popular logistics

No Spill Zone has an excellent explanation of the taxonomy, if you will, of oil spills (although not their effects - which would be an immense task, given variation between marine environments and coastal areas):

Alex Spence, the general manager for Seacor Environment Services Middle East, says that to appreciate the work of companies such as his, it is first necessary to understand how they categorise spills.

“We tend to classify spills into three categories – T1, T2, and T3,” he says.

In broad terms, a Tier 1 spill requires only a local response; Tier 2 might demand regional resources and Tier 3 necessitates international assistance.

“A T1 — that would be your first-strike response,” he says. “That would be like if you have a very small fire in a room, picking up a fire extinguisher and putting it out.”

A T2 is “if the whole room catches fire and you alert the fire brigade – and the T3 is if the whole building catches fire”.

A T2 spill can take anything from a couple of days to a week to deal with; a T3 can take months, or even years.

There are, he says, three response options for dealing with oil spills: monitoring and surveillance for light spills, containment and recovery for larger incidents and a combination of containment and spraying of chemical dispersants for the most severe.

Middle East Oil Spill Classifications at the No Spill Zone

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 ¹. 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 ² 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.

1. SFGate.com is, we gather, the on-line presence of the San Francisco Chronicle [↩]
2. written with assistance from Carolyn Jones, Michael Cabanatuan, Rick DelVecchio and John Wildermuth, [↩]

Matthew Wald has this piece on the Times website:

Nov. 4 — The Energy Department has not finished plans to consolidate storage of nuclear bomb fuel and other high-risk materials now spread among numerous sites, even though the department said in 2005 that it would do so within about a year, according to a Government Accountability Office report to be released Monday.As a result, the department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defend additional sites.

The G.A.O. had reported that the Energy Department was putting off making security improvements at some of the storage sites because the sites were due to be phased out. But the new report makes clear that the goal of shutting down some obsolete weapons and research centers, and simplifying the security job by centralizing “special nuclear material,” as bomb fuel is called, has yet to advance from concept to plan, let alone to finished project.

The Energy Department “has completed only two of the eight implementation plans for consolidating and disposing of special nuclear material,” the new report found, and it cited problems with those two plans.

Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA)  makes the case that military activities have had a profound environmental effect on Southern California:

Southern California’s health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity.   Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site - and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?

  PSR-LA is working to ensure the cleanup of the Rocketdyne Laboratory in the Santa Susana Hills above Chatsworth

Military, intelligence, and to some extent, law-enforcement agencies, not without some reason , are exempt from many regulatory schemes. In the first place - there are often no civilian analogues - making regulations less relevant. Even more powerfully, they’re charged with critical and specialized tasks   that might well, in an individual case, or in wartime, outweigh other concerns.

However, as Lord Acton observed, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and the power - especially when masked by official government secrecy - tends to aggregate these decisions.

Fewer than 300 people were killed in the planes on September 11, 2001. The two planes which hit the World Trade Center hit buildings which were owned by the Port Authority of New York  and New Jersey - a bi-state agency. Because they were government-owned - even though most of the tenants were commercial tenants who might have rented from a regular commercial landlord - all sorts of building and fire codes were waived.

via Critical Spacial Practice

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.