CAR AND BUS COLLISION IN OREGON CITY, OREGON SENDS THE CAR DRIVER TO THE HOSPITAL. 2 OF THE 33 CHILDREN ON BOARD SUFFERED MINOR INJURIES

CAR AND BUS COLLISION IN OREGON CITY, OREGON SENDS THE CAR DRIVER TO THE HOSPITAL.  2 OF THE 33 CHILDREN ON BOARD SUFFERED MINOR INJURIES

 February 6, 2015

OREGON CITY, Ore. (KOIN 6) — A school bus filled with elementary students collided with a car in Oregon City Friday morning, sending the car’s driver to the hospital and leaving a number of kids with bumps and bruises.

Clackamas County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Kruse said the bus was stopped at a light at Country Village Drive and was about to turn onto Maplelane Road when a silver car on Maplelane hit the bus while trying to change lanes.

The car was significantly damaged. The driver was the only person in the car.

The school bus was carrying Redland Elementary students — 33 children in all, also less than originally estimated — at the time of the crash, according to Kruse.

No one on the bus required immediate transport, though several were treated on scene as emergency workers attempted to reunite the children with their parents.

Ryan Watkins said he was on his way to pick up his wife and run some errands when he saw there was a crash between a car and a school bus.

His wife texted him their daughter, Emily, was on the bus. He got out of his car and ran to the bus.

First responders, he said, “did a good job of getting there and taking care of everything.”

Firefighters first checked the driver of the car and the kids on the bus. The car’s driver was taken to the hospital by ambulance, and since the kids weren’t seriously hurt they were allowed to stay on the bus.

Two children were eventually taken to the hospital with reportedly minor injuries, but the main reason for their transport had more to do with a difficulty in locating their parents, according to CCSO.

Parents had to show IDs and confirm their child’s name in order to get them off the bus, and the firefighters escorted each child off the bus and to their parents.

Too many collisions between school buses; can the drivers see the tall, huge, yellow-colored buses?  Perhaps it is time to change the color of the buses and turn them bright red.  We believe it will help reduce the crushes, as some drivers have become desensitized to the yellow color of the school buses.

Design Failure Caused the Mount Polley Disaster, one of the biggest Canadian Environmental and/or Geotechnical Disasters in Modern History

 

 

 

Design Failure Caused the Mount Polley Disaster, one of the biggest Canadian Environmental and/or Geotechnical Disasters in Modern History

February 6, 2015

It’s been nearly six months since the tailings storage facility (TSF) at Imperial Metals’ (TSX:III) Mount Polley copper-gold mine was breached, releasing tailings into the surrounding area. However, the public is only now receiving answers about what went wrong.

The Mount Polley Independent Expert Engineering and Review Panel, which is comprised of three geotechnical experts and was formed on the day of the breach, released its final report on the cause on Friday, noting that “the breach was the result of a failure in the foundation of the embankment, a failure that occurred in a glaciolacustrine (GLU) layer of the embankment’s foundation.”

That might sound confusing, but a recent CBC article provides a good breakdown of the report, explaining that, put simply, the disaster was caused mainly by design failure. Specifically, the design of the TSF “failed to take into account the complexity of the unstable underlying glacial and pre-glacial layers under the retaining wall.”

While not initially a problem, the instability of those layers became an issue as the TSF grew more and more full. Ultimately, the weight of the material in the TSF caused them to give way, with the breach being the result.

Elaborating to CBC, Jack Caldwell, an expert on tailings dams, said that Knight Piesold, the engineering and consulting firm that designed the TSF, knew what material the TSF was built on, but “misinterpreted … test results and didn’t really understand the nature of the strength, and the nature of how it could get weaker.”


According to the panel, that all means the breach was not caused by human intervention; regulatory oversight was also not the problem. Indeed, it emphasizes that inspections of the TSF would not have stopped it from failing. Imperial Metals is unsurprisingly pleased with the news, and said in a statement released on Friday that the panel’s determination of the cause of the breach matches the results of an investigation conducted by Mount Polley Mining, the mine’s operator.

Of course, key questions now are whether other TSFs may also be ticking time bombs, and what can be done to prevent future TSFs from not being built propertly. On that note, the panel includes in its report seven recommendations. 

They are as follows: 

• Use a phased approach to implement the best available technology at new and existing TSFs. 
• Improve corporate governance at companies looking to operate TSFs. 
• Expand the requirements for permits for TSFs. 
• Use independent tailings review boards more frequently. 
• Assess current TSFs in the province and determine whether they are at risk. 
• Push the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia to put together guidelines aimed at improving site characterization for tailings dams. 
•  Improve safety guidelines for TSFs.

At close of day Friday, Imperial Metals’ share price was up 6.04 percent, at $8.95. Prior to the breach, it was sitting at $16.80, and immediately after it was at $9.70. The company said Friday that it “continue to make good progress” in repairing the damage done by the breach.

THE FAILURE OF THE MOUNT POLLEY DAM: A ‘dangerous game’ at Mount Polley preceded disaster, according to senior engineer

 

Before the breach

 

After the breach

THE FAILURE OF THE MOUNT POLLEY DAM: A ‘dangerous game’ at Mount Polley preceded disaster, according to senior engineer

February 6, 2015

The Mount Polley mine disaster is an environmental disaster in the Cariboo region of central British Columbia, Canada, that began 4 August 2014 with a breach of the Imperial Metals-owned Mount Polley copper and gold mine tailings pond, releasing its water and slurry with years worth of mining waste into Polley Lake. The spill flooded Polley Lake, its outflow Hazeltine Creek, and continued into nearby Quesnel Lake and Cariboo Creek. 

By 8 August the four square kilometres sized tailings pond was empty. Water tests showed elevated levels of selenium, arsenic and other metals similar to historical tests before the disaster. The cause of the dam break has been investigated with a final report published 31 January 2015. Imperial Metals had a history of operating the pond beyond capacity since at least 2011.

The spill has been called one of the biggest environmental disasters in modern Canadian history, while British Columbia’s government has insisted the dam failure is not an environmental disaster.
 

‘Remember, if they lose the dam, the mine can’t operate anyways’

The ill-fated tailings dam at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine was an improvised work in progress, built higher every year to hold back the growing volumes of water behind it.

“For years, dam raising had managed to stay one step ahead of the rising water,” wrote a trio of engineering experts in a report on the dam breach released Friday. “But on May 24, 2014, the water caught up.”

The spur was a heavy run-off from an abnormally high winter snow pack, followed by torrential rains. With the rising waters in the tailings pond threatening to over-top the dam itself, the mine operator put out a call on the 25th to AMEC, its engineering firm of record.

After arriving on the scene the following day, geotechnical engineer Dmitri Ostritchenko found plenty of cause for concern: wet spots on the embankment, seepage here and there, and a pond almost level with the core of the dam.
Two days later he reported by email to the company’s senior geotechnical engineer, Andrew Witte, that the situation had not much improved. “At the end of the day, the freeboard level is basically zero,” wrote the on-site engineer, referring to the gap between the water level and the crest of the dam.

Despite some effort to reduce the amount of water behind the dam, tailings were still being added to the pond because the mine was continuing to operate. “Basically there has not been much (de-watering),” he wrote, “as they are still focused on making sure the mine can operate.”
This was too much for Witte. The safe operating standard was nine tenths of a metre of freeboard at bare minimum. Mining operations had to take a back seat until that was restored. He directed Ostritchenko to remind the company of its obligations.

“Under this type of scenario they are supposed to stop discharging tailings and focus on de-watering to get 0.9 metre of freeboard again,” wrote the senior engineer. “If they are not removing water, they are in direct contravention of (what the province) expects.

“That is a dangerous game to play and we need to make sure that our ass is covered by telling them to pump water out of the tailings storage facility. We cannot support the ‘just keep operating in the danger zone attitude.’ Remember, if they lose the dam, the mine can’t operate anyways.”
They didn’t lose the dam — not then, anyway. That wouldn’t happen for another 10 weeks.

Instead, the rising water, the precarious state of the dam, and the urgings of the engineering firm galvanized the mine operator into action. The embankment was topped up, the water drained, and the situation stabilized by the end of May.

Still, it was a near-run thing. A near “over-topping failure” and “potential breach” of the dam, according to the report from the trio of experts.
They also highlighted factors that contributed to the near-miss. The climate model for the dam neglected to consider a worst-case weather scenario. “They did not account for specific wet year conditions.”

The amount of water stored in the tailings pond had increased 10-fold to 10 million cubic metres in just four years. Yet the company had only just obtained a permit for a treatment plant that would allow the release of three million cubic metres of water a year. “It is not clear to the panel why it took so long.”

Another area of concern was the failure to maintain a separating barrier of tailings — known as a “beach” — to prevent erosion of the earthen embankment from the rising water behind it.

Critically important because the structure was not designed as a water-retaining dam, though increasingly that is what it was doing. The report is replete with references to “chronic problems with maintaining the tailings beach.”
Key documents related to the concerns about the beach, and others connected to the near-over-topping of the embankment, were among the dozens excluded from the public record when the report was released Friday.
The exclusions were made at the request of the two continuing investigations into the dam failure, one by the provincial inspector of mines, the other by provincial conservation officers. Each may result in recommendations for charges.

Even with the exclusions, the engineering panel had plenty to say about the sorry state of affairs that preceded the dam failure last August.

The root cause was an undetected flaw under the section that breached. But overly steep slopes on the embankment, neglected beaches, inadequate safety margins, ad hoc planning, and the hefty volume of water behind the dam all contributed to making the failure much worse than it needed to be.

“The panel was disconcerted to find that, while the Mount Polley tailings dam failed because of an undetected weakness in the foundation, it could have failed by over-topping, which it almost did in May 2014. Or it could have failed by internal erosion, for which some evidence was discovered.

“Clearly, multiple failure modes were in progress, and they differed mainly in how far they had progressed down their respective failure pathways.”

Mount Polley was not a story of one flaw that went undetected for years with nothing to be done about it. Rather, it was characterized by a pattern of dubious behaviour, margins of safety that skirted the edge of the cliff, little thought of worst-case scenarios, all factors in a disaster waiting to happen.

Source: http://www.vancouversun.com

Penn Township officials hear from residents, experts on fracking plans

 

Penn Township officials hear from residents, experts on fracking plans

February 6, 2015 12:06 AM

Penn Township commissioners on Thursday heard hours of comments about their plans to regulate Marcellus Shale gas drilling.


Lasting about three hours in the Penn Middle School auditorium, the meeting included about three dozen speakers, including experts such as geologists, representatives of environmental groups and gas drilling companies, and residents supporting and opposing plans for hydraulic fracturing in the township. Their remarks were limited to five-minute windows.


Critics cited research suggesting environmental and health risks for those living close to fracking operations, from possible radiation and groundwater contamination to neurological and respiratory effects, along with a decrease in property values.


“It definitely affects your quality of life,” resident Dan Begg said in an interview.

While he acknowledged that the township is proposing an outright ban on ponds to treat wastewater from fracking operations, he said that would not prevent disturbances from trucks hauling away fracking fluids, let alone spills or other drilling-related accidents.


“I don’t think it’s something that fits well in a residential community,” said Mr. Begg, who lives about a mile from where a drilling company has received state approval to begin operations, in the Level Green area of the township.


Supporters contended that the effects of fracking have undergone adequate environmental review, arguing that the township should not tighten its proposed drilling restrictions based on concerns raised by residents.


“Making the use of our land or our development rights subordinate to the desires, wishes of others is not equal treatment,” Anthony Marks, who owns about 20 acres in the township, told the commissioners.


Having signed two leases with two different drilling companies, he later said that for many township landowners, leasing their properties to drilling companies is a “huge incentive” for them to avoid handing it over to developers.


For local governments themselves, such revenue from fracking can also be significant.


Over the past few years, the township has received some $150,000 in fees paid by drilling companies for digging wells, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.


Westmoreland County has received nearly $5 million in such fees over the same period.

Those fees are required under the state’s Marcellus Shale gas drilling law, Act 13, and have gone toward infrastructure improvements such as road repairs.

For their part, township leaders are finalizing a formal review of a draft ordinance that would further restrict such operations in residential and commercial areas.


“We wanted to give the people a say,” said Paul Wersing, chairman of the board of commissioners,, referring to Thursday's special meeting. But, he added, “Our decision has to be made on the rule of law, and not on speculation and assumptions.”


The township is requiring that drilling companies obtain a conditional use permit before beginning unconventional drilling operations, and officials have said none will be issued until the proposed regulations are agreed on and adopted. A township zoning board will hold public hearings on any applications for those permits.


That could come as early as April, with the possibility of commissioners scheduling a public hearing at a work session next week.


In addition to prohibiting treatment ponds, the township is proposing a ban on fracking operations within 600 feet of homes, schools and businesses on properties less than 10 acres. It also is proposing a 1,000-foot buffer around water supply intakes.


But a recently formed citizens group says that would prove “too close to too many people in our community.” The group, Protect PT, is calling for a 2,000-foot buffer around buildings.


Also speaking at the meeting were elected officials from neighboring municipalities including Trafford. which is considering developing its own ordinance to limit any drilling activity in the borough.


Some residents there are concerned about the planned drilling operation at the Level Green site, which is less than 2,000 feet from a subdivision of dozens of homes.


The drilling company Apex Energy LLC has received approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection to begin operations there and at another site, near Monroeville. The Wexford-based company also has submitted an application for a nearly 90-acre site near Delmont, near the William Penn Care Center, a senior living facility, and it is seeking several more permits, said Mark Rothenberg, its chief executive.


Also, the land acquisition arm of another drilling company, Huntley & Huntley, which is based in Monroeville, has purchased about 220 acres off Pleasant Valley Road, near Murrysville.


Bernard Goldstein, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh whom Protect PT requested to speak at the meeting, said research of the effects of fracking remain inconclusive.


“We really don’t know what the health effects are,’ he said in an interview, citing New York’s ban on high-volume fracking. “They haven’t really been studied.”

As a result, Mr. Goldstein said, “There’s a reason to delay” as much as possible drilling in the township. “What’s the rush?”

Hydraulic line rupture sparked Washington County drill site fire

 

Hydraulic line rupture sparked Washington County drill site fire

February 5, 2015

A ruptured hydraulic line ignited a fire at a Washington County gas drilling site, a Range Resources spokesman said Thursday. 

No one was injured in the fire Wednesday evening at the company's Jeffries drilling location off Ross Road in North Strabane. 

It likely will take at least a few weeks before more detailed information is available, Range Resources spokesman Matt Pitzarella said. 

“There are many hydraulic lines on locations, which is part of what we're investigating,” Pitzarella said. 

The state Department of Environmental Protection is investigating, agency spokesman John Poister said. 

“We believe there were some factors there that need to be further explained,” Poister said. “We want to look for ways to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.” 

The state investigation will determine whether any violations occurred. There is no timetable for a determination. 

“They were very fortunate that there was nothing more that happened,” Poister said. “Anytime you have a fire on a well pad, it's a serious matter.” 

The fire started about 5:15 p.m. and burned engine oil and plastic liners used to protect the environment from pollutants. Range Resources personnel and firefighters extinguished it within an hour by using a special foam designed to snuff out oil and grease fires. 

The gas well, which is not in production, did not catch fire. No homes were evacuated. 

“Range has a good protocol for dealing with fires,” Poister said.