popular logistics

Ken Belson of the Times reported in June that state investigators had “suggested … ways that Consolidated Edison and the New York City Fire Department can better coordinate their response to gas leaks.”

After a seven-month investigation, the Public Service Commission is recommending that the utility ask firefighters to remain until safe conditions are restored, improve the way information about gas leaks is shared and set parameters for ordering evacuations.

The Fire Department and Con Edison were criticized for how they handled the deadly explosion, at a house in Sunnyside, on Nov. 21. The Fire Department said it did nothing wrong when it left after checking a report of a gas odor because Con Edison officials had taken control of the situation. The utility said it acted appropriately because it did not have information suggesting that any of the people in the houses in the area were in danger.

A 69-year-old woman, Kunta Oza, who lived at 48-19 41st Street, died a day after being burned in the explosion.

Con Edison, which said it followed its established procedures for dealing with gas leaks on the day of the explosion, has since improved its protocols, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

“We’ve worked closely with the Fire Department with respect to improving procedures for responding to gas complaints, maintaining emergency personnel presence on site and coordinating evacuations when necessary,” said the spokesman, Michael Clendenin.

Con Edison has already implemented some of the “actions to improve safety” that were recommended by the Public Service Commission. On Wednesday, staff investigators discussed their findings from the explosion at a commission meeting in Albany. The investigation is complete, but the report has not yet been released.

But Kenneth P. Thompson, a lawyer who is representing Mrs. Oza’s family in a civil suit against Con Edison, said the investigators’ findings showed that “Con Ed was negligent and caused Mrs. Oza’s death.” The report, he said, includes details about rusted gas pipes.

“Con Ed had a duty to fix that pipe, and that it wasn’t on their priority list shows they were negligent,” Mr. Thompson said. Mrs. Oza’s family is seeking $100 million in damages from Con Edison.

Officials for Con Edison said the utility did not comment on pending lawsuits.

Councilman Eric N. Gioia, who represents Sunnyside, said the commission had ignored the destruction caused by the explosion and should penalize Con Edison. (The commission did not assess penalties as part of the investigation.)

“The Public Service Commission continues to confirm our worst fears that they are little more than a public shield for Con Ed’s behavior instead of being the watchdog they need to be,” Mr. Gioia said. “Whether it’s getting electrocuted, steam pipe explosions or this, at most, the Public Service Commission gives them a slap on the wrist.”

Con Ed Urged to Improve Its Response to Gas Leaks, June 19, 2008.

Interestingly, the Public Service Commission entitled its press release

GAS DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES IMPROVE SAFETY RECORD
-Effort Underway to Further Improve Safety Performance-

On the same day that it expanded the definition of “major” system failure so that it means a system failure for 10% or more of Con Ed’s customers a maximum fine of $10 million, and a maximum of three incidents per year. “PSC Redefines Major Outages for Con Edison.” Have three major incidents - and the fourth, fifth and sixth - and every later one - are on the house. - Con Ed admits to having 3.176 million customers (See Con Ed Fact Sheet here) - so the message here is - try to keep the system failures to 300,000 customers or less - but if things get very bad - you’ll never have to pay more than $30 million in fines.

This doesn’t seem like a particularly effective deterrent.

See also:

Queens Crap Blog coverage of Con Edison issue(s)

New York Sun coverage of Con Ed

Good news from one of our local fire companies, Ladder 102:

From A.M N.Y. Newsday:

Nearly three years after two New York City firefighters jumped from a burning building and plunged to their deaths, a 24-year FDNY veteran Monday became the first to use a widely hailed safety device to escape from a Bro klyn house fire that almost engulfed him. Raymond Pollard, 50, of Brooklyn, rappelled away from searing flames that had trapped him near a fourth-floor window of an apartment building on Willoughby Avenue, fire officials said. The fire was reported at 3:41 a.m. Pollard drove the second unit to arrive at the scene, Ladder Company 102 from Bedford Avenue.

Within 10 minutes, officials said, Pollard broke three fourth-floor windows facing the street and entered the building to look for occupants.

When he moved to the hallway, fire surged up the stairway and over his head, blocking his exit. He moved to the next room, where the fire forced him to retreat to the window.

“Just as the fire was blowing over his head, he took the hook out and jammed it into the windowsill” said Stephen Raynis, safety command battalion chief.

Pollard rappelled two feet below the ledge and firefighters slid a bucket ladder towards him and lowered him to safety, Raynis said.

Around 5:50 a.m., the roof collapsed onto the fourth floor.

Pollard, who declined to be interviewed, was treated for second-degree burns on his left hand at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, officials said. Three other firefighters suffered minor injuries.

The emergency device, called a personal safety system, was developed by FDNY members in the wake of the deaths of Lt. Curtis Meyran and firefighter John Bellew, who jumped from a window of a burning Bronx building in January 2005, when they could not find the fire escape. Four other firefighters who also leapt from that building were critically injured.

The lifesaving invention consists of a forged aluminum anchor hook that can penetrate brick, a 50-foot rope, a descending device operated by a trigger, a carabiner, and a waist belt with leg loops.

Since January 2006, it has been distributed to about 11,500 FDNY members, including all 8,500 firefighters, officials said.

Fire marshals deemed the fire suspicious and are investigating.

Laura Rivera, Newsday/A.M. N.Y. , “FDNY: Rope device saves firefighters life“

This is what the system looks like:

[photopress:exo_breakdown.jpg,full,centered]

Image via All Hands Safety.

If you’re in need of an explanation - Lindsay Beyerstein has already supplied it here.

This is the first of what we hope will be a group of articles about the costs of transporting liquid petroleum products (heating oil, gasoline, jet fuel, etc.). We’re going to start with this incident because the reporters and multimedia staff of SFGate.com ((SFGate.com is, we gather, the on-line presence of the San Francisco Chronicle)). did such an excellent job of explaining how this particular incident happened on April 29, 2007. Their multi-media illustration of the events - “How the Crash Happened” can be found here.

Here’s an excerpt from Demian Bulwa and Peter Fimrite’s piece ((written with assistance from Carolyn Jones, Michael Cabanatuan, Rick DelVecchio and John Wildermuth, )) published the same day

The single-vehicle crash occurred on the lower roadway when the tanker, loaded with 8,600 gallons of unleaded gasoline and heading from a refinery in Benicia to a gas station on Hegenberger Road in Oakland, hit a guardrail at 3:41 a.m.

Engineers said the green steel frame of the I-580 overpass and the bolts holding the frame together began to melt and bend in the intense heat

– and that movement pulled the roadbed off its supports.

California Highway Patrol spokesman Trent Cross said the driver of the tanker, James Mosqueda, 51, of Woodland (Yolo County), was traveling too fast in a 50 mph zone when his truck overturned and burst into flames.

Photograph by Mark Costantini/San Francisco Chronicle. More images here.

Mosqueda, an employee of Sabek Transportation in San Francisco for 10 months, got out of the truck on his own after it overturned and hailed a taxi that took him to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, witnesses and police said.

He has been transferred to the burn unit at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco, where his father said he was “doing OK” this afternoon, having sustained burns on his face, neck and hands. The family expected Mosqueda to remain hospitalalized two or three more days.

- snip -

Oakland firefighters, the first public safety workers on the scene, arrived with two engines at 3:55 a.m., Capt. Cedric Price said.

“We didn’t know it was a tanker truck that was involved. As soon as that was established we immediately upgraded to a large scale incident response team and added two more engines and two trucks,” Price said.

Firefighters immediately noticed the upper connector ramp was buckling and seven minutes after they arrived — at 4:02 a.m. – it collapsed, Price said. Now there were no more structures threatened, the firefighters’ approach shifted.

“With no structures or lives in jeopardy and with 8,000 gallons of flammable fuel involved, you’re basically better off letting it burn itself out,” said Price.

Firefighters used only water to control the blaze, which took about two hours, he said. Had there been lives at risk, firefighters would have used foam to fight the blaze, but it would have run off into the nearby Bay water, polluting it.

“That this didn’t happen on a weekday morning might have been the only beauty of it,” said Price.

With the help of protective gear and breathing devices, firefighter exposure to the fumes was minimal, according to Price. A total of 29 Oakland Fire Department personnel were on scene as well as one engine from Emeryville. A smaller crew of Oakland firefighters remained there through the early evening to watch for potential dangers.

“Tanker fire destroys part of MacArthur Maze | 2 freeways closed near Bay Bridge”

We’re trying to learn how many of these incidents there are a year - and how many people get hurt. Apart from the risk to life - the risk to structures seems so great that we’d want to encourage great caution in transporting any form of petroleum fuel.

And take this sort of risk into account when we decide how much of it we’re going to use.

Fire. Dog hides in tub. Not for water - but to breathe air through drainpipe.  An old firefighter’s trick, apparently.

Coverage via neatorama.  We made up the part about Congress. Our libel counsel told us not to lose any sleep over it; truth is, after all, a defense.

Original Newsday article.

Via Arbroath (to Neatorama).

Paul Rega at Project Disaster reports:

10/2/07: Five workers at a hydroelectric plant outside Georgetown, Colo., were killed on Tuesday when a chemical fire trapped them in a water tunnel where they were working, officials said.Rescue workers in the mountain town had been in contact with the trapped workers earlier on Tuesday afternoon, and they were initially thought to be alive and uninjured. But afterward contact was lost, and rescue teams from the nearby Henderson Mine discovered the bodies.

“It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened here,” said Kathleen Gaubatz, the director of emergency management for Clear Creek County. “We’ve never had anything happen like this before. This is incredibly disappointing.”

Ms. Gaubatz said the workers were at the bottom of a 3,000-foot-long tunnel that carries water to the hydroelectric plant from a reservoir. They were coating the four-foot-wide tunnel with epoxy sealant when the fire broke out, she said.

A few weeks back, my friend and neighbor Gary Osgood explained Wikipedia’s vetting process; I had only the notion - from mainstream media - that whoever posted last posted loudest.

[singlepic=46,320,240,,] From Wikipedia’s Firefighting Page.
Turns out that the peer-reviewed and featured pieces have been subject to pretty vigorous editing and fact-checking. It’s a small percentage, that are fully vetted, but the number that have useful starting points. As Gary points out in his Wikipedia user profile,

As overwhelming [as] the dreck may be in Wikipedia, one can still type that word into Wikipedia’s search box and get an answer that stumbles toward the truth, leaving the reader with at least a little clue. That small miracle still happens more often that not.

And often there’s a bit of redundancy - for instance, two entries on Prospect Park, both good - Gary has contributed to one, and is the principal contributor to the entry on Aymar Embury II.

I hadn’t realized until today the extent and number of the firefighting resources. Here’s a sample from the excellent entry on Palm Beach, Florida’s emergency responders:

In 2004 the County Commission approved a resolution allowing for funding for the Fire-Rescue Communications Center to come out of the General Fund instead of the Fire-Rescue budget. This change meant that now any city that wanted to be dispatched by Fire-Rescue could do so without having to negotiate a price and a contract, since all taxpayers were paying for it anyway. The concept behind this was to create a “Regionalized Dispatch Center” where the closest unit could be dispatched to a call, regardless of municipal boundaries. This was initially met with opposition from a few cities, citing that this construed “Double Taxation”, as they were already providing dispatch services to their own departments yet their citizens were being taxed for the Countywide system. Recently, more and more cities are coming into the new system.

This is typical of the entry: concise, and addresses to complex logistical issues, how the political process addresses and resolves the problem. The principal drafter of the entry is, it appears, an active serving member of the PBCFR, has also provided the entry “Quint (fire apparatus),” which is a type of “apparatus that serves the dual purpose of an engine and a ladder truck.”

There’s much more on this and related subject in Wikipedia - and I’ll try to point them out in future posts. wpfslogo.jpg
If you’d like a good starting point - it might be at The Wiki Project:FireService.