Category: Life in the Big City

Near miss

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

CP 550

When I saw this, I just assumed it was an old story. There was another one? WTF?

Over the weekend, 11 cars from an 111-car CSX train derailed in South Philly. The cars were carrying crude oil, but there were no leaks, no deaths and no injuries.

This time.

But the incident happened almost exactly a year after seven crude-oil-carrying cars on a CSX train derailed over the Schuylkill River, raising questions — never entirely answered — about whether Philadelphia citizens are adequately protected from the possibility of an oil catastrophe as the city grows into a possible “energy hub” future.

“Both accidents were predictable, preventable, and a near miss from potentially catastrophic impacts,” activist Iris Marie Bloom blogged on Saturday. “There must be no third derailment. That no rupture occurred is extremely lucky. We can’t leave prevention to luck.”

She is right to be concerned. Where there are oil shipments, there are frequent — if frequently minor — incidents: ProPublica’s Isaiah Thompson reported in November that “in at least 65 cases over the last two years, tank cars bound for or arriving in Philadelphia were found to have loose, leaking or missing safety components.”

And while catastrophic events involving crude don’t happen every day, they can be devastating. In 2013, an oil-train derailment in Quebec set off an explosion that killed 47 people. There have been several more huge explosions in recent years, albeit with fewer casualties, but even federal regulators think there is good reason to be concerned.

They got him

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

kim jones

Remember when I asked for donations of duffel bags and suitcases for foster kids? The woman I worked with to set it up was Kim Jones, the victim in this seemingly random shooting death several weeks ago. It had me really depressed, I didn’t want to talk about it. But I feel a lot better now that they got the guy who did it:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An assistant director at a child advocacy organization followed and shot his supervisor as she waited at a bus stop so she couldn’t report him for stealing about $40,000 from the organization, police said Monday.

After the slaying last month, Randolph Sanders told a television station that he was “stunned” by the death of 56-year-old Kim Jones, a mother of two.

“She was incredibly happy,” Sanders said in the interview with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. “So this is – this is just disturbing.”

But over the weekend, authorities say, he confessed to shooting Jones once in the back of the head in what homicide Capt. James Clark described as “a premeditated assassination-style” killing.

One of the things that depressed me was how many people insisted to me the cops would never bother trying to find the shooter, because the victim was black and it happened in North Philly. I knew that wasn’t true — if there’s anything that gets cops motivated, it’s finding the killer of someone they think of as a “citizen” (as opposed to a scumbag). And social worker Kim was a solid citizen. Heck, she was even standing at the bus stop listening to gospel music on her headphones when she was shot.
Continue reading “They got him” →

A ‘fiery sex scandal’ for a slow news day

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Engine 4 & Rescue 1

Swamp Rabbit and I were arguing again. The primary goal of mainstream news organizations is to scare people, he said. Fear sells. Just look at the huge response to news coverage in PA, NJ and NY of the “monster snowstorm” that never hit those states.

“You’re wrong,” I said, showing him the front-page story in Wednesday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

A fiery sex scandal threatens to burn up multiple firefighters’ careers, including some top brass, according to former Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers.

Ayers told the Daily News today that the investigation into a young paramedic’s claims of sexual misconduct began shortly before he retired in June.

The paramedic filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging misconduct against another paramedic. Soon after, rumors surfaced that she had sexual encounters with numerous firefighters, paramedics and supervisors in firehouses while on- and off-duty all around the city.

“The goal is to is titillate,” I said, using one of my favorite words. “The story can be a monster storm, a sex scandal, a murder on Main Street. It doesn’t matter, so long as it titillates.”

“Use whatever fancy word you want, Odd Man. News stories is to scare people. Will I git snowed in? Is my husband screwin’ around? Will I get murdered on my way home from the SuperFridge?”

I told him we were both saying the same thing. News venues — tabloids, so-called broadsheets, TV news shows, whatever — exist to dish out infotainment, not news, especially now that they’re fighting Internet sites for people’s attention.

“The snow stories scared me,” I said. “But it’s fun to read about firefighters having sex. What would you do with all that down time, hold Bible classes?”

The rabbit sniffed at my wood stove and said, “Wait till this here shack catches fire and all them firemen are off gettin’ laid. Have fun with that.”

I unlocked the cabinet near the stove and handed him a bottle of Wild Turkey. “Here,” I said. “You’re a real drag when you’re sober.”

It always amazes me

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Boston post Blizzard
That when weather forecasters get one big story wrong out of the hundreds they do every year, people stop believing anything they say.

Forecasters said all along that it was hard to tell just where the blizzard line would be this week, yet people act as if they simply made the whole storm up — for “ratings.” We’re supposed to get snow today and Sunday night, but people now refuse to believe it. Because freedom!

Boom

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

So this happened in my little town yesterday. Glad everyone’s okay:

Three women were injured Tuesday when part of the roof of a neighboring building fell onto a Center City clothing, authorities said.

A roof parapet and adjoining bricks from a six-story building at 16th and Walnut streets fell into the Lululemon Athletica clothing store around 3:25 p.m., authorities said.

Christine Vamvalis-Haley, 60, was browsing inside the store, which specializes in workout clothing, when she heard “a huge boom.”

She turned to one of the store workers and expressed alarm at the loud noise, and “within seconds” the ceiling collapsed, she said.

At least two women were hit by light fixtures and other debris, she said.

Police said three women, all age 27, were being taken to Hahnemann University Hospital.

Vamvalis-Haley described the scene as chaotic.

“The first thing was we couldn’t breathe,” she said.

Rocky

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Rocky steps - Philadelphia

Every time I drive past the Art Museum, I see the people running up the steps, and people at the bottom getting their pictures taken in front of the Rocky statue — people from all over the world. There’s just something about Rocky! So our local paper just wrote about some visiting college kids who decided to run the Art Museum steps and met Sylvester Stallone at the top:

In the original Rocky, Stallone wanted to run the steps carrying his dog, Butkus, but the dog weighed 120 pounds.

“After going up a flight and a half,” Stallone wrote in the foreword to ROCKY STORIES: Tales of Love Hope and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps, “I realized I would only be completing this with a terminal case of a hernia, so I abandoned that idea.” (Editor’s Note: Staff Writer Michael Vitez is coauthor with Inquirer photographer Tom Gralish of ROCKY STORIES: Tales of Love Hope and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps.)

In Rocky Balboa, the sixth movie, however, he runs the steps, at age 60, with his new dog, much smaller, on a leash, and thrusts only one hand to the sky in celebration at the top because he has picked up the pup with the other.

It was hardly surprising that Stallone returned to the steps incognito on Saturday. He loves it there.

For all his fame, wealth and success, Stallone loves the idea that nearly 40 years later, people still come from all over the nation and world and run these steps. The ritual is organic, authentic, and as we discovered in our book, the actor and movie may bring people to the steps, but they run to celebrate their own lives and accomplishments, or to get motivation for challenges ahead.

Stallone so loved the idea of our book, and this ritual, that he decided to end the movie Rocky Balboa with scores of Philadelphians running the steps and dancing at the top as the credits roll. As a gesture of kindness, he included Gralish and me. Tom has the camera and I have the notebook. Blink and you will miss us.

For my book, I asked Stallone why he thought people continue to run the steps many decades later.

“Because we are underdogs,” he wrote in the foreword. “And there’s very few things, iconic situations, that are accessible. You know you can’t borrow Superman’s cape. You can’t use the Jedi laser sword. But the steps are there. The steps are accessible. And standing up there, you kind of have a piece of the Rocky pie. You are part of what the whole myth is.”

I submit that Sylvester Stallone is happy at the steps. He is proud of what he inspired here, that running the steps still resonates with so many. I believe he will continue to surprise people at the steps for as long as he lives.

Apocalypse now? No, just another dumb forecast.

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments
It's the end of the world again!
What John Bolaris reads instead of tea leaves

“What we got here is a failure to communicate,” I told Swamp Rabbit, quoting from an old movie but referring to Philly-based John Bolaris, one of the many talking heads paid by the media machine to make weather forecasts.

Bolaris was on the radio, explaining why the “monster storm” predicted for us barely touched PA and NJ before rolling over New England, where storms in the East usually land. It seems he and his fellow weather swamis on TV had to choose from a number of possible computer-generated storm “models,” meaning scenarios. He and they chose wrong, but better to be safe than sorry, blah blah.

“What a bozo,” I said. “People in the real world get fired for being that wrong.”

The rabbit said I was the one who was wrong, that the local weather guy did great. “His job ain’t to inform people, Odd Man. It’s to scare ’em, like them horror movies do. People like being scared. The more scared they is, the more they watch the TV news show. Ain’t you learned that yet?”

“What a blowhard,” I said. “I spent the whole night worrying that the roof of this shack might cave in from the snow that never came.”

“Well there you go,” the rabbit replied. “The man done his job, didn’t he?”

Footnote: Too bad the mainstream media would rather hype winter snowstorms — they’re so unusual! — than inform people about long-term climate change.

Here comes the big ass storm

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

blizzard

They’re predicting they could get as much as 40 inches of snow Tuesday!

“While the storm from Saturday may have been a mere nuisance to travelers and a delight to skiers, the storm Monday night into Tuesday could be far more disruptive in terms of travel and daily activities,” said AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

The greatest impacts are expected along the Interstate-95 corridor from Philadelphia northward where over a foot of snow is forecast to fall. The blizzard also threatens to bring the heavily populated zone from New York City to Boston to Portland, Maine, to a standstill.

Arrival Of The Snow
Before intensifying into a major winter storm, this system will spread snow across the lower Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic through Sunday evening.

Snow amounts in this area are not expected to be nearly as high when compared to what will fall over New England early this week, but Sunday’s snow can still cause some travel delays from Indianapolis through Pittsburgh.

Bill DeBlasio called a press conference and warned this could be NYC’s worst blizzard ever:

http://youtu.be/FHEaw4EZxHk