"an official policy of premeditated ignorance"

After FEMA started providing trailers to survivors of Katrina and Rita, high levels of formaldehyde were found in many of the trailers. I first learned of this from Dr. Irwin Redlener’s excellent Americans At Risk, which we’ve referred to before, and will again. Suffice it to say for present purposes that

  1. There was formaldehyde in the trailers, in which were housed many people, of every age, male and female, and varied in many ways – although probably very few of them affluent.
  2. The formaldehyde is dangerous –
  3. And its presence in housing – above certain parts-per-million (I believe that’s in air samples – not in the building materials themselves)
  4. When FEMA officials first found out that this was a possibility  – FEMA counsel instructed them not to test – and to take the position that that was not a FEMA function – fearing that with knowledge would come responsibility.

Alas, the index of Americans at Risk does not do it justice – so a discussion of Dr. Redlener’s account will have to wait for an updated post.

“an official policy of premeditated ignorance”

Congressman Henry Waxman’s description of FEMA lawyers instructing FEMA employees not to test trailers for formaldehyde.

Professor David Michaels has been providing excellent coverage of this issue at The Pump Handle, a most-excellent public health blog.

You can read Michaels’ excellent post of July 26th here;

Michaels’ two previous posts here

and here.

Michaels points out that The Washington Post, in an editorial called “FEMA’S TOXIC ENVIRONMENT,” says that the Post tells FEMA director R. David Paulison that “knocking a few heads in FEMA’s general counsel’s office would be a good first step” in sending a strong signal that the beleaguered agency needs to undergo major changes.

The Post is right, of course. Michaels links to an excellent article by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle – citing a number of legal ethics experts – who agree that the FEMA attorneys’ behavior was unethical. These attorneys include Monroe Freedman, perhaps the best-known legal ethics expert in the United States, and Ronald Rotunda, another leading ethics expert. Ask most lawyers to name nationally known legal ethics experts, and most will give you a short list – Freedman and Rotunda would, I think, be on nearly every list.

[Disclaimer: I know and admire Monroe Freedman, and have worked with him on at least one matter].

Professor Rotunda – who has the funniest law professor’s web page that I’ve seen – was assistant majority counsel to the Ervin Committee (for you young people, that was the Senate Select Committee on what’s now referred to as “The Watergate Affair”) – which might mean he was once a Democrat – but he’s also been counsel to Ken Starr while Ken Starr was Special Prosecutor, special counsel to the Department of Defense in the current administration – would, I hope, not be offended if we described his politics as “other-than-leftist.”

My point is that there’s a consensus that government lawyers should not take the position that “we don’t do those tests, because if we did we’d be responsible for knowing about the results and acting on them.” This is not a controversial proposition.

However – will these FEMA lawyers be disciplined? Our best bet is – probably not – unless someone formally brings it to the attention of legal ethics officials in a state in which any of the attorneys is licensed. Because this involves what is probably unethical conduct – but hasn’t resulted in a conviction – although it may have made some people very, very ill – the state licensing agencies (in some states, the bar association) aren’t likely to act on the basis of news reports.

We’re going to have the crack Popular Logistics research team look at the five thousand page document set released by Congressman Waxman’s committee and report back. Stay tuned.

Walmart Flip-Flops reported to cause chemical burns

The following images are reported to have been caused by flip-flops sold by Wal-Mart – which, according to the same report, told the consumer to take the matter up with the Chinese manufacturer.

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If Chinese-made items as innocuous as rubber sandals can cause injury – perhaps, until circumstances change, emergency caches should not contain any items made in China. Let’s hope this manufacturer hasn’t also been making respirators.

Original link.

Via Boing Boing.

Mike Mercurio’s Energy Choices

Chez Mercurio

Meet Mike Mercurio, a friend of mine in Long Beach Island, NJ. The image shows his PV Solar installation and small wind turbine. The turbine sits 34 feet above the ground. The 6-foot blades make the tip 40 feet above the ground.

Mercurio’s wind turbine and solar panels produce power without pollution – without greenhouse gases, mercury, and radioactive wastes. And with an annual bill of $114. Click Here for Treehugger

, or Here for the International Herald Tribune.

His neighbors prefer smog. They prefer the hacking cough of polution related “health effects” and other “externalities” to the gentle whirr of wind power. And electric bill of $2500 per year and $3500 per year, as opposed to his grid-connect charges of $114. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?

Mercurio is a real patriot who believes in intelligent action, not empty words. His wind turbine and photovoltaic solar panels show us how to achieve energy independence, and national security, with clean safe energy, with lower costs, with no pollution.

He should be applauded and emulated, not sued and shut down.

New Blog – Zuzu has returned from the mountaintop!

Our dear friend and pack-member (that’s right, we’re a lot like dogs, in good ways and

bad) Zuzu has started her own blog

, Kindly Pog Mo Thoin.

We’re aware that most Popular Logistics readers excel in obscure languages – and spoken Irish, even taking into account recent efforts to revive it – falls ino the category “obscure.” (And the people who post responses in Aramaic – we have good reasons

for not publishing those comments. I’m not even going to discuss the Esperanto types). But in case your Irish isn’t too strong – this means “Kindly Kiss My —-.”

Never at a loss for words, Zuzu is like Shakespeare’s Beatrice – with a little Emma Goldman a tiny touch of Maureen Dowd mixed in.

So please check out Kindly Pog Mo Thoin.

Vested Interests: allmed.net – EMS and rescue supplies

I’ve been looking for a while for a high-visibility vest – ideally ANSI Class III (visible at – I think it’s 1,250 feet – in poor lighting conditions, like snow or rain, visible from all sides) – that also  had pockets. And had great difficulty finding a garment that was serious about storage and visibility. Lots of great special ops-type vests – in any color you want as long as it’s black.

I’ve been looking every time I find a new EMS or SAR or similar supplied. I  stumbled on  these guys through a Google search (I think for “ANSI” +”vest” +”pocket”).

Here’s a link to the vest. 

And, of course, it comes in any color you want, as long as it’s high-visibility yellow. Trimmed with Scotchlite at virtually every opportunity. The person I spoke with, Mark Robinett, told me that while they don’t make this in-house, it was designed by Dan White of AllMed. So I’ve ordered one – and I’ve got high expectations. (My nefarious scheme is to try to get them to add some Reflexite to each surface, some velcro or dual-lock on the back and/or front for names, assignments, etc).

New Yorkers involved in CERT stuff know that people are often selling “CERT” gear that doesn’t remotely approach the ANSI specs, and is very overpriced.

I’ll try to add photos of the AllMed vest – and the not-so-useful “CERT” vests to this post later.

I did some quick comparisons of AllMed’s gear and prices and my impression is that they’re very  competitive about price – and, while they have a pretty wide range of merchandise – one gets the impression they’re fussy about the brands they stock.

Here’s a link to AllMed.

Note: not that we’re not thoroughly corrupt (we are, after all, New Yorkers, and have a reputation to live up to) – but because we’re going to review this item, we paid for it, as is our current policy.

Community-building meeting scheduled for the local crowd

Those of you living on or around the Parade Grounds in Brooklyn have probably noticed a decline in police presence in our neighborhood this summer. That’s because after two years, the ‘impact zone’ defined by the 70th Precinct to address serious safety issues with a whole lotta beat cops, has moved on to shadier climes. Fair enough, but we still get a lot more visitors than most neighborhoods because of the athletic fields, on top of a thriving core of our very own home-grown

thugs.

Since the end of May, a group of area residents has been working closely with members of the 70th Precinct to try to reverse the spike in criminality that resulted when the impact zone moved on. We’ve been very pleased by the responsiveness of the police. Now we’d like to invite other concerned residents of the area immediately around the Parade Grounds to join us for a community meeting and briefing with the police on Tuesday, July 17th at 7:30 pm in the lobby of 25 Parade Place. The idea is to expand and organize the network of neighbors willing to use their eyes and ears and voices for the welfare of the community. Please help us to spread the word among those who care. Thank you!

Another Canary in China's Coal Mines

Pollution kills 750 thousand per year in China, according to a self-censored World Bank study described in the Independent and on Yahoo News. According to these reports, the Chinese government is suppressing knowledge of the issue, rather than addressing the problem, and the World Bank agreed to suppress the data.

While three quarters of a million people in a population of one point three billion is only six out of ten thousand and is a low percentage of the population, this corresponds to 173 thousand Americans. If 173 thousand Americans were dying each year from pollution, which is slightly more than the 150,000 Americans who die each year from stroke, we might be upset.

The worse things are:

  • The Chinese government is supressing the news, rather than addressing the problem.
  • The Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency, SEPA, and Health Ministry are the agencies suppressing the news.

As China continues to industrialize, as they put an additional 1000 cars on the road each day, things will only get worse.

And according to the World Watch Institute, 16 of the worlds 20 most polluted cities are in China.

Redlener connects the dots –

From Irwin Redlener’s Americans at Risk:

Even if the nation’s intelligence capacity is substantially strengthened and homeland security better assured, these systems will never be perfect. An American city could conceivably experience the nightmare of a nuclear detonation. The essential point is that the quality and extent of survival and recovery, even from a nuclear bomb, are affected by the success of our preparedness and mitigation programs.

The current presidential administration is, of course, now well-known for its argument that it “didn’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” Implicit – by omission – was that the strategy of pre-empting the (hypothetical or fictional) threat of nuclear attack by Iraq would so likely to succeed that it wasn’t necessary to take steps to mitigate or prepare for the effects of a nuclear attack. Continue reading →

Thomas the Child Killer, I mean Tank Engine.

I’m shocked, Shocked, to find the Chinese using lead paints on toys for toddlers.

They put Etheylene Glyclol as a substitute for Glycerin in toothpaste and a few years ago in medications. Ethylene glycol works great as antifreeze, but it’s poisonous in small doses.

In The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, available from Amazon, Elizabeth C. Economy describes “In late July 2001, the fertile Huai River Valley – China’s breadbasket – was the site of an environmental disaster. Heavy rains flooded the river’s tributaries, flushing more than 38 billion gallons of highly polluted water into the Huai. Downstream, in Anhui province, the river water was thick with garbage, yellow foam, and dead fish. … Only seven months earlier, the government had proclaimed its success in cleaning up the Huai. A six-year campaign to rid the region of polluting factories that dumped their wastewater into the river had ostensibly raised the quality of the water in the river and its more than one hundred tributaries to the point that people could once again fish, irrigate their crops, and even drink from the river.”

They lied and their people die.

In Deep Economy, also available on Amazon

, Bill McKibben describes “a trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province – that is she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out.”

What’s one or two girls in a population of one billion three hundred million?

Unofficially HIV Aids follows trade and prostitution. January, 2006, the Chinese government, (www.avert.org/aidschina.htm) reported 650,000 people living with AIDS, down from the 2003 estimate of 840,000, and up from 1989, when AIDS was known as “aizibing,” the “Loving Capitalism Disease” and it was reported at 153 Chinese and 41 foreigners.

If they are correct in their characterization of HIV Aids as the disease of loving capitalism, boy are they in trouble.

Skybuilt Power receives patent for its “MPS” (mobile power station)

We first learned about these from Haninah Levine’s piece in Defense Tech, which had reported that they were under consideration for field use in Iraq

.

skybuilt-power-mps-schematic.jpg

From the firm’s press release:

This is a revolutionary, plug-and play, rapidly deployable, mobile, hybrid solar and wind power system. It can provide power in hours and run for years with very low maintenance and minimal operating costs. It is ideal for disaster relief, Homeland Security, commercial, military, and intelligence applications in any climate worldwide.

Continue reading →