New York Times/AP: Urgent Marine Corps requests for armored vehicles lost, refused; Congress misled about reasons

In earlier wars, failures to supply troops were the basis of scandals. Shouldn’t they be now? From yesterday’s New York Times:

Hundreds of United States marines may have been killed or wounded by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps officials refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official, accuses the service of “gross mismanagement” in delaying the deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

Maj. Manuel Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman, called the study “predecisional staff work” and said it would be inappropriate to comment on it.

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the vehicles, known as MRAPs, according to the study. Authorities in the United States saw the vehicles, which can cost as much as $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.

After Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon’s No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.

The vehicles weigh as much as 40 tons and have been effective at protecting American forces from roadside bombs, the weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents. Only four American service members have been killed by such bombs while riding in MRAPs; three of those deaths occurred in older versions of the vehicles.

The study’s author, Franz J. Gayl, catalogs what he says were flawed decisions and missteps by midlevel managers in the Marines that occurred well before Mr. Gates replaced Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2006.

Mr. Gayl, the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, has clashed with his superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year.

Among its findings, the Jan. 22 study concluded that budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by roadside bombs in late 2004 and early 2005, and were convinced that the best solution was adding more armor to Humvees. Humvees, even with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the powerful explosives used by insurgents.

The study also found that an urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by Brig. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of them. The Marines could not continue to take “serious and grave casualties” caused by roadside bombs when a solution was commercially available, wrote General Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005, and who has since been promoted to major general.

Mr. Gayl cites documents showing General Hejlik’s request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marines’ supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends.

The study says Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, was not told of the gravity of General Hejlik’s request and the real reasons it was shelved. That resulted in General Conway giving “inaccurate and incomplete” information to Congress about why buying MRAPs was not forcefully pursued.

The Combat Development Command, which decides what gear to buy, treated the MRAP as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans for equipment that was more mobile and fit into the Marines Corps’ vision as a rapid reaction force, the study said.

Mr. Gayl writes that “if the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005” in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time “hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented.”

“Study Faults Delay of Armored Trucks to Iraq,” The New York Times , 17 February 2008.

Toolmonger: What Do You Get The Last Guy On Earth For His Birthday?

Eric Dykstra at Toolmonger has posted about the ATAX

– a new type of multitool – although – I’m guessing – it has its origins in credit-card sized flat or or flatt-ish multitools. Learn a bit more, and the design innovations seem quite impressive – not merely a larger version of the smaller think.

[photopress:ATAX_designed_by_Ron_Wood.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Continue reading →

League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn Want to ask the Candidates about Energy and Global Warming

The League of Conservation Voters, LCV, and Move On.Org are asking people to urge TV news reporters to ask the candidates about Global Warming, Climate Change, and Energy. People at LCV and MoveOn have noticed that the candidates were asked about Global Warming six times. They were asked about extra-terrestrials three times.Click here, for the Move On page, here , for the League of Conservation page.

Move On and LCV have also partnered with local groups like Environment New Jersey in this effort (click here)

Popular Logistics endorses this effort. Before reviewing the questions I’d like to ask, I would like to note, for the record, an observation.

The debate Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008, between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, sponsored by CNN, the LA Times, and Politico, and broadcast on CNN, like everything broadcast on CNN, provided opportunities for commercials. The advertisers included the coal industry.

Here are the questions I’d like to ask:

Given the urgency of global warming, will you commit to take action on the issue in your first 100 days in office? If yes, what specifically would you do?
Will you commit invest in and deploy clean renewable energy technologies, including solar, wind, geothermal, marine current, cogeneration and conservation?
Will you commit to cutting our use of old fashioned or problemmatic technologies, including coal, oil and nuclear — which are neither clean nor renewable?
Will you push a mandatory cap on emissions that achieves at least a 20 percent reduction by the end of next decade?
Will you call a major international summit on global warming in your first 60 days and work to sign a new international treaty by the end of your first year?

We want to know where all the candidates stand on global warming, climate change, and energy, and what they would do as President.

We also want to know how CNN can be expected to ask tough questions about energy policy, global warming, and climate change when it relies on advertising revenue from an energy industry which by it’s existence, is triggering global warming and climate change? Should the debates be sponsored by non-commercial interests?

NRC Failing in Oversight

Janet Tauro, of the NJ Environmental Federation, raises a disturbing question — is the NRC as incompetant as FEMA?

The NRC’s mission is to protect citizens, not put up roadblocks to a full and open airing of safety concerns, but as Janet Tauro writes in the Asbury Park Press,

“It should not have been citizens who made public the safety problems at Oyster Creek. It should have been the NRC.

It took a whistleblower who took pictures of a bunch of sleeping guards at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania to wake up Congress about NRC’s lackadaisical approach to citizens’ safety concerns. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, announced recently that an investigation by the Office of Inspector General that found “questionable decisions by the commission with respect to nuclear power plant relicensing” also will be under review.

Some of these Questionable Decisions:

The NRC’s refusal to evaluate the terrorist risk of elevated fuel pools jam-packed with thousands of pounds of highly radioactive fuel rods,
The lack of a workable evacuation plan,
The transfer of the state’s most senior nuclear expert after he publicly chastised NRC officials for not imposing penalties on Exelon after the department discovered safety commitments were not being honored,
The discovery of radioactive Cesium in soil samples outside of the plant,
Massive fish kills in Barnegat Bay, and
The mysterious emptying of water collection buckets shortly before NRC and state inspectors arrived to draw samples to try to determine the source of leaks within the drywell, the reactor’s steel containment vessel.

In addition, Rep. Dingell’s committee might review:

Transcripts from our precedent-setting hearing before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board and decide whether preferential treatment was given to Exelon and the NRC, while NJ Environmental Federation’s attorney and expert were badgered and interrupted.
Judge Anthony J. Baratta’s minority opinion that affirmed our coalition’s contention that there is no analytical proof that the drywell meets current safety standards, and that those standards must be met as a condition of relicensing.
The NRC’s attempt to change the basis of Exelon’s current licensing, which stipulates adherence to accepted engineering standards for safety. When an NRC inspector affirmed that the drywell did not meet minimum safety standards for thickness, the NRC tried at the last minute to change its rules, saying that it wasn’t necessary, just preferable, to meet those standards.

The NRC must regulate nuclear power, to guarantee that nuclear power plants are operated safely. Or the NRC should be shut down, and every nuclear power plant as well.

The Wolf Inside

This is not, strictly speaking, emergency preparedness, public health, or environmental policy. But it’s in the intersection. Click Here.

An old Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A battle is raging inside me … it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The old man fixed the children with a firm stare. “This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather,

“Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee replied: “The one you feed.”

Nuclear Power – Not Green, Not Cheap. But It’s A Security Nightmare.

This Letter to the Editor, written by Larry, was published in the Asbury Park Press , Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 (Click Here).

The full text is reproduced below.

Nuclear power too dangerous.

Nuclear power is not green or cheap. It is a security nightmare.

When you look at mining, milling and transporting nuclear fuel, nuclear power emits four to five times as much carbon dioxide as wind and solar. The fuel cycle also creates massive amounts of radioactive waste — 100,000 metric tons per plant per year. Thermal pollution from Oyster Creek kills fish, shellfish and amphibians. And radioactive wastes must be isolated from the environment for a long time.

No new nuclear power plants were built in the United States after electricity was deregulated. That’s not because of the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, and not because of the protests against nuclear power or rational fears of the technology, but because of the time and expense to build new nuclear power plants. When you look at the capital costs of building nuclear plants, and add the costs of insurance, evacuation plans, security systems and government regulation, nuclear power becomes too expensive to compete.

So in 2005, the federal government mandated $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear power plant and provided loan guarantees of 80 percent of a plant’s cost, including overruns. Taxpayers pay for those tax breaks and loan guarantees. That does not make it cost-effective; it just shifts the burden.

Nuclear power is a security nightmare. If the Sept. 11 killers had crashed one of the hijacked planes into Oyster Creek rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, much of the Jersey Shore would be like the area around Chernobyl — condemned, abandoned and uninhabitable.

If we were smart, we would move forward quickly on offshore wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, ocean current turbines and conservation.

Larry Furman

Timex Ironman instructions: or, how to make a good product useless and frustrating

I’ve recently purchased a new Timex Ironman. The old one – about a year and a half old, gave up the ghost. I thought I’d send it in for service, but in the meantime decided to buy another to use to track laps, time cardio time, and – what was the other thing? – show up places on time.

The printed instructions which came with the watch are tiny, and cram many languages into one sheet. Not readable. (No microscope available).

Download the manual. You can look at all of the Timex manuals here

. After nearly an hour – I was able to read enough of the oddly-formatted Acrobat file to set the time. (took printing at least six overlapping sheets). I’m not sure I’m man enough to try to learn the rest of the watch’s functions.

Cryptome/Eyeball Series on Buckeye pipelines

Anyone interested in the issues discussed at Popular Logistics is likely to find Cryptome.org an – and its affiliated sites – invaluable resources. One of the – The Eyeball Series – treats “Eyeball” as a verb rather than as a noun – and provides visual information – some declassified, some acquired as open-sour material. Our recent piece about

New Jersey’s Peach Bottom nuclear power plant relied on the Eyeball Seriea. Here is one recent posting in the Eyeball-Series sites we think you might want to see.

The JFK Airport Fuel tanks, acquired in June, 2007;

The Buckeye Pipeline Co. facility is seen in Linden, N.J., Saturday, June 2, 2007. Four Muslim men were foiled from carrying out a plot to destroy John F. Kennedy International Airport, kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe by blowing up a jet fuel artery that runs through populous residential neighborhoods, authorities said Saturday. The pipeline, owned by Buckeye Pipeline Co., takes fuel from the facility in Linden to the airport. [singlepic=246,320,240,,](AP Photo/Home News Tribune, Mark R. Sullivan) ** NEWARK STAR LEDGER OUT **

Here’s a marker for what’s called an “appearance” by underground infrastructure – marked and accessible relatively close to ground level – and in Howard Beach, not far from the NYC airports.[singlepic=245,320,240,,left]

More images – click on the thumbnails for large- high resolution images – from this series:

The pipelineSthere are four of them, roughly parallel on most of teir journeys from New Jersey inthrough Brooklyn and Queeens.

New York experiments with remote sensing to monitor bridges

NYSERDA (the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) and the federal government have been testing a remote sensing system on Bridge 1027260. Like Jean Valjean, this bridge has no name. [photopress:kerop.jpg,thumb,alignright] And you can tell that it’s not in New York City, because if it were here, the City Council, whose power is limited to the power to name public objects and thoroughfares – might have already named each lane and approach ramp.

Professor Kerop Janoyan and a team of graduate students from Clarkson University have been monitoring their equipment from a work barge near the bridge. (Since they seem to be working on an exposed, unheated barge, perhaps the bridge and its appurtenances should be named for them

. Popular Logistics will send a correspondent in person to any naming ceremony).

We learned about this from Matthew Wald’s piece in the Times: Continue reading →

The Energy/Corruption axis: violence, oligarchy in Nigeria

Lydia Polgreen of the Timeswon the George Polk Award in 2006 for her reporting from Africa. The following passage is from an article filed from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, last November.

The violence that has rocked the Niger Delta in recent years has been aimed largely at foreign oil companies, their expatriate workers and the police officers and soldiers whose job it is to protect them. Hundreds of kidnappings, pipeline bombings and attacks on flow stations and army barracks have occurred in the past two years alone.

Toddlers seized for ransom or political compliance

But these days the guns have turned inward, and open battles have erupted with terrifying frequency on the pothole-riddled streets of this ramshackle city. The origins of the violence are as murky and convoluted as the mangrove swamps that snake across the delta, one of the poorest places on earth. But they lie principally in the rivalry among gangs, known locally as cults, that have ties to political leaders who used them as private militias during state and federal elections in April, according to human rights advocates, former gang members and aid workers in the region.

“What is happening now cannot be separated from politics,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. “The cults are part and parcel of our politics. They have become part of the system, and we are paying in blood for it.”

The cults go by names that veer from the chilling to the improbable – like the Black Axe, the Klansmen, the Icelanders, the Outlaws and the Niger Delta Vigilante. Separate but not entirely distinct from the militant groups that have attacked the oil industry in the past, they represent a new, worrisome phase in a region that has been convulsed by conflict since oil was discovered here in 1956.

Since democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999, politicians across the country have used cults to intimidate opponents and rig votes. A Human Rights Watch report published in October

concluded that the political system was so corroded by corruption and violence that, in some places, it resembled more a criminal enterprise than a system of government. The April elections were so brazenly rigged in some areas and so badly marred by violence that international observers said the results were not credible.

Nowhere is political violence more severe than here in the Niger Delta, where control over state government means access to billions of dollars in oil revenues and control of enough patronage for an army.

Lydia Polgreen, “Gangs Terrorize Nigeria’s Vital Oil Region,” The New York Times, 9 November 2007.

We see two clear implications:

First, the share of American oil-market dollars which find their way to Nigeria aren’t doing the Nigerians a bit of good;

Second, because oligarchy and instability are the norm in energy-resource rich countries, it’s unwise to rely on Nigeria as a contributor to global oil markets. Ready money won’t necessarily buy oil from a country in chaos, especially if someone blows up the wells.

Airport Security – A Work in Progress

None

Al Gore, Nobel Laureate

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

Full text: Click Here:

Solar Boats – up to 60 passengers and 11 knots in Europe; NYC ferry service suspended

The Swiss Firm MW Line makes solar boats that are ferrying people around lakes and rivers in Switzerland, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The only backup power, apparently, is on-shore charging from the grid. They’re also the shipbuilder for the PlanetSolar project which plans to have a solar-only craft in the water ready for a two-person, 120-day around-the-world trip in 2009.

The New York Times reported on January 4th that New York Water Taxi, the only operator of Queens/Manhattan and Brooklyn/Manhattan ferry service has cancelled service for the winter – largely because of fuel price increases. That notwithstanding a monthly subsidy from the real estate developers who established Schaefer’s Landing, a high-end project in Williamsburgh. A ferry powered by photovoltaic cells wouldn’t be directly affected, if at all, by petroleum price increases. Given the relatively short distances involved, on-board solar panels and batteries could be supplemented with electricity dockside. If that electricity is generated via wind (often best captured on or near water) or solar, ferry operating costs could be insulated from petroleum price fluctuations.

After violent clash, New Orleans Council Votes to raze public housing

Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton reported last week in the Times that:

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Advocates for public housing residents contended that HUD plan would not provide housing for all of the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Katrina, almost all of them black.

The Council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately and to rebuild all of the public housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said the Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

Continue reading →

Death on the Marathon – Risk of dying is twice as high when driving

Marathons may save lives by reducing automobile traffic:

Worried about dropping dead if you run a marathon? Researchers in Canada say you can put your mind at ease. The risk of dying on a marathon course is twice as high if you drive it than if you run it, they find.

In fact, they conclude, marathons may actually save lives: more people would die in traffic accidents if the race course had not been closed to vehicles on marathon day. (Nor was there any spillover of extra deaths on alternative routes.) Their paper is being published Friday in The British Medical Journal.

“For each death in a marathon, two motor-vehicle crash deaths were averted,” said Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and the lead author of the new study. “It’s riskier if you decide to drive your car around on a Sunday morning than if you go out and run.”

As might be expected, marathon directors were pleased.

Continue reading →