine that were safe at the time mean that today’s methane explosion in the mine didn’t happen because the levels couldn’t have been high enough – but obviously they were.
And to hear Dr. Sanjay Gupta say on CNN, that it is just so hard to link cause and effect to know if these chemicals of one kind or another are causing illness – is bullshit. Every container of gasoline, petroleum derivatives, kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel, motor oil, benzene, ethylbenzene and everything else that comes from petroleum lists known hazards, explains the safety precautions to take, and a long list of health hazards and health damages have already been discovered without any doubt whatsoever.
How did they fail to connect the two when there are known cause and effects from petroleum that have been studied comprehensively for over a hundred years? How is that possible? This isn’t a rhetorical argument. When someone is sniffing gasoline or petroleum products recreationally – there is no problem finding the health risks directly associated with it including the long-term damages that happen to the brain, blood chemistry, heart, lungs, bone marrow, joints, hormones, lymph system, kidneys, liver, cell damage and respiratory system damage.
So, why is it when the OSHA and EPA want the oil industry to appear to have filled the ocean with something of no consequence or harm – suddenly there is “no way to find cause and effect” – I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe that history or the government is going to be held without responsibility for failing to protect people from it with a simple respirator and accurate information made available to people in a timely manner.
– cricketdiane
***
You don’t stand in front of a volcano waiting for a lahar or gases exploding from the volcano sure to overtake you and your home and your community and your family. It doesn’t matter how long your family has been living there – when a danger of magnitude is there – you leave to safety. No home, no house, no location, no history in that place is worth the loss of lives, the loss of health and well-being, the loss of everything truly valuable that matters.
And, as I’ve listened to Republicans and others who have been blasting this thought everywhere – that when there is an airplane accident, we don’t stop all the airplanes – I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking – how could they be so stupid?
When there is an air accident and it turns out that the same thing which brought that plane down is also known to be likely wrong with all of the planes, we don’t put them back into the air until we make them safe. And, none of the people saying otherwise would get on any of those planes known to have the same problem wrong with it.
So, to say that shit is nonsense. Eleven men died. The biggest oil disaster in the history of this country and quite possibly in the history of mankind across the entire earth that will last long into the next forty years or more is taking place right now. And, that happened because it wasn’t safe and the others out there drilling – however many thousands there are in every coastal waters – deepwater offshore and shallow, on land, on permafrost, on whatever sea is waiting to be the next one – and any one of them could have the same thing happen without any recourse, just as this one has happened. That is not okay.
– cricketdiane
***
What is petrol?
Petrol comes from crude oil and is a mixture of organic hydrocarbons like toluene and benzene. These hydrocarbons are quickly absorbed by the body and the brain and make sniffers feel high. Many of the other volatile substances that people sniff, like glue and paint, contain one or more of these hydrocarbons. Different hydrocarbons may have slightly different effects but petrol is a complex mix of many different hydrocarbons and the combination varies considerably between different sources of petrol. This makes it difficult to understand exactly how the different chemicals in petrol contribute to its health effects.
Short-term effects
People inhale through the mouth or nose using either a cloth soaked in petrol or a small container filled with petrol. Petrol goes from the lungs to the bloodstream and then into the brain. There it slows down brain activity and depresses the central nervous system in a similar way to alcohol. Within seconds the person can feel euphoric, relaxed, dizzy, numb and light. They may also experience:
hallucinations
aggression
increased libido
hunger
lack of coordination, staggering
disorientation
slurred speech
coughing, wheezing
vomiting
slow reflexes
They may look like someone who is drunk on alcohol but act a bit more strangely. Sometimes you can smell the strong odour of petrol on them. These effects can last up to an hour, and longer if they keep sniffing. In serious cases people may have fits.
It is possible to die from sniffing the first time because the petrol is taking the place of oxygen in the blood and not enough oxygen is being taken to the brain. People have died this way from sniffing with a jumper or blanket around their head because it stops oxygen getting to the lungs.
People have died from doing exercise like running or playing football straight after sniffing. The combined stress of sniffing and exercise put too much pressure on the heart.
Many people who sniff have suffered serious burns or death because the petrol caught fire. Sniffing around any flames or fire is very dangerous.
Long-term effects
The list of health problems caused by sniffing is enormous. The poisonous chemicals in petrol gradually damage the brain, the heart, the lungs, the immune system, the liver and kidneys. The longer a person sniffs, the worse they damage these organs.
Over the first few years of sniffing petrol, people will begin to show signs of brain damage that will affect their ability to think clearly, concentrate, remember things, learn new things and solve problems. If the sniffing continues, the part of the brain that controls movement and balance gets damaged and the person can’t walk and talk properly. Many sniffers end up in a wheelchair with permanent brain damage. Some of the brain damage caused by sniffing can repair itself if the person stops sniffing, but the longer they sniff, the less chance there is that the brain will get better.
Sniffing while pregnant can cause birth defects such as physical and intellectual disabilities and may also stop the brain from developing properly.
Still there is no healthy way to sniff. Sniffing causes serious health problems and can kill you.
The neurobehavioural consequences of petrol (gasoline) sniffing
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Sheree Cairney, , a, b, Paul Maruffa, b, Chris Burnsc and Bart Curried
a Neurophysiology and Neurovisual Research Unit, Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Parkville, Vic. 3052, Australia
b School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic. 3083, Australia
c National Heart Foundation, Parliament House, Darwin, NT 0801, Australia
d Menzies School of Health Research, P.O. Box 41096, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia
Received 22 May 2001;
revised 12 October 2001;
accepted 16 October 2001
Available online 7 November 2001.
Abstract
This review will introduce petrol (gasoline) sniffing as a specific form of substance abuse. Petrol sniffing is associated with dysfunctions that range in severity from subtle cognitive impairment to encephalopathy and death, and these are discussed with respect to their specific neurological and cognitive bases. Morbidity and mortality rates will also be presented that suggest severe central nervous system damage occurs as a result of petrol sniffing. The neuropharmacological actions of tetraethyl lead and volatile hydrocarbons, the components within petrol, and their contributions to the effects of sniffing petrol are investigated. Reports of human occupational or recreational exposure to either lead additives or volatile hydrocarbons (i.e. inhalants) have provided evidence of the neurological and cognitive effects that may also occur with petrol sniffing. Petrol sniffing causes a progressive decline of cognitive function that eventually leads to permanent neurological changes.
Author Keywords: Petrol; Gasoline; Sniffing; Petrol sniffers; Tetraethyl lead; Volatile hydrocarbons; Inhalants; Cognitive; Neurological; Encephalopathy; Ataxia; Cerebellum; White matter
Corresponding author. Address: Neurophysiology and Neurovisual Research Unit, Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Parkville, Vic. 3052, Australia. Tel.: +61-3-9388-1633; fax: +61-3-9387-5061; email: sheree@neuro.mhri.edu.au
Offered from the Deepwater Horizon Incident site for the Gulf of Mexico – note the date that is for today’s interpretation of the risks, air quality and water quality – other than the fact today is June 13, 2010 and the problem has expanded exponentially – the things offered were incorrect in the first place.
– cricketdiane
Gulf of Mexico oil spill - boom covered in syrup thick crude oil - from AP photo - May 7, 2010 or before
May 26, 2010 Overflight Map of the Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico from Reponse Group
My Note –
Above map shows where the oil was when those advisories above were created and when the samples were taken by EPA which are being used to say the water and air is clean when those samples were tested on June 1, 2010.
That’s not the way it is now.
And, you can’t get off a boat surrounded by petroleum crude oil fumes at a level immediately above the surface of the ocean covered in petroleum where you’ve been for several hours to go get some fresh air right quick. When those fumes are brought onshore by winds, there is no where to go to get fresh air.
– cricketdiane
***
US_Gulf_of_Mexico_offshore_gas - 2009 Energy Information Administration
***
4,000 places where accidents and disasters have been occurring – incidents from small to large have occurred and where any one of them – even one can make a disaster of the magnitude as the Deepwater Horizon has done which overtakes every other industry and economic opportunity, every other habitable opportunity for people and marine animals and can destroy the entire place for years and years and years to come.
This is no small insignificant thing. Safety and profits must go hand in hand with equal importance, or profits second and safety first. There isn’t another choice that can work, that’s where the real mistake was made on the BP drill operation Deepwater Horizon that yielded this disaster.
– cd9
***
Benzene – (from wikipedia)
Benzene is a natural constituent of crude oil, and may be synthesized from other compounds present in petroleum
Health effects
A bottle of benzene. The warnings show benzene is a toxic and flammable liquid.
Benzene exposure has serious health effects. Outdoor air may contain low levels of benzene from tobacco smoke, wood smoke, automobile service stations, the transfer of gasoline, exhaust from motor vehicles, and industrial emissions.[21] Vapors from products that contain benzene, such as glues, paints, furniture wax, and detergents, can also be a source of exposure, although many of these have been modified or reformulated since the late 1970s to eliminate or reduce the benzene content. Air around hazardous waste sites or gas stations may contain higher levels of benzene.
The short term breathing of high levels of benzene can result in death, while low levels can cause drowsiness, dizziness, rapid heart rate, headaches, tremors, confusion, and unconsciousness. Eating or drinking foods containing high levels of benzene can cause vomiting, irritation of the stomach, dizziness, sleepiness, convulsions, and death.
The major effects of benzene are manifested via chronic (long-term) exposure through the blood. Benzene damages the bone marrow and can cause a decrease in red blood cells, leading to anemia. It can also cause excessive bleeding and depress the immune system, increasing the chance of infection. Benzene causes leukemia and is associated with other blood cancers and pre-cancers of the blood.
Human exposure to benzene is a global health problem. Benzene targets liver, kidney, lung, heart and the brain and can cause DNA strand breaks, chromosomal damage etc. Benzene causes cancer in both animals and humans. Benzene was first reported to induce cancer in humans in the 1920s. The chemical industry claims it wasn’t until 1979 that the cancer-inducing properties were determined “conclusively” in humans, despite many references to this fact in the medical literature. Industry exploited this “discrepancy” and tried to discredit animal studies which showed benzene caused cancer, saying that they weren’t relevant to humans. Benzene has been shown to cause cancer in both sexes of multiple species of laboratory animals exposed via various routes.[22][23]
Some women who breathed high levels of benzene for many months had irregular menstrual periods and a decrease in the size of their ovaries. It is not known whether benzene exposure affects the developing fetus in pregnant women or fertility in men.
Animal studies have shown low birth weights, delayed bone formation, and bone marrow damage when pregnant animals breathed benzene.
Benzene has been connected to a rare form of kidney cancer in two separate studies, one involving tank truck drivers, and the other involving seamen on tanker vessels, both carrying benzene-laden chemicals.
Several tests can determine exposure to benzene. There is a test for measuring benzene in the breath; this test must be done shortly after exposure. Benzene can also be measured in the blood; however, because benzene disappears rapidly from the blood, measurements are accurate only for extremely recent exposures. Benzene exposure should always be minimized.
In the body, benzene is metabolized. Certain metabolites, such as trans,trans-muconic acid can be measured in the urine. However, this test must be done shortly after exposure and is not a reliable indicator of benzene exposure, since the same metabolites may be present in urine from other sources.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has set the maximum permissible level of benzene in drinking water at 0.005 milligrams per liter (0.005 mg/L). The EPA requires that spills or accidental releases into the environment of 10 pounds (4.5 kg) or more of benzene be reported to the EPA.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set a permissible exposure limit of 1 part of benzene per million parts of air (1 ppm) in the workplace during an 8-hour workday, 40-hour workweek. The short term exposure limit for airborne benzene is 5 ppm for 15 minutes.
In recent history there have been many examples of the harmful health effects of benzene and its derivatives. Toxic Oil Syndrome caused localised immune-suppression in Madrid in 1981 from people ingesting anilide-contaminated rapeseed oil. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has also been correlated with people who eat “denatured” food that use solvents to remove fat or contain benzoic acid but causality is unproven.[citation needed]
Workers in various industries that make or use benzene may be at risk for being exposed to high levels of this carcinogenic chemical. Industries that involve the use of benzene include the rubber industry, oil refineries, chemical plants, shoe manufacturers, and gasoline-related industries. In 1987, OSHA estimated that about 237,000 workers in the United States were potentially exposed to benzene, but it is not known if this number has substantially changed since then.
Water and soil contamination are important pathways of concern for transmission of benzene contact. In the U.S. alone there are approximately 100,000 different sites which have benzene soil or groundwater contamination. In 2005, the water supply to the city of Harbin in China with a population of almost nine million people, was cut off because of a major benzene exposure. Benzene leaked into the Songhua River, which supplies drinking water to the city, after an explosion at a China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) factory in the city of Jilin on 13 November.
And – as a bit ago on CNN, I heard that BP is setting up tent cities for workers – Who is that stupid?
You don’t make tent cities for people where it is over 90 degrees, high humidity, covered over with gnats, ants, flies, mosquitoes and every other crawling thing – with hurricanes on the way. Who could be that stupid?
And to be filled with the fumes from the coast of crude oil and dispersants and increased diesel exhausts that the areas have – without any chance to get into a hotel room with air conditioning and air filters or anything?
And common afternoon and evening thundershowers – they’re setting folks up to “camp out”? What kind of thinking is that conceptually stupid?
– cricketdiane, 05-29-10
***
They must have said twenty times between Rear Admiral Landry and BP executive Doug Suttles, that the very best minds are working on this – the “brain trust” etc. –
I don’t care who they hell they’ve got making these decisions – stupid is still stupid no matter how many people think that’s the way to do it.
And EPA tests showing there isn’t oil where we are looking at it in photos – is stupid.
And EPA air monitoring that say there aren’t chemical dangers and health hazards in the air – where everybody anywhere in the area can smell it – is stupid.
And, BP building a “tent city” in Louisiana in the summertime for workers near the coast filled with fumes and heat and humidity and mosquitoes – is stupid.
I don’t care who you are – this shit is stupid.
– cd9
***
The Louisiana National Guard is acting and doing what is smart and intelligently applied. The state of Louisiana local, state leaderships and other locally based assets are fighting to add practical and common sense measures which should’ve been added by BP, Coast Guard, EPA and other agencies of the government responsible for the knowledge – in the first place.
The international meteorological scientists, oceanographers, marine biologists and marine ecologists along with multitudes of our own scientists are getting it right or more closely aligned to the truth than every single agencies’ representatives working under the direction and intellectual bias of BP and their specialists and incident command members.
And stupid is still stupid – and if things that don’t work are continuing to be done the same way – that is stupid –
including setting booms that don’t do anything in seas with choppy wave forms, winds, waves over a foot high, waves going in different directions, in even the slightest 10 knot wind – and its already obvious since very early in the process – that they don’t work. That is stupid.
including putting people in tent city in Louisiana in the summertime – that is stupid.
including insisting that fisherman and local boat owners who went out into the open ocean to place booms in petroleum oil-laden seas with overhead known toxic chemical dispersants blowing by the wind across them – was criminal, life-threatening, health damaging and stupid.
including treating this oil spill the way that has been done knowing the chemical dispersants in use would kill marine life and food chains and be toxic to people when they come on shore with the winds and storm surges – that is stupid.
including dicking around about the quantities being released into the ocean as if equations and methods for finding such quantities didn’t exist – that is sad, create unnecessary dangers and was stupid.
including that pretense of the quantities being released being different than they had to know them to be and then saying the quantities don’t matter – that is stupid.
including not knowing that things, techniques, and possible solutions in the plan they had were inappropriate to the task and its unique requirements – which also includes acting like they didn’t know the gas hydrates would clog the last “top hat” they used – was completely stupid. And didn’t work.
including the insistence that priorities be to stop the leak and then keep the oil out of the marshes until it had completely killed over 30 acres that are now known to be dead zones. That was stupid.
including the instigation of putting out public information as if no animals have died as a result of this despite the high numbers of unnaturally occurring deaths of marine wildlife at a time when their only place to live is coated with crude oil, filled throughout the water column with toxic chemical dispersants mixed with crude oil, and the air above the water is filled with burning methane leftovers, controlled burn leftovers, motor oil from boats, and diesel exhaust from boats, and every dangerous fume and vapor chemical hazards known to be in the crude oil and in the chemical dispersants. Stupid.
including saying that they don’t know how those marine animals, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles and other marine life, birds, etc. died – and put out public opinion pieces about there only being a little oil on a couple bird’s wings – is also stupid.
including the EPA taking water and air samples and saying it is safe and not toxic when we’ve all seen the crude oil thick in the water and people have smelled the fumes and now many people are getting sick and were getting sick all along with permanent health damages known to be caused by these things – see, that is stupid.
I don’t care how professional, how many degrees or credentials they have up there at the Unified Command or at their Brain Trust – stupid is still stupid.
And, doing the same things that aren’t working – is stupid.
And, causing or allowing to be caused inhumane and dangerous, life-threatening, permanently life-altering ill health, ecologically damaging things that also kill the food chain and marine animals for generations –
is stupid – I don’t care who you are.
you can’t credential that – but the thinking that is being used on this thing has been consistently proving to be stupid.
– cricketdiane
***
When –
a.) the things being done aren’t working, aren’t working well, or are making things worse, causing death, causing sickness, killing people, killing animals, killing future generations of animals, making children sick, destroying the future health of children, families, people, elderly and future generations –
and
b.) the solutions being tried to cap the well continue to be producing ill, non-existent or failing results which allows the situation to be catastrophically worse –
and
c.) the complete menu of solutions has simply carried forward things already planned that were known to not work, or tried in places with drastically different parameters making them unlikely to work in this one –
and
d.) the overall impacts of the continuing expansion of the dangerous situation is massive, catastrophic on every level, expansive in the amount of dangers and destruction it can and will likely do –
THEN –
doing it the way they are going about it – even with the credentialed experts and specialists being the “best minds available” backing up doing it that way – is still stupid, is still wrong, and is still failing to meet the measure of the event successfully mitigating it and its damages.
And, if BP or anyone else thinks that using those intellectual educated resources in the way they have been using them and intimating that those experts back up BP’s way of doing it – will all relieve their responsibility and liability for getting it wrong and making things worse – they are wrong.
It won’t be an excuse at all when it gets down to it. They have the best and brightest minds applying what they know to this situation – then let ’em lose to find anything and everything that could possibly work given the unique parameters of this event in all its complexities including the massive spread of it – and let them generate solutions novel to it and include those from any and all other places as well. Then use all of those things generated.
Keep doing what does work. Discard what doesn’t work. Modify until the full measure of the challenge has been given solutions, had them paid for and implemented in a timely way – and y’all can study the hell out of it later. To use the same solutions without having generated any new ones nor to have filled things in where solutions were found that do work and doing more of that – is stupid, to say the least and irresponsible to a criminal level in fact.
Somebody or some organization – or the news organizations or the state / local governments along the Coast – needs to take air samples and these people can tell how to get the sample using a sterile vacuum thingy they have – and then pay to have an independent air chemistry evaluation made. I don’t work for these people but they are one of the best, if not the very best lab in the country – and then let’s get an international UN team to take some of these samples also and independently verify the results – they need to be done for the air and the water like I just saw on the photos of the fishermen without masks and crude oil thick in the water where they were working on CNN at 9.30 pm tonight.The EPA saying that samples of air and water are fine – not toxic and that their samplings show nothing of any kind of danger are wrong somehow – and way wrong at that – it is a matter of life and death. These independent analysis by this lab can be made very quickly knowing that the samples have come from the Gulf Coast area and the labs in France can have the samples within twenty-four hours and the results not long thereafter. This isn’t a joke and Putting public relations ahead of public health and well-being is unacceptable.
– cricketdiane
The lab is called IMR test labs – they are a leader in materials testing –
they have a kit to take the samples in these big vacuum pressurized containers that look like propane tanks as part of the testing package. It isn’t cheap but it isn’t tremendously expensive either and they are very fast with results.
And, they can show every chemical and particulate matter in the air along with the full chemistry using the tools they have. It does require more than a single sample in order to get the chemicals coming onshore from the open ocean areas with the crude oil and dispersant/oil mixed, etc.
IMR Test Labs information on materials testing – air and water quality comprehensive chemical analysis labs
IMR Test Labs – air and water chemistry evaluations – comprehensive chemical materials analysis –
***
Hi, Diane. BP explained that their plan was to drill the well, cap it, and drill another well nearby. Eventually, those wells would have been connected to an existing platform, for production. They use this sort of batch system, because working at sea and at such depths is more difficult than drilling a well and hooking it up, as they do on land.
I used to write a newsletter for people in the oil spill business about 10 years ago. The technology is little different than it was then. The best way to fight an oil spill is not to spill it in the first place. Skimming will only get about 10 percent. Burning it will reduce it by some other fraction — they’ve not yet given details on the burning they did the other day.
Most of it “goes into the environment”: evaporates in the air or is churned into the ocean. There are natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean there does have bacteria that have been eating it since long before we started drilling for it. But they’re not going to eat this thing at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The dispersant they’re applying basically makes it mix into the ocean faster. Maybe its better to have a little bit of oil mixed into 5,000 feet of ocean than to have it floating on top. Most scientists seem to think so. We’ll see how it comes out this time.
Jim Polson
From:
<dianecphillips@comcast.net>
To:
JIM POLSON, BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:
Cc:
<Public.Information@cnn.com>
Subject:
about oil spewing into Gulf – question and solutions – cricketdi
Date:
4/30/2010 13:55:21
Do you know –
What is this process? Why did they drill and then cap a producing well? Are they running around the Gulf, drilling and then capping rather than pumping it to harvest the crude? How do they place a “cement” cap 5000 feet underwater?
And – there was a senior editor from PopSci on bloomberg just now who explained that the companies, and engineers in the Gulf are going to do the plan as planned without trying anything else in the interim. Not only was his attitude really shitty, for lack of a better word – we can see already what there “plans” are producing and burning off 100 gallons at a time where 210,000 gallons per day are pouring into the Gulf waters is a sad note in the history of engineering and innovation in America.
Just wanted to say – notwithstanding Mr. Bjorn Carey being very informative, his patronizing and exclusionary attitude about solutions which could work long before the ones they are using or planning to use – is unacceptable. Is that also the attitude shared by the oil companies, recovery companies, engineer teams in the area and others making the decisions about fixing the problem? Is there any way they could have some other choices on their menu or are we to watch them continue for five weeks or three months to destroy the economies and wealth of the sea throughout the Gulf Coast and Gulf of Mexico. How about finding out –
Thanks,
cricketdiane
***
that email was an interaction from April 30, 2010
And – as a bit ago on CNN, I heard that BP is setting up tent cities for workers – Who is that stupid?
You don’t make tent cities for people where it is over 90 degrees, high humidity, covered over with gnats, ants, flies, mosquitoes and every other crawling thing – with hurricanes on the way. Who could be that stupid?
And to be filled with the fumes from the coast of crude oil and dispersants and increased diesel exhausts that the areas have – without any chance to get into a hotel room with air conditioning and air filters or anything?
And common afternoon and evening thundershowers – they’re setting folks up to “camp out”? What kind of thinking is that conceptually stupid?
– cricketdiane, 05-29-10
***
They must have said twenty times between Rear Admiral Landry and BP executive Doug Suttles, that the very best minds are working on this – the “brain trust” etc. –
I don’t care who they hell they’ve got making these decisions – stupid is still stupid no matter how many people think that’s the way to do it.
And EPA tests showing there isn’t oil where we are looking at it in photos – is stupid.
And EPA air monitoring that say there aren’t chemical dangers and health hazards in the air – where everybody anywhere in the area can smell it – is stupid.
And, BP building a “tent city” in Louisiana in the summertime for workers near the coast filled with fumes and heat and humidity and mosquitoes – is stupid.
NOAA Ship Pisces.
n Davis Inlet, the transfer of gas-addicted children to the authorities has been considerably more difficult. Unlike Paul Rich in Sheshatshiu, Simeon Tshakapesh, the chief in Davis Inlet, has insisted on negotiating with the government before handing over the children. Tshakapesh has been accused by individuals in the government and in the Innu community of holding the children hostage to larger Innu demands — requesting more money for Innu social services and demanding that treatment programs be run by Innu counselors who will emphasize native culture. One government official who insisted on anonymity said that the Innu in Davis Inlet also requested a guarantee that if doctors discovered the children had been sexually abused, no charges would be brought against the parents.
