Kris Alexander at Danger Room has a short report and incisive analysis of these attacks, which PEMEX (Mexico’s oil exporting entity) claims will require hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. PEMEX also claims – in my view, not plausibly – that it won’t cause disruptions in exports (and to United States imports).

Photo by Pablo Spencer of the Associated Press.

Flames were visible at least six miles away. Thousands of people were evacuated; two women died of heart attacks.

Mexican authorities told the Associated Press that a note from a leftist group was found next to at least one unexploded device.

From Kris Alexander’s piece in Wired.com’s Danger Room

:

Mexico supplies much of US oil and gas imports. Are higher gas prices on the way? Pemex, Mexico’s state-run oil company, claims that the attacks haven’t disrupted export supplies, but will cost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. With the U.S. economy already on shaky ground because of the sub-prime loan crisis, another such attack that did actually disrupt export oil supplies could have a direct economic impact on the U.S.

Counter-terrorism expert John Robb sees both attacks as a particularily good systempunkt — a point where a series of attacks on key nodes will cause the collapse of the entire system, essentially effects-based operations on the cheap. A few hundred dollars spent on explosives causes millions in damage.

It’s not clear from the underlying Associated Press report, published on MSNBC, whether or not the pipelines are underground or aboveground. Our concern about that detail is that we’re still working up the learning curve in trying to understand the risk of petroleum pipelines. (The “editorial offices” of Popular Logistics are in a roughly .75 square mile area which contain four underground petroleum lines, about which we presently know far too little).

DisasterNewsNet reports that a volunteer organization, Operation Blessing International, has conducted a successful rodent reduction program in 1,158 blocks in New Orleans. The principal tool is a cube shaped toxic rat bait with a flavor/smell agent which, it’s reported, are unattractive to other animals.

From Nancy Hogland’s August 30th piece:

“When residents were forced out of their homes by Hurricane Katrina, most of them grabbed their valuables and pictures. However, what they left behind quickly became what I call a ‘super-sized buffet’ for rats,” said Jody Harrington, director of U.S. disaster relief for OBI.

“The cabinets were stocked with crackers and such and the refrigerators were full of gross, rotten food – everything rats love to munch on. All those abandoned homes became the perfect atmosphere for them to live, eat and reproduce.”

She said because OBI volunteers had already been working with the New Orleans Mosquito and Termite Control Board on a mosquito eradication project, city officials turned to them first for help.

“The city hadn’t been taken over by rats, as some have said, but there were areas where there were very large populations,” Harrington said. “In fact, when we were baiting sewers on Desire Street, a woman standing on the second story of her home saw us and asked what we were doing.

We suppose that in doing shelter-in-place planning, this is a strong argument for making sure that sanitation is planned for any situation which lasts for longer than one day.

I’ll add that our building – 36 units – started composting several years ago. Use has increased so much that we needed to add a second barrel. So the inference I draw is – that in a properly staffed system – either shelter-in-place or in large-scale shelters, if garbage pickup is not happening – it might well be possible to turn most of the rat food into compost.