INTERESTING TIMES

Not a surprise but we are not storing fuel.  We figure the roads will be toast also so who needs it?  Might want to top off our propane tanks for the cookstove, though.

“Is there any worse soil in Portland that we could have built on?” she asked.

Wang, an engineer with Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, known as DOGAMI, wrote a report in 2013 that said an earthquake could cause this ground to liquefy, as she had just now demonstrated.

“The risk here is extreme,” she said. After an earthquake, “within 10, 20 seconds, the sand will turn into a thick, sandy soup.”

And that would be bad.

Soil liquefaction, as it’s known to geologists, can exacerbate shaking and destroy roads, buildings and underground pipes. If that happens in Portland, it could devastate supply lines for fuel, electricity and natural gas. It also could mean a major chemical spill into the Willamette River.

What exactly is the problem?

Oregon’s petroleum reserves, along with substations, key pipelines and natural gas storage, are highly concentrated in one stretch along the Willamette River. Scientists now know that stretch of land poses a higher seismic risk than other parts of the city.

DOGAMI modeling for a magnitude-9 earthquake shows most of the petroleum tanks in that area sit on soils the agency considers to have a medium to high probability of liquefaction. The area also is predicted to have very strong shaking.

Read all about it here:
http://pamplinmedia.com/pt/276643

That's a lot of people who can't shower in or cook with the water coming from the faucet. The solution to this pollution is said to be dilution, same as ever, which means people have to wait until enough good water has run through the system to wash out the chemical. The wildlife get no such warning. The symptoms are nausea and vomiting. I haven't found anything about longterm toxicity yet.

Events like this are manageable for populations wealthy enough to purchase bottled water or travel to cleaner digs. For impoverished folks and for the creatures and plants of the land, this is a true crisis.

The leak was a foaming agent used to wash coal, and it went from a 48,000 gallon storage tank straight into the Elk River. The primary component in the foaming agent that leaked is the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (CH3C6H10CH2OH). It has been patented as an air freshener and has a slightly minty odor (another good reason not to use air fresheners). It is used in ~20-25% of coal plans, mainly for "coking coal" which is used for metallurgical purposes, but not for making coal burned to make electricity ("steam coal") which is the lion's share of total coal produced.

The biz owning the leaky tank is called Freedom Industries, and it distributes mining reagents for WV, VA, PA, OH, MD, MN, KY, and MI. In 2008, Freedom Industries was specially selected by Georgia-Pacific Chemicals as a distributor of G-P's Talon brand mining reagents for the states already mentioned. Georgia-Pacific Chemicals is, of course, a subsidiary of Georgia-Pacific, which was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005. Koch is big biz, and should be penalized to assure that they will take better precautions in all their plants in the future.



SOURCES
Fresh Brains sent me this link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/11/west-virginia-chemical-sp_n_4582100.html
National Geographic on the same leak:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140110-4-methylcyclohexane-methanol-chemical-spill-west-virginia-science/
Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/11/1268990/-Freedom-Industries-Has-Ties-to-Koch-Brothers
Koch Industries
http://www.kochind.com/

ENERGY LITERACY
CONSERVATION
RESILIENCE
RELOCALIZATION
FAMILY PLANNING
BEAUTY
BIODIVERSITY
( the Post Carbon Institute, that is )

This site gives the history and will be providing a blow by blow as this dam on the White Salmon River in Washington is removed. The boaters are excited because dams are always built where there is substantial gradient and sufficient constriction to make construction easy. Which means there's whitewater under there. Good whitewater.

This 60 minutes program is from last November, but it's a good overview of what's happening.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7054210n

http://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2011/06/rooftop_solar_panels.html
"rooftop revolution"
( notes )

I don't believe the powers when they tell me to panic. And I definitely don't believe them when they tell me NOT to panic. I think back to 9/11, when all those people in burning skyscrapers, just hit by airplanes, were told to remain calm and stay at their desks. The ones who decided for themselves that the situation was fubar and ran down the stairs were the ones who survived.

For this Japanese quake and tsunami the media machine has been spewing something constantly. Panic. Don't panic. Nothing to worry about. All under control. Oooops, out of control. Whoopsie.

It's up to us to decide what to do for ourselves.

Japan reportedly to rate nuclear crisis at highest level
By Chico Harlan, Monday, April 11, 9:30 PM

TOKYO — Japanese authorities planned Tuesday to raise their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the Kyodo news agency.

A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-to-raise-rating-of-nuclear-crisis-to-highest-level/2011/04/11/AFxrFEND_story.html?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

Texas and the Republicans are dead set against requiring utilities to generate x power per y emissions, but it sounds like a good idea to me. I'd like to breathe good air, please. I don't want anyone else in my family to become asthmatic because of coal burning in their region. And as for global warming, well, it's not easy to pin down and it's hard for me to get as excited about it as some people do. I do think our climate is changing and that we have increased the rate of change by our burning of fossil fuels. I am not sure that we can change that rate of change now that it has been initiated. But I'm diverging from the subject, which is that the Obama administration, specifically the EPA, is moving forward to enforce the Clean Air Act after Congress has failed to take any action on the issue. They've begun to take on specific state officials in the state of Texas who refuse to enforce federal laws.

I am going to begin to make posts in defense of Obama. Somebody needs to.
( Notes from a 12/23/10 Wall St Journal article )

I didn't know what this dance was until just now. Very cool!!