Category: Disastrous

72 known dead, many missing

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

4-27-11 Tornado Tuscaloosa, Al from Crimson Tide Productions on Vimeo.

Massive natural disasters like this are only one reason why it’s a really stupid idea to have a national spending cap, or to cut government services. The federal government will step in (as it should) with all kinds of aid to help the victims of this huge disaster, and it’s going to cost money — which, as tea lovers like to point out, doesn’t grow on trees. This is why we don’t cut FEMA, or aid to first responders, or highway crews, or any of the hundreds of necessary services that are on the chopping block right this minute — because when you need them, you really need them:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.— A wave of tornado-spawning storms strafed the South on Wednesday, splintering buildings across hard-hit Alabama and killing 72 people in four states.

At least 58 people died in Alabama alone, including 15 or more when a massive tornado devastated Tuscaloosa. The city’s mayor said sections of the city that’s home to the University of Alabama have been destroyed and the city’s infrastructure is devastated.

Eleven deaths were reported in Mississippi, two in Georgia and one in Tennessee.

News footage showed paramedics lifting a child out of a flattened Tuscaloosa home, with many neighboring buildings in the city of more than 83,000 also reduced to rubble. A hospital there said its emergency room had admitted at least 100 people.

“What we faced today was massive damage on a scale we have not seen in Tuscaloosa in quite some time,” Mayor Walter Maddox told reporters, adding that he expected his city’s death toll to rise.

The storm system spread destruction Tuesday night and Wednesday from Texas to Georgia, and it was forecast to hit the Carolinas next and then move further northeast.

Around Tuscaloosa, traffic was snarled Wednesday night by downed trees and power lines, and some drivers abandoned their cars in medians. University officials said there didn’t appear to be significant damage on campus, and it was using its student recreation center as a shelter.

Maddox said authorities were having trouble communicating, and 1,400 National Guard soldiers were being deployed around the state.

It was nice while it lasted

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

A reliable food supply, I mean:

Australia’s pistachio farmers expected a bumper crop this year. Instead they had a harvest of horrors, with nuts blackened by a fungus that had never before caused an outbreak in pistachios.

The culprit was anthracnose, a fungal disease best-known for infecting mangoes. It raced through the industry, resulting in a harvest some 50 percent smaller than expected — and half of that was inedible.

What the disease means for the future of Australia’s pistachio farmers remains to be seen, but for the rest of the world it’s yet another cautionary example of fragility in modern agriculture.

“The wide cultivation of genetically uniform plant populations fosters rapid evolution among the pathogens,” said Scot Nelson, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii. “Because of this greed, new pathogens or newly reported host-pathogen combinations arise almost daily around the world.”

Good news in PA

~ susie

Looks like the EPA has no intention of standing by and letting Gov. Corbett’s contributors foul our waterways:

The federal Environmental Protection Agency is doing more than looking over the shoulder of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection. The EPA is apparently not satisfied with the way the DEP is handling an investigation into last week’s spill in the Marcellus Shale.

Chesapeake Energy has maintained that malfunctioning equipment caused fracking fluids to flow like a geyser at one of its well in Bradford County.

Officials with the EPA say the DEP is still in control of the investigation, but federal authorities are on the ground asking tough questions and seeking data. It is rather strange since no one was injured and it does not appear that the leak caused irreversible, long term, damage to the environment.

Oversite like this did not occur during former DEP Secretary John Hanger’s watch. Has the Department of Environmental Protection’s reputation fallen that much in the days in the few months since Hanger departed?

Hanger told the Patriot-News, “It means that the gas-drilling industry in Pennsylvania will be regulated in practice by both DEP and EPA, at least in some cases and respects.”

The EPA maintains that the course of action is routine, but this is the first time it has conducted such an inquiry in the Marcellus.

Thousands of gallons of fracking fluid leaked into the ground and a tributary before Chesapeake managed to seal it.

“We want a complete accounting of operations at the site to determine our next steps in this incident and to help prevent future releases of this kind,” EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin said in a statement.

Advice

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Via Naked Capitalism:

I wrote to radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby to ask him if he thought people living outside of Japan should take any actions to try to reduce their radiation exposure:

Epidemiologist Dr. Wing thinks people outside of Japan shouldn’t do anything to attempt to reduce radiation exposure: Leading Epidemiologist: Instead of Trying to Avoid Japanese Radiation, Put Your Energy Into Demanding a Saner Energy Policy

But the French anti-nuclear NGO CRIIAD says that pregnant women and infants should take steps to reduce exposure: French Nuclear Group Warns that Children and Pregnant Mothers Should Protect Themselves from Radiation

I’ve also researched the scientific literature, and found that antioxidants can help a little:Can Vitamins or Herbs Help Protect Us from Radiation?

What’s your advice for people outside of Japan?

Continue reading “Advice” →

Big Sugar wins over GMO safety

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

As low as my expectations were for Obama, I did think we’d at least have effective oversight for things like this. Apparently I was wrong!

Last August, Federal Judge Jeffrey White issued a stinging rebuke to the USDA for its process on approving new genetically modified seeds. He ruled that the agency’s practice of “deregulating” novel seed varieties without first performing an environmental impact study violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

The target of Judge White’s ire was the USDA’s 2005 approval of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready sugar beets, engineered to withstand doses of the company’s own herbicide. White’s ruling effectively revoked the approval of Monsanto’s novel beet seeds pending an environmental impact study, and cast doubt upon the USDA’s notoriously industry-friendly way of regulating GM seeds.

A rigorous environmental impact assessment would not likely be kind to Roundup Ready sugar beets. First, sugar-beet seeds are cultivated mainly in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, also an important seed-production area for crops closely related to sugar beets, such as organic chard and table beets. The engineered beets could easily cross-pollinate with the other varieties, causing severe damage to a key resource for organic and other non-GMO farmers. Second, Monsanto’s already-unregulated Roundup Ready crops — corn, soy, and cotton — have unleashed a plague of Roundup-resistant “superweeds,” forcing farmers to apply ever-higher doses of Roundup and other weed-killing poisons. Finally, the Roundup herbicide itself is proving much less ecologically benign than advertised, as Tom Laskawy has shown.

How has the Obama USDA responded to Judge White’s rebuke? By repeatedly defying it, most recently in February, when the agency moved to allow farmers to plant the engineered seeds even though the impact study has yet to be completed. Its rationale for violating the court order will raise an eyebrow of anyone who read Gary Taubes’ recent New York Times Magazine piece teasing out the health hazards of the American sweet tooth: the USDA feared that the GMO sugar beet ban would cause sweetener prices to rise. Thus the USDA places the food industry’s right to cheap sweetener for its junk food over the dictates of a federal court.

In early April, the USDA made what I’m reading as a second response to Judge White, this one even more craven. To satisfy the legal system’s pesky demand for environmental impact studies of novel GMO crops, the USDA has settled upon a brilliant solution: let the GMO industry conduct its own environmental impact studies, or pay other researchers to. The USDA announced the program in the Federal Register for April 7, 2011 [PDF].

I’m sure that’ll work out just fine. It always does.

Fracked over

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I try not to think about what’s going into the water supply from this drilling:

Dairy farmer Christine Pepper’s worst fears were realized when a natural gas drill 3 miles from her home blew out, spilling toxic fluid into a creek.

A 25-year-old native of rural Bradford County in northern Pennsylvania, Pepper said she was against the boom in drilling by hydraulic fracturing ever since wells started popping up a few years ago, surrounding her livestock and family, fearful that safety would be overlooked.

“I was crying when I heard about it (the blowout),” Pepper said on Thursday, a day and a half after the accident at the Chesapeake Energy well in the town of LeRoy. “They’re taking the county and taking our livelihoods.”

Chesapeake suspended hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations in Pennsylvania and said it was working to plug the well while investigating the cause of the blowout.

A theoretical debate about the environmental safety of fracking drilling for natural gas burst into real life for the people of Bradford County with the blowout late Tuesday. Similar debates are taking place in other states and Washington, where President Barack Obama has identified natural gas as crucial to U.S. energy needs.

‘Uncontrollable’ fracking blowout in PA

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Thanks for your de facto deregulation of the natural gas industry, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett! Via Daily Kos:

Another consequence of deregulation has apparently just boiled over in Bradford County, Pa.

http://www.google.com/…

Operators have lost control of a natural gas well in rural northern Pennsylvania, leading to a spill of fluids used in the drilling process.

Bradford County emergency officials say thousands of gallons of tainted water have spilled from a Chesapeake Energy Corp. well site near Canton since early Wednesday.

As of 1:50 pm., the spill was still out of control, spilling “thousands and thousands” of likely contaminated water over fields and into at least one stream, per the reports, prompting the evacuation of seven families, thus far.  Updated reports indicate the water started pouring out at 11:45 pm last night.

The “stream” is apparently the Towanda Creek, which feeds into the Susquehanna River, which in turn feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.

http://www.grist.org/…

Reuters describes the spill as “uncontrollable” as of 3:52 pm.  The local news reports describe attempts  to control the spill as a “large scale operation” with a “widespread impact.” There appear to be no reports providing the actual amount of fluids spilled at this time.

The cat’s on the roof

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Every single time we get an “official” update on Fukushima, I think of this joke.

Fuel of the Fukushima nuke plant plant’s No. 1 reactor could be melting, an official said on Wednesday at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) , the operator of the crippled plant.

TEPCO said last week some of the spent nuclear fuel rods stored in the No. 4 reactor building of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant were damaged..

The company’s workers have put iRobot PackBots to measure radiation, oxygen and temperature inside the reactor..

In other reports, they’re having problems with the robots:

Tokyo Electric Power Company says radioactive debris and high humidity are hampering the investigation by robots at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The company began using remote-controlled robots to explore the first three
reactor buildings on Sunday and Monday.

At the Number 2 reactor building, the robot’s camera lens was instantly clouded by high humidity. TEPCO officials think that the steam is coming from the damaged section of the reactor’s suppression pool. But they have not found a way to resolve the problem as the steam could be highly toxic.

Robots entered the Number 3 reactor building through the southern entrance, but their path was blocked by debris. The firm is considering using another robot that can remove obstacles weighing up to 100 kilograms.

At the first reactor building, robots were able to advance 40 meters along the northern side wall.

The use of robots is aimed at paving the way for staff to work inside the contaminated buildings to stabilize the reactors, but the prospects of success remain unclear.

Do I hear a “meow”?