Category: Disastrous

Good

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I’ll update with details when I have them.

UPDATE: I read somewhere later that the D.A. is doing this as a stunt, but we’ll see.

2ND UPDATE: Here it is.

FLINT, MI – Felony and misdemeanor charges have been issued against three state and city employees in connection to the city’s water crisis.

Genesee District Court Judge Tracy Collier-Nix authorized charges, Wednesday, April 20, for Flint employee Michael Glasgow and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby.

Glasgow is accused of tampering with evidence when he allegedly changed testing results to show there was less lead in city water than there actually was. He is also charged with willful neglect of office.

Prysby and Busch are charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence, tampering with evidence, a treatment violation of the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act and a monitoring violation of the Safe Drinking Water.

Oh boy

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

08-2015_02

I never like to read this:

A leak at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state has prompted warnings of “catastrophic” consequences, as workers attempt to clean up more than eight inches of toxic waste from one of 28 underground tanks holding radioactive materials leftover from plutonium production.

Alarms on the site began sounding on Sunday, leading workers to discover 8.4 inches of toxic waste in between the inner and outer walls of tank AY-102, which has been slowly leaking since 2011 but has never accumulated that amount of waste before.

A former tank farm worker told local media that despite statements from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that the spill does not pose a threat to public health, it should be considered a major problem.

“This is catastrophic,” the worker, Mike Geffre, who first discovered that the tank was failing in 2011, told King-TV on Monday. “This is probably the biggest event ever to happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the savior of all saviors [to hold waste safely from people and the environment].”

Flint mayor: Governor’s decision to drink Flint water ‘doesn’t impress me’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

FIRST Robotics State Championship 2016

Flint, MI Mayor Karen Weaver was on my radio show Monday night, and I asked her about Governor Rick Snyder’s pledge to drink that city’s water for a month. COLMES: The governor of your state, Rick Snyder, said today that he was going to drink for a month, I guess to give people some comfort, what’s… Continue reading “Flint mayor: Governor’s decision to drink Flint water ‘doesn’t impress me’” →

Of course he’s not going to jail

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’ve said it before: These are the crimes for which I support the death penalty, because you destroy so much and put so many people at risk:

A former co-owner and officer of Freedom Industries on Monday became the fourth official from the company to avoid being sentenced to any jail time, despite playing a role in the January 2014 chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the Kanawha Valley and surrounding communities. U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston sentenced William E. Tis, a former Freedom director and secretary, to three years’ probation and ordered Tis to pay a $20,000 fine. Tis had pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of causing an unlawful discharge of refuse matter, and faced a statutory maximum of one year in prison.

The charges related to Freedom’s spill of MCHM and other chemicals into the Elk River just 1.5 miles upstream from West Virginia American Water’s regional drinking water intake.

As he had with three previous Freedom defendants, Johnston said that Tis was “hardly a criminal.” The judge cited the misdemeanor nature of the charge against Tis and what he said was a lack of any previous criminal record. “I never intentionally hurt anyone in my life,” Tis told the judge at Monday’s hearing. “I am sorry this happened.”

Johnston said his sentence for Tis was also based on a motion from Acting U.S. Attorney Carol Casto’s office asking for a lighter sentence based on Tis having provided “substantial assistance” to the government’s investigation of the spill and of two top Freedom officials, Gary Southern and Dennis Farrell.

TEPCO admits they lied

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

fukushima, ReachForThe Sky you lil fcker

I said so from the beginning. You could tell from the behavior of the TEPCO officials that it was much worse than they admitted:

The operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has admitted that it should have announced sooner that there was a nuclear meltdown at the site.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company denied the meltdown for two months.

The company now says the public declaration should have been done within days of the disaster.

Experts have long said the melting began within hours of the reactor being struck by the tsunami.

Yet another reason to hate Republicans

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

They prefer tax cuts for the wealthy to doing basic infrastructure repair, which leads to decisions like this.

Last month was South Florida’s wettest January since 1932. Because of the heavy rain, the water levels in Lake Okeechobee in central Florida rose to about a foot above what’s normal for this season. On top of that, water managers began to pump dirty water from flooded farms into the lake, adding more pollution to a body of water that already contains fertilizers and other chemicals from the state’s cattle and sugar industries. At the same time, officials began to worry that the rising lake waters would put stress on its aging dike, so they decided to drain the lake toward the east and west coasts. Some 70,000 gallons per second flowed into the St. Lucie River and the Caloosahatchee River all the way through to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. And as the toxic runoff spreads, it’s threatening sea grasses and oyster beds and is adding to harmful algae growth.

Now the tourism industry and small businesses on the coasts are worried that they’re going to see their business slump as a result of the pollution. Local politicians are calling on Governor Rick Scott to declare a state of emergency, and mayors are traveling to Washington, D.C. to demand action from Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers. And Floridians are snapping pictures of the polluted water and dead sea creatures and sharing them on social media.

Fiji starts clean-up after cyclone devastation

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Climate change makes it imperative that we win this election, because the Republicans won’t do a damned thing to stop it.

Fiji has launched a clean-up after the most powerful cyclone in the Pacific island-nation’s history left a trail of destruction, killing at least six people, destroying homes and damaging infrastructure. The storm struck the popular tourist destination overnight Saturday, packing wind gusts of 325km per hour, according to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA. OCHA said six… Continue reading “Fiji starts clean-up after cyclone devastation” →

Fruits and vegetables

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Winter Crops

I guess I can stop feeling guilty about my diet now?

The second episode, which aired last week, highlighted another aspect of the drought. It shows how farmers are using treated oil wastewater to irrigate their crops, despite the fact that nobody has tested the wastewater to see if it’s safe.

“There are farmers so desperate for water in one particular irrigation district called Cawelo, they’re taking some wastewater to irrigate crops from Chevron. It’s being used to grow food for people—citrus crops, grapes, pistachios,” Tom Frantz told Deol in the episode.

“You grow an orange—it’s 90 percent water when it gets to the consumer,” Frantz continued. “Where did that water come from? It’s the irrigation water. The irrigation water is toxic, even at very tiny amounts. Is there a tiny amount of toxicity now in the fruit? Nobody is testing that yet. And they’re salting up their soil by using this water, which means ultimately they’ll have to stop growing everything.”

Seth Shonkoff of PSE Healthy Energy explained to Deol that “until we have a list of the chemicals that are going into oil and gas wells and in what volumes and what are their toxicities, we’re flying blind.”

In order to find out the health impacts of using recycled oil water on crops, Deol joined water scientist Scott Smith as he covertly tested the water for toxic chemicals at the Cawelo wastewater treatment plant.

“We found oil and these nasty solvents,” which can cause “kidney damage, liver damage and cancer,” Smith said.

Fish deformities spiked after Lac-Mégantic oil spill, report says

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

MONTREAL—Scientists have recorded an “unprecedented” spike in the fish deformities in the wake of the deadly 2013 train derailment and oil spill in Lac-Mégantic, Que., according to a provincial government report. The report into the effects of the disaster on the 185-km-long Chaudière River, which begins in Lac-Mégantic, found that in some parts of the river… Continue reading “Fish deformities spiked after Lac-Mégantic oil spill, report says” →

This isn’t the last time

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

HEALTH-ZIKA/BRAZIL

Scientists have been predicting it all along: As the climate changes dramatically, we’re going to see diseases where we’ve never seen them before, where people have no antibodies. I for one would like to grab those “pro life” climate deniers by the shoulders and shake some sense into them: “See what you’ve done?”

Now this:

Before last fall, medical reports of babies born with brain damage and unusually small heads — a condition known as microcephaly — were so uncommon in Brazil that only about 150 cases were registered each year in the entire country. Now Brazilian officials are investigating thousands of them, and they contend that the mosquito-borne Zika virus is the cause.

Virus specialists are racing to understand the connection, if any, between Zika and the rash of microcephaly cases in Brazil, an undertaking that international officials warn could take six months or more.

But whatever the cause, “There is no doubt that Brazil is experiencing a significant increase in microcephaly,” said an official for Brazil’s Health Ministry who was not authorized to speak publicly. “We wouldn’t have declared this situation a health emergency if this increase had not been detected.”

The Zika epidemic has spread much faster than science’s understanding of it. Researchers here believe that the virus made the leap from Polynesia to Brazil during the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament. Since then, as many as 1.5 million people in Brazil are believed to have been infected, and the virus has spread to more than 20 countries and territories in the Americas.

Right now, the epidemic is happening in a country where women don’t have access to either birth control or abortion. Nor do they live in a society that can support the special care needed for these families. I don’t think any country is set up to deal with this. It is a nightmare.