PG&E could be on hook for decades-old pollution

 

APRIL 6, 2015

A century ago, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. generated gas for San Francisco customers from coal and oil plants in the Marina and Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhoods that deposited their waste into the ground and in waters that flowed to the bay.

Five years ago, Marina resident Dan Clarke discovered two large black rocks in his yard and had them tested by PG&E, which found toxic levels of hydrocarbons of the type once generated by the power plants. Around the same time, members of San Francisco’s commercial herring fleet were drawing a connection between the diminished local herring population and the carbon gases and coal tars seeping into the bay.

PG&E says it learned of the residential pollution only recently and acted promptly to remove it. The utility denies its actions in the early 20th century have caused any danger to the fish. But a federal judge says PG&E must face a lawsuit by Clarke and the San Francisco Herring Association for the continuing harm allegedly caused by the power plants that last operated 84 years ago.

If the plaintiffs’ claims are correct, “PG&E’s refusal to test for contaminants in groundwater that serves as a conduit means that (the former plant) sites will continue to present an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health and the environment,” U.S. District Judge William Orrick said in a Feb. 26 ruling denying the company’s motion to dismiss the suit.

The suit is about the present, not the past, said the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Stuart Gross.

PG&E, Gross said, “walked away from very dirty sites,” leaving contaminants behind. He said they surface as vapor that sifts through loose soils and into homes, and as water pollutants that kill herring eggs and larvae.

PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith said the lawsuit overstates the harm and understates the utility’s cleanup efforts.

PG&Es response

“We are not aware of any evidence that herring or any other species are impacted by the former manufactured gas plants,” Smith said. He said PG&E voluntarily started testing homes in the Marina district for residues from the power plants in 2010, put together a remediation program that the city approved in 2012, and cleaned up 10 properties before the suit was filed in 2012. In Clarke’s case, he said, the company offered to remove contamination up to a foot below his home and 5 feet beneath his yard, but Clarke refused.

Orrick, however, said in his ruling that the suit adequately alleged deficiencies in PG&E’s offer to Clarke and its testing of the areas around the former power plants.

According to evidence cited by the plaintiffs, Orrick said, “independent testing has revealed that despite remediation, a high level of contamination still exists and is affecting the bay.”

That testing, the judge said, reportedly includes a 1997 inspection at the Radisson Hotel at Fisherman’s Wharf, on the site of a former PG&E plant, showing “exceptionally high” levels of toxic hydrocarbons in soils and “severe contamination of several kinds” in groundwater. It also includes testing by the city over the past two decades near Gashouse Cove, a harbor in San Francisco Bay, that found heavy contamination in tidal and submerged lands in an inlet bordering a former power plant site, Orrick said.

In Clarke’s neighborhood, near the same plant site, every home that has been tested has required major cleanup, Orrick said, quoting the plaintiffs’ documents. He said soil samples on Clarke’s property reportedly had contamination more than 1,000 times the level allowed by the state, posing more than a 1 in 100 risk of cancer.

Gross said there have been no studies that show how much the herring stock has declined or that have documented any health hazards in the Marina neighborhood. But he said that fishing crews reported a substantial drop in the herring population in the last three decades of the 20th century, and that researchers have found the hydrocarbons discharged by the former power plants to be toxic to herring. He also said there was “anecdotal evidence” of cancer clusters and premature births in Clarke’s neighborhood.

Suit cites city

The city may have unintentionally spread contamination with a sewer and storm-water collection system it built in the 1970s to carry wastes to treatment plants, Orrick said. The lawsuit alleges that the system, which runs along Marina Green, picks up gas-plant contamination from groundwater and fails to remove it before discharging the residue into the bay.

While leaders of the herring fleet claim PG&E is responsible for substantial and ongoing financial losses from the drop in the herring population, Gross said they aren’t after compensation.

The suit, the lawyer said, “seeks primarily to get PG&E to fully characterize the extent of the contamination and to remediate it.”

Source: San Fransisco Chronicle

Department of Environmental Protection Investigating Sheen at Schoharie Reservoir

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 8, 2015
Contact:
deppressoffice@dep.nyc.gov, (845) 334-7868

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is investigating an oily sheen that was discovered Monday afternoon near the Shandaken Tunnel Intake Chamber at Schoharie Reservoir. The sheen was discovered about 2:30 p.m., several hundred feet down shore from the intake. 

Water supply operators successfully prevented it from leaving the reservoir by shutting down the intake chamber and installing an absorbent boom around the intake structure. As a result, it did not pose a threat to drinking water. The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and Department of Health (DOH) were immediately notified. Local, state and federal elected officials have also been updated.

The sheen had dissipated and was no longer visible as of Tuesday morning. A preliminary investigation found that the sheen was likely coming from a previously undiscovered tank that was washed into Schoharie Reservoir in 2011 by Hurricane Irene. Shifting ice and low water levels likely dislodged the tank and caused the sheen. On Monday, DEP retrieved several water samples from the area expressing the sheen to determine its source and severity. 

Results are expected by mid-week. DEP plans to reactivate the Shandaken Tunnel once the substance is identified and the intake chamber is appropriately protected. As an extra precaution, DEP will also install an absorbent boom where the tunnel discharges into Esopus Creek.

DEP will continue to monitor the sheen and develop plans to remove the tank once the ice melts and its location is pinpointed. The department will also replace boom around the intake chamber as needed, and install containment boom around the sheen if it reappears.

Schoharie Reservoir stores up to 19.6 billion gallons of water that is collected from a 314-square-mile watershed. It diverts the water through the 18-mile Shandaken Tunnel, which discharges into the Esopus Creek where it travels another 5 miles before entering Ashokan Reservoir. From Ashokan Reservoir, the water flows south through the Catskill Aqueduct to New York City.

DEP manages New York City’s water supply, providing more than one billion gallons of high quality water each day to more than 9 million New Yorkers. This includes more than 70 upstate communities and institutions in Ulster, Orange, Putnam and Westchester counties who consume an average of 110 million total gallons of drinking water daily from New York City’s water supply system. This water comes from the Catskill, Delaware, and Croton watersheds that extend more than 125 miles from the City, and the system comprises 19 reservoirs, three controlled lakes, and numerous tunnels and aqueducts. 

DEP has nearly 6,000 employees, including almost 1,000 scientists, engineers, surveyors, watershed maintainers and other professionals in the upstate watershed. In addition to its $70 million payroll and $157 million in annual taxes paid in upstate counties, DEP has invested more than $1.7 billion in watershed protection programs—including partnership organizations such as the Catskill Watershed Corporation and the Watershed Agricultural Council—that support sustainable farming practices, environmentally sensitive economic development, and local economic opportunity. 

In addition, DEP has a robust capital program with nearly $14 billion in investments planned over the next 10 years that will create up to 3,000 construction-related jobs per year

CARBON EMISSIONS FROM ARCTIC’S PERMAFROST COULD BECOME A MAJOR NEW SOURCE

APRIL 8, 2015

As the frozen Arctic soil known as “permafrost” thaws, it could release a large amount of carbon — in the form of both carbon dioxide and methane — to the atmosphere.  And this new source of greenhouse gas emissions could be large enough that it could substantially undermine attempts to cut down on emissions from fossil fuels.

A new overview of what we know about the permafrost carbon problem has just come out in Nature, written  by a group of 17 experts on the matter. In other words, this is probably the most thorough scientific look at the issue yet. And the researchers, led by Edward Schuur of Northern Arizona University, basically confirm that we have a serious problem on our hands.

The bottom line is that the permafrost carbon problem doesn’t look like it’s going to just go away as researchers better refine their estimates. Rather, it’s something that the world, and especially its leaders who are the ones making climate agreements, will have to deal with.

“Initial estimates of greenhouse gas release point towards the potential for substantial emissions of carbon from permafrost in a warmer world, but these could still be underestimates,” the study notes.

A much cited estimate from past literature is that northern permafrost contains 1,700 gigatons of carbon — a gigaton is a billion metric tons — which is a vast amount and around double what currently exists in the atmosphere.

The new study goes back closely over past estimates in light of new evidence, and comes to a broadly consistent conclusion. It finds that there are between 1,330 and 1,580 gigatons of carbon in the top three meters of global permafrost soil, in what are called yedomas (permafrost with particularly high ice content), and in Arctic river deltas.

And then on top of that, it says, there is a possible 400 additional gigatons in “deep terrestrial permafrost sediments” — not to mention a simply unknown amount in permafrost below the sea in shallow continental shelves, such as beneath the East Siberian Sea.

Overall, it’s a troubling large amount of carbon — especially in light of numbers presented by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggesting that if we want to have a good chance of holding global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, we probably have only about 500 more gigatons of carbon in total that we can emit.

“We’ve gone back with this whole synthesis effort, looked through all the data, and synthesized, and yeah, this problem is not going away,” says lead study author Schuur.

Fortunately, the new study also finds that any sudden or catastrophic release of Arctic carbon stores is unlikely. Rather, the experts estimate that by 2100, somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of the 1,330-1,580 gigatons could  be emitted. Ten percent of the total would equate to around 130 to 160 gigatons of carbon emitted this century — which is both good news and bad news at the same time.

The good news is that the permafrost emissions are “unlikely to occur at a speed that could cause abrupt climate change over a period of a few years to a decade,” as the study puts it. The bad news, though, is that 160 gigatons, even though it’s less than we’re expected to emit from fossil fuels in coming decades, is still a large enough amount to really matter for the planet — especially given the relatively tight carbon budget that we have remaining.

And it could, of course, be more. If you assume 15 percent of the carbon will be emitted in this century, for instance, then the range becomes about 200 to 237 gigatons. Moreover, the emissions don’t end at 2100 — they continue well into the next century.

Much of the research that is synthesized in the new Nature paper has been conducted since the last official report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — whose climate projections didn’t include permafrost emissions. New models, perhaps, will — and accordingly, may spit out results suggesting that reducing our emissions enough to stave off the worst climate outcomes will be even harder than previously thought.

“I think this highlights, there’s a big carbon cycle out there that we’re influencing, but we don’t control the whole thing,” says Schuur.

DRIVER KILLED IN CAR-TRAIN COLLISION WHEN HE FAILED TO YIELD AND STRUCK A WESTBOUND UNION PACIFIC TRAIN IN NEBRASKA

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2015

COLTON, NEBRASKA

A Sidney, NE man has been killed in a car-train accident near Colton, Nebraska, Tuesday.

Cheyenne County Sheriff John Jenson said in a press release issued Wednesday that Michael J. Kennedy, 44, died in the accident.  Jenson said Kennedy had been traveling northbound on County Road 125 when he failed to yield and struck a westbound Union Pacific train.

Kennedy died at the scene of the accident.  He was not wearing a seat belt.

The accident occurred at about 6:30 p.m.

Colton is located about 7 miles east of Sidney.

THE DEADLY ROADS: SEMI-TRUCK CRASHES DISABLED VEHICLE ON I-55, ILLINOIS KILLING THE DRIVER

APRIL 8, 2015

I-55 IN PLAINFIELD, ILLINOIS

One person is dead and another remains hospitalized after a semi-trailer hit a disabled vehicle Wednesday afternoon on Interstate 55 in Plainfield, according to Illinois State Police.

The crash occurred at 4:26 p.m. Wednesday when a semi-trailer traveling northbound on I-55 near Lockport Road struck a 1999 Chrysler that was disabled in the roadway, state police said.

The male driver of the car was pronounced dead on the scene by the Will County Coroner’s Office. The semi driver, also a male, was rushed to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries, state police said.

As of 8 p.m., two northbound I-55 lanes have reopened. State police continue to investigate.

No other information on the victims was immediately released before authorities notify the victim’s next-of-kin.

Sorry to say, but nobody is safe in these roads and with these drivers.

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http://metroforensics.blogspot.com/2015/03/united-states-still-has-one-of-highest.html

UNITED STATES STILL HAS ONE OF THE HIGHEST ROAD ACCIDENT DEATH AND INJURY RATES IN THE WORLD: 34,000 DIE AND 2.5 MILLION INJURED EACH YEAR.

Despite the improvements in road safety, the United States has one of the highest death rates at about 1 person dead per 10,000 people. Unfortunately, only undeveloped countries have higher death rate.

Some states, such as Texas and West Virginia (sorry, WV, despite your tremendous progress in traffic safety, you are still at the top of the worst-death-rate list) have death rates of nearly 1.5 percent, i.e., fifty percent more people die compared to the national death rate.

Approximately 34,000 people are getting killed each year.  In the 1950s and 1960s, about 55,000 people used to die on the roads – so, there has been improvement in the number of dead. 

However, the number of injured is rising.  Roughly 2.5 million are injured (yes, you read it correctly – 2.5 million injured) per year.  That is, 1 percent (1%) of the population that is eligible to drive is injured every year.

It is worse than a war zone out there.  

So, please be safe and be on the lookout for weaving-through-the-traffic drivers, crazy drivers, reckless drivers, sick drivers, medical-condition drivers, sleepy drivers, negligent drivers, stupid drivers, careless drivers, drunk drivers, speeding drivers, drugged drivers, texting drivers, talking-on-the-phone drivers, looking-at-the-GPS drivers, hurry-hurry drivers, tailgating drivers, upset drivers, eating-while-driving drivers, putting-the-lipstick-on-while-driving drivers, elderly drivers, and so on.