Category Archives: Safety

Natural gas pipeline exploded in Oklahoma; seen in two other states

The most obvious risk of that proposed natural gas pipeline was seen in another one Monday through today in Oklahoma (and Texas and Kansas): explosion and fire. The pipeline proposed for here would be 44% bigger; maybe we could have an explosion seen from Florida and Alabama!

CBS News reported today, Okla. pipeline blast sparks huge blaze, spurs evacuations,

Deputy Cliff Brinson, of the Harper County Sheriff’s Department, says the fire sounded like four roaring jet engines and had flames reaching two football fields high.

He says no injuries were reported, and residents within two miles of the blast were evacuated.

A family of three living in a home about 200 yards away escaped unharmed, authorities say.

By the time the pipeline company, Northern Natural Gas, released a statement they called it “a flicker”.

Video by Spencer Albracht: Continue reading →

Divestment is about undermining the political power of the fossil fuel industry –Tim DeChristopher

Answering Harvard President Drew Faust’s excuses,

Tim DeChristopher, who went to jail for directly opposing gas and oil drilling and is now a student at Harvard Divinity School,

To seriously suggest that any research will solve the climate crisis while we continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to maintain a stranglehold on our democracy is profoundly naive.

Wen Stephenson wrote for the Nation 4 October 2013, Tim DeChristopher: There Is No ‘Neutral’ in the Climate Fight, including DeChristopher’s statement:

Drew Faust seeks a position of neutrality in a struggle where the powerful only ask that people like her remain neutral. She says that Harvard’s endowment shouldn’t take a political position, and yet it invests in an industry that spends countless millions on corrupting our political system. In a world of corporate personhood, if she doesn’t want that money to be political, she should put it under her mattress. She has clearly forgotten the words of Paolo Freire: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain neutral.” Or as Howard Zinn put succinctly, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

She touts Continue reading →

Harvard excuses for not divesting from fossil fuels

Drew Faust wants us to believe Harvard can’t figure out how to power its own campus and vehicles on renewable solar, wind, wave, and tidal energy? Come on, pull the other one!

President Faust wrote that divestment would make Harvard appear “as a political actor rather than an academic institution”, that Harvard might not make enough money, that “Universities own a very small fraction of the market capitalization of fossil fuel companies”, and that “I also find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies at the same time that, as individuals and as a community, we are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services for so much of what we do every day.” The first three excuses would have applied just as much back in the 1980s when Harvard finally divested from companies dealing in apartheid in South Africa, a symbolic, and yes, political action that contributed markedly to the release of Nelson Mandela, the downfall of the apartheid regime, and later the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.

Harvard President Derek Bok, 18 May 1990, in a letter to students explaining the Unversity’s September 1989 decision to divest from tobacco companies, since completed:

In reaching its decision, the corporation was motivated by a desire not to be associated as a shareholder with companies engaged in significant sales of products that create a substantial and unjustified risk of harm to other human beings.

Harvard divestment was good enough for apartheid and tobacco.

In veritas, Harvard can have just as much or more influence by divesting from fossil fuels, and that cause is even more important for the whole world. In south Georgia truth, so can Valdosta State University in its own region.

Office of the President, Harvard, 3 October 2013, Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement; I added the links and images, all directly related to Harvard.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

Continue reading →

Test program meeting at Plant Vogtle –NRC and Southern Company 9 October 2013

Safety at Plant Vogtle, this Wednesday, with call-in number, by NRC and Georgia Power’s parent the Southern Company. One hour from 1 to 2PM is the public part, then 3 more hours closed “because the staff has determined that the information is proprietary in nature.” Why is nuclear testing affecting public safety proprietary?

It’s at Vogtle Training Center, 9034 River Road, Waynesboro, GA 30830, which is on the corner of the Plant Vogtle site. Do you get a tour of the construction if you appear in person? Here’s what it looks like in Georgia Power’s Vogtle 3 and 4 Construction Photos September 2013, and on google maps:


View Larger Map

Here’s the NRC meeting announcement: Continue reading →

From Seven Out in Waycross to CSX to Pecan Row Landfill in Lowndes County

CSX was involved directly in the Seven Out contamination, storing hazardous water that leaked: and then that water was apparently shipped to the Pecan Row Landfill in Lowndes County. This is in addition to the the CSX trichloroethylene groundwater contamination dating back to 2000 and earlier.

According to a letter from Georgia Department of Natural Resources to BCX, Inc. of 20 July 2004, EPA Identification Number: GAR000030007,

  1. Twenty-seven tanks of wastewater were stored at the facility. Four portable tanks were storing the excess capacity of wastewater next door on property owned by CSX Transportation. These portable 10,000-gallon tanks were not labeled to indicate their contents;
  2. According to a BCX representative, one of the portable 10,000-gallon tanks had a gasket failure on the forward manhole which caused the release of an unknown substance onto the ground at the site owned by CSX Transportation;
  3. Dead vegetation was observed in a 15 feet by 30 feet area downgradient of the tank that caused the release;
  4. A yellowish-green substance was observed on the ground between the portable tank that had the release and another portable tank adjacent to it. There was also dead vegetation observed between these two tanks; and

And GA EPD tested the soil and found something the document doesn’t specify, but whatever it was was enough that: Continue reading →

CSX groundwater contamination in Waycross

The MCLG for
trichloroethylene
is zero.
Around the Seven Out and CSX contamination areas in Waycross more than 100 people have gotten sick or died, most since 2000, with groundwater contamination known since 1985, according to Joan Martin McNeal, So the CSX problem long predates the Seven Out problem. Here’s her map of the CSX property (in yellow) and contamination, sickness, and death:


brown stars: known contamination areas
red markers: confirmed deceased or confirmed cases of severe illness mostly cancer (bone, lung, prostate, blood, colon, breast), some severe neurological disorders, some heart failure, with ages ranging from 4 to 85 years.
green markers: likely early stage cases of such problems

According to this February 2000 tricholoroethylene isopleth map, there was already extensive contamination in the CSX railyard by 2000, extending across an internal drainage ditch that goes into the Waycross Canal that become Tebeau Creek, running through downtown Waycross into the Satilla River.

According to U.S. EPA, Trichloroethylene 79-01-6 Hazard Summary-Created in April 1992; Revised in January 2000, Continue reading →

Jellyfish 1 Nuke 0

One of the world’s largest nuclear reactors was shut down Sunday by jellyfish. Not a tsunami, not an earthquake, not a blizzard, not even hot water: jellyfish. And it’s not the first time or the first reactor. Tell me again how reliable centralized baseload power is?

AP reported yesterday, Jellyfish force nuclear plant shutdown in Sweden: Tonnes of jellyfish clog pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines

Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tonnes of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines.

By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.

All three Continue reading →

Common Community Vision for Lowndes County

What do you the citizens want Lowndes County to be? Here’s a chance to speak up, so when somebody asks where were you when the decisions were being made, you don’t have to answer “lying on the couch watching television.” (Thanks to Nolen Cox for that phrase.)

Corey Hull wrote on facebook today, Help Spread the Word for the Future of Lowndes County,

My office is conducting a survey and gathering public input on Facebook (go to www.facebook.com/valdostalowndesmpo) about what they want the Lowndes County Common Community Vision to be ( www.bit.ly/LowndesCCV). So far our participation has been low. I am calling on all of you to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to spread the word and let us know what you think about the future of Lowndes County and its cities.

Over the next two months there will be future opportunities for public input so stay tuned.

Thanks for your help.

On the Southern Georgia Regional Commission’s website, Lowndes County Common Community Vision, Continue reading →

Spectra never bothered to check pipeline for corrosion –Spectra employee

So “the pipe will be monitored 24/7”? That’s not Spectra’s actual practice, according to an employee and according to a federal fine.

By fjgallagher for Natural Gas Watch 19 June 2013, Spectra Energy Employee: We Never Bothered to Check Natural Gas Pipeline for Corrosion,

A Spectra Energy employee acknowledged to federal inspectors that the company never conducted key tests for corrosion on a natural gas pipeline that was already operating at excess capacity, according to documents recently obtained by NaturalGasWatch.org.

There’s much more in the article, including this:

Additionally, according to another May 2, 2013 letter sent under separate cover from (PHMSA) to Holeman, Spectra failed to install equipment to monitor whether or not the natural gas pipeline in question was being affected by corrosion and could not produce any records indicating that the pipeline had, in fact, ever been tested for corrosion or that the pipeline was even structurally sound.

So that’s what “the pipe will be monitored 24/7” means. Good to know.

See Item 2 in that Final Order with fines from the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to Spectra Energy CEO Gregory L. Ebel: Continue reading →

Spectra backtracks about pipeline incident

Spectra flip-flops on major safety events as well as on whose houses are beautiful and whether Georgia cities can use gas from its pipeline from PCB-polluted Anniston, Alabama to Orlando, Florida. And Spectra was fined recently for violating both federal safety requirements and its own operating procedures, including for pipeline monitoring. Oh, and its natural gas comes from fracking.

Remember Spectra rep Andrea Grover, quoted by the VDT? Well, she’s been quoted elsewhere, too. Mike Benard wrote for CSRHUB 5 April 2013, Spectra Energy ‘Backtracks’ on Methane Incident: First: “Nothing Released …. No Smoke …. No Incident”; Then Admits: Methane & Hydrocarbons Released,

Spectra Energy Corporation (SE, NYSE) was forced to backtrack on dismissive assertions it made about a nighttime incident at its huge natural gas compressor station in Bedford County, PA, after persistent neighbors and a reporter kept pressing the company and state regulators for facts.

A natural gas compressor station, like the ones Spectra says will be along its proposed AL-GA-FL pipeline, maybe in Dougherty County, maybe in Lowndes County; we don’t know.

Now Spectra could say this was a different kind of compressor because it’s a different kind of operation in Pennsylvania. What kind? Fracking: Continue reading →