the intersection of emergency preparedness, public health and environmental policy
From HelpBobLevinson.com
:
On Sunday, March 9, 2008, the Levinson Family will be holding the Help Bob Levinson Rally of Hope in Coral Springs, Florida.
We hope that you, our family and friends, will join us in showing love and support for Bob on the one year anniversary of his disappearance and the eve of his 60th Birthday.
We’ll try to provide further information shortly.
Who said this:
” If there is a philosophical issue that you can’t trust private industry to do anything, then I have to say, you’ve got no business getting on an airplane.”
Answer after the jump. Via Open Target, the blog of Clark Kent Ervin, the honorable former IG of the Department of Homeland Security, and before that, the Department of State.
Answer: Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Secretary Chertoff appears to have said this on the record, testifying before Congress last fall. Remarkable. From Clark Kent Ervin’s post “The Law Is what We Say It Is.”
Aida Edemariam, in The Guardian, interviews Joseph Stiglitz about his new book, written with Linda Bilmes, The Three-Trillion-Dollar War.
Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle has an interesting discussion of sewage systems - she points out that
While most of sewage systems do a great job of making the water look clean and getting rid of bacteria and viruses, they often aren’t designed to remove synthetic chemicals. With so many of us dependent on daily doses of pharmaceuticals, we’re excreting lots of drugs (or their metabolites), and they’re sticking around in treated wastewater. Researchers are now starting to discover what that means for the environment.
And then, typically for The Pump Handle, follows up with well-sourced, calm discussion which will leave you better informed.
There may be long-term planning implications with respect to how we design sewage and filtration systems. We’re also reminded of the toxic soup post-Katrina - composed not only of sewage - but of every opened bottle of household cleanser, paint, insecticide, etc. which was on a floor low enough to have the water pass through. (I’ll try to update later with links to the post-Katrina water issues).
Additional resources and ideas about the use of blogs during disasters:
Rex Hammock puts it very concisely in this post, “Hyper-Local Blogging:
In times of local crisis, the importance of having an active blogging community becomes very apparent. There are so many people outside an area who are desperately seeking information — any information — from the ground, so even if power and web-access is out in a city, the information being shared is much needed. (One of the reasons I blog hurricanes is that all of my family (including inlaws) live within one-mile of the Florida or Alabama gulf coasts.) In addition to the standard “meet-ups” that are popular among bloggers here in Nashville and other cities, I suggest that some emergency preparation might be a good thing for bloggers to discuss before the need arises. I’d be happy to point to any examples or list of emergency-blog planning suggestions that exist. Feel free to e-mail me some, or add to the comments below. And I’d be happy to assist in helping Nashville bloggers organize for such an effort.
Josh Hallett makes the case that public information officers should familiarize themselves with local bloggers and make use of them during emergencies. (Hallett was, I think, thinking about government PIO’s - but since so much of the private sector can be involved in crises, private organizations big enough to have a public information function, in my view, can take similar advantage of the blogosphere). From PIOs - Add Bloggers to your Media Distribution List for Disasters & Emergencies
My wife was the public information officer (PIO) for our local county for a number of years. During hurricanes or other emergency situations (remember Y2K) she would spend countless hours at the emergency operations center doing media updates.Like Rex, I feel it’s important for PIOs to be connected with their local blogging community. When a PIO sends out an update to the media they should include local bloggers. The best case scenario would be for the county/local agency to have a blog/rss feed of such content. Continue reading ‘Disaster Blogging Resources - Part II’
When a subcontracting firm - the “John Galt Corporation” - is named for the protagonist in an anti-union, anti-government-regulator novel (Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) it is to be hoped that at least one decision-maker would have thought it disturbing to put such a firm in charge of safety. (See David W. Dunlap’s “A Literary Footnote to a Fire: John Galt,” on the Times’s City Room Blog.
John Galt Corporation and Bovis Lend-Lease are accused of safety violations which led to the deaths of two firefighters. William K. Rashbaum and Charles V. Bagli, “Bank Tower Contractors Accused of 44 Violations,” The New York Times, February 20th, 2008. Rashbaum and Bagli report that the staff of the New York County District Attorney’s Office have been presentign evidence to a grand jury.
This isn’t, I think, what one hopes for in government efficiency: taking a defective and dangerous item which shouldn’t have been distributed in the first place - and giving them to a different set of disaster victims.
Doctor of Thinkology has an account here: “Love, FEMA.” The Doctor’s claims notwithstanding, there’s clearly no need for a diploma or a brain.
In conjunction with two blogs I’ve just set up - NewYork.PopularLogistics.com and EmergencyInformation.us - links to excellent articles and resources about blogs as communications tools during disasters:
“Blogging: reaching a global audience easily and affordably - from anywhere ,” by Teresa Crawford on Humaninet. Humaninet seems to have been an early adapter in using blogs as information toools by NGOs during disasters with this blog - humaninet.blogspot.com. Via Beth Kanter. Continue reading ‘Disaster Blogging Resources - Part I’
In Case of Emergency - also known as BreakGlass.WordPress.com — is a blog, like this one, about public health and disaster preparedness. We’ve listed the formal blog name and the URL just to make sure everyone gets it. The author of this blog is doing a much better job than we are in many areas: to give an example, his coverage of the CDC is excellent. We’ll be adding In Case of Emergency to our blogroll, and intend to be frequently linking to their coverage.
Michael Bergey of Bergey Power Company, a manufacturer of wind-power hardware, is the author of the very helpful Primer on Small Wind Turbines.
Check out the following information graphic, prepared by The New York Times based on data provided by the American Wind Energy Association:
This graphic accompanied Clifford Krauss’s article “Move Over Oil, There’s Money in Texas Wind,” in yesterday’s paper.
More on Krauss’s excellent article in another post - but - if you’re also aware that Krauss reported a 45% increase in wind-energy production from 2006 to 2007 - and have that in mind while looking at this chart - this is very good news. If we were to continue at this rate, it would mean a doubling of capacity would occur in slightly over two years.
This is part of a Times series called The Energy Challenge. Check out this series, and you can see that the Times has, perhaps slowly but steadily, been providing good, detailed coverage of energy issues; look closely at the bylines, and it’s apparent that the Times has assigned some of its best reporters to covering energy issues. (As to the chart - which is only credited “The New York Times” - we suspect that Khoi Vinh may have had something to do with it. Why the infographic designer, as who, as much as the reporter and her/his editors, has interpretive responsibility, gets no byline, we don’t understand).
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According to the International Herald Tribune, “By ‘bagging it,’ Ireland rids itself of a plastic nuisance“by Elisabeth Rosenthal,
There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape.
There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is holding a cellphone to his ear. But there are no plastic bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.
In a determined attempt to deal with litter, Ireland passed a plastic bag tax in 2002 - now 22 euro cents, about 33 U.S. cents - at the register if you want one with your purchases. There was an advertising awareness campaign. Then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, there was a 94 percent drop in plastic bag use. Within a year, nearly everyone bought reusable cloth bags, which they now keep in the office and the back of their cars. Plastic bags became socially unacceptable - on par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after your dog.
“When my roommate brings one in the flat, it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer carrying a load of groceries in a red backpack.
Countries from China to Australia, cities from New York to San Francisco, have promulgated laws and regulations to address the problem, with decidedly mixed success. Continue reading ‘International Herald Tribune: “By ‘bagging it,’ Ireland rids itself of a plastic nuisance”’
Taras Grescoe, (bio, slightly out of date, here; in a Times Op-Ed called “How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It,” has a proposal for dealing with, among other invasive species, the Asian carp.
Closer to home, the Asian carp, which has been working its way north from the Mississippi Delta since the 1990s, is now on the verge of reaching the Great Lakes. This voracious invader, which weighs up to 100 pounds and eats half its body weight in food in a day, has gained notoriety for vaulting over boats and breaking the arms and noses of recreational anglers.
it is high time we developed a taste for invasive speciesHaving outcompeted all native species, it now represents 95 percent of the biomass of fish in the Illinois River and has been sighted within 25 miles of Lake Michigan. The only thing preventing this cold-water-loving species from infesting the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world, is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
One of the great unsung epics of the modern era is the worldwide diaspora of marine invasive species. Rising water temperatures brought on by global warming have allowed mauve stingers and harmful algae to thrive far beyond their native habitats. Supertankers and cargo ships suck up millions of gallons of ballast water in distant estuaries and ferry jellyfish, cholera bacteria, seaweed, diatoms, clams, water fleas, shrimp and even good-sized fish halfway around the globe.
Thanks to the ballast water discharged by ships entering American ports, Chinese mitten crabs now infest San Francisco Bay, and the Chesapeake’s oysters are preyed upon by veined rapa whelks native to the Sea of Japan. Sixty percent of the species in the St. Lawrence River were introduced by ships that ply the seaway to Lake Ontario. Continue reading ‘Carpe Carp: A proposed remedy for invasive aquatic species’
Dan Kitchen reviews the BCB Mini Work Tool at Toolmonger:
The BCB Mini Work Tool looks like a miniature version of the ATAX tool that Toolmonger
featured a few weeks ago. This credit card-sized piece of stainless steel integrates 11 tools in its simple frame, including a knife, saw, bottle opener, flat screwdriver, and a hole that can be used as a wrench.
BCB Miniwork Tool [BCB Survival USA]
Matthew Wald has a piece in yesterday’s Times about the rules governing the growing piles of waste from nuclear power plants, which the federal government is obliged to store - indefinitely, for all practical purposes. 
What’s most disturbing isn’t actually new - Wald’s explanation of the long-standing setup is troubling enough:
- The federal government has obliged itself to “dispose” of nuclear waste for a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour
- Because it hasn’t taken the waste away on time - nuclear utilities have sued the federal government for their costs in storing the waste until it’s picked up
- it was supposed to have started picking up the waste in 1998
- this is costing about $500 million per year; because these payments are the result of lawsuits - they’re paid out of a “judgment fund,”
According to Wald,
Initially, the Energy Department tried to pay the damages out of the Nuclear Waste Fund, the money collected from the nuclear utilities, plus interest, which comes to about $30 billion. But other utilities sued, saying that if the government did that, there might not be enough money left for the intended purpose, building a repository. So the government now pays the damages out of general revenues.
The damages are large relative to the annual budget of the Energy Department, which is about $25 billion. But the money comes out of the Treasury, not the Energy Department. Under a law passed in the Carter administration, such payments are recognized as obligations of the federal government and no further action by Congress is required to make them.
The money comes out of a federal account called the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay settlements and court-ordered payments. For the last five years, the fund has made payments in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with the average payment being $80,000 to $150,000. In contrast, payments to utilities have been in the tens of millions.
Matthew Wald, “As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises
Perhaps a useful goal here would be, at a minimum, to attribute these costs to the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear power. Strong evidence that, before we see nuclear power as central to our energy problems, we hedge our bets with safer options.
Lawrence Livermore lab explanation of the Yucca Mountain project here.
