popular logistics

The New York Times’ blog about news coverage, The Lede, has a good piece by Patrick J. Lyons about the current Las Vegas ricin incident. “Scary Stuff That Won’t Stay in Vegas” updates the story concisely, and provides some context:

After all, nobody is known to have been hurt so far, though seven people — the room’s occupant, three workers at the motel and three cops — have been sent to hospitals for observation, just in case they might have been exposed to the chemical in question, which was found in a package in the room. Update: The occupant of the room is in critical condition and has been hospitalized for several weeks; it now appears that it was a friend or relative who went to the room on Thursday to retrieve his belongings who found the package and reported it.. The authorities are saying they have no reason to think the episode has anything to do with terrorism.

But this wasn’t just any nasty industrial byproduct, it was ricin — the stuff of mystery novels and cloak-and-dagger schemes. And that makes everybody’s ears prick up.

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.

What’s In Your Sewage? at The Pump Handle

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).

By  Ian Austen  in the Times on November 9th, “Study Find Carcinogens in Water Near Alberta Oil Sands Project,” more evidence of one of the myriad costs and risks that come with the use of fossil fuels:

OTTAWA, Nov. 7 — High levels of carcinogens and toxic substances have been found in fish, water and sediment downstream from Alberta’s huge oil sands projects, according to a new study.

The 75-page report, written by Kevin P. Timoney, an ecologist with Treeline Environmental Research, was commissioned by the local health authority of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, where many residents say they believe the oil sands developments to the south are damaging their health.

Oil sands developments are generally vast open-pit mines that recover a form of tar mixed with sand. That tar, which is formally known as bitumen, is later separated and processed to produce oil. Most of the oil from the Alberta developments is sent to the United States.

Earlier studies by the province of Alberta had dismissed health concerns. And Dr. Timoney’s report, while highly critical of the government, does not make a specific link between the toxic substances and the oil sands. But many Fort Chipewyan residents did on Thursday.

“For years the community has believed that there’s lots of cancer,” said Donna Cyprien, health director of the Nunee Health Authority. “When they drank from the water, there was an oily scum around the cup. We now know there is something wrong.”

Mrs. Cyprien said that the local health board hired Dr. Timoney largely because it had lost faith in Alberta’s provincial health department.

Like Dr. Timoney, scientists who have reviewed his report say further studies are necessary to determine the cause and extent of the problem. But they also expressed concern about what his research had already found. “This could actually be worse, in some respects, than the Exxon Valdez,” said Jeffrey W. Short, a research scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center who has studied the tanker accident that spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Most disturbing, said Dr. Short, was the finding that from 2001 to 2005, concentrations in sediments of a group of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons rose.

“These are substantial increases over and above the natural levels,” said Dr. Short, adding that the hydrocarbons “are notorious carcinogens,” found in tar and tarlike materials. In some cases, they were more than four times recommended limits in the United States. (Canada has no guidelines.)

Dr. Timoney concluded that the town’s treated drinking water was safe, but found high levels of arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in fish, which many people in Fort Chipewyan, especially members of its Native community, rely on for a substantial portion of their diet.

In an e-mail message, Howard May, a spokesman for Alberta’s Department of Health and Wellness, said that the government could not specifically comment on the report because it had not received a copy.

“There is nothing really new in these allegations, we have been looking into them for some two years now,” Mr. May wrote, adding that the government investigation has found “no higher incidence of cancer in Fort Chipewyan than the rest of the province, and we stand by that analysis unless and until we are provided with further evidence.”

Oil, then -unless it’s being used at the well head - after extraction, it needs to be moved somewhere for refining - a process which carries its own risks - stored - and then transported down the supply chain towards end users.  And in each stage of this process, there are risks: in production (the article above provides an illustration). And in each mode of transportation, risks - of trucks overturning, pipelines accidentally or intentionally being ruptured, boats spilling their loads.

We don’t mean to make an argument against  any and all use of petroleum - but that one of the many benefits of reduced consumption (reduced greenhouse gases, reduced cost, reduced air pollution), is a reduction in risks and costs connected to production.

Effect Measure has a good explanation of what’s dangerous about Bisphenol-A. Because it’s so important - and outside of our expertise to paraphrase and summarize - and already so well-written - we’re going to, with apologies to Revere at Effect Measure - reproduce it in its entirety:

You’re in a crowded bar near the airport and your co-worker is trying to tell you something important. She wants you to do something before you drive her car to the garage for her. She is heading out of town. But you can’t hear her over the din from the crowd. It’s too noisy, too much cross talk. Later you discover she was telling you the gas gauge is broken and the tank almost empty. But you know that. After you ran out of gas on the freeway. Now imagine you are a developing fetus. Genes in your nervous system are turning on and off in a precise sequence in response to what’s going on in your developing brain. Your neurons are growing, making new connections, responding to the cues from other parts of the system that are also developing. The signals that coordinate this involve very tiny amounts of chemicals coursing through the blood stream. Hormones, like the the estrogens. But there’s a lot of noise from artificial chemicals that also stimulate cells, but not in response to a coordinated development plan. Chemical noise from the environment. 

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?

[singlepic=136,320,240,,left]  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  [singlepic=137,320,240,,right] 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

Popular Logistics thanks everyone for their words of praise about our predictions - on line and in the neighborhood - about trouble with New York’s petroleum fuel pipelines. Which run, incidentally, more or less directly underneath our editorial offices (and bedroom). Those messages were occasioned by news reports of arrests in a terrorist plot to blow up Kennedy Airport (JFK), its fuel depots, and the Buckeye Pipelines.

In any case, our concern is that we don’t need terrorists for these pipelines to be an alarming risk. Negligence and accident will do just fine.

Plus there’s  the question of what appears to be an alarming incidence of premenopausal breast cancer cases along the pipeline. More as we learn it.