Associated Press

Northern California may need years to recover from wildfires

Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press     October 29, 2017

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) — It will take at least months and likely years to fully recover from devastating wildfires that ripped through Northern California earlier this month, destroying at least 8,900 structures and killing 42 people, Sonoma County officials said Saturday.

“We don’t control these things, and it makes you realize how small you are in the world when something like this happens,” Sheriff Rob Giordano said. “I don’t think we understand the level at which it is going to impact lives, and the community will be different.”

Giordano spoke before hundreds of people gathered at a college in Santa Rosa, one of the hardest-hit cities, for a memorial service to honor the lives lost in the deadliest series of wildfires in California history. The fires sparked Oct. 8, eventually forcing 100,000 people to evacuate.

Before a bell rung 42 times to commemorate the dead, Giordano and other officials praised the ordinary and extraordinary acts of heroism by first responders and community members as the firefight raged on for more than a week. Some firefighters worked days on the front line, refusing to take breaks, while sheriff’s dispatchers continued taking calls even as the fire came close to taking out their building.

“The night of Oct. 8, we were all tested,” Santa Rosa fire Chief Tony Gossner said.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and five members of Congress spent Saturday attending the memorial, touring the fire ravaged areas and gathering advice from federal, state and local officials on what Congress can do to aid the recovery efforts. In a briefing in Santa Rosa, officials asked them to ease red tape that will make it easier to erect temporary housing and to ensure the Environmental Protection Agency has the resources it needs to clean up any hazardous material before it infiltrates the water supply.

The EPA has assessed 740 properties so far, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency has given out $6 million worth of rental and other assistance to displaced Californians, officials said. Officials estimate the cleanup of debris and other hazardous materials will last into early 2018. The losses are estimated to be at more than $1 billion.

Pelosi and U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, who represents Santa Rosa, said they must make their fellow lawmakers in Washington understand the unprecedented nature of the fires, the deadliest in California history. They drove through a neighborhood near Coffey Park where entire streets are wrecked, with only burned-out cars and charred remains of once-standing houses lining the streets.

“It was just unfathomable the amount of destruction that we saw,” Pelosi said. “My colleagues will have to understand this is different from anything else, many times over.”

But Pelosi said Northern California’s response to the fires can serve as a national model for disaster response if done right. She urged her colleagues in Congress to think beyond the incremental rebuilding needs to consider the big picture of helping the region better prepare for and mitigate damage from future disasters. Obtaining the appropriate amount of relief money will require detailed documentation of homes lost and other destruction, she said.

Santa Rosa alone lost five percent of its housing stock, Pelosi said.

“What would we like to see the result be? Let’s engineer it back from there,” she said of the rebuilding efforts.

Thompson and other members of Congress, meanwhile, were asked to look at ensuring immigrants living in the country illegally are not at risk if they contact the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They were also asked to look into improving the system for alerting people of pending disasters, a more difficult task now that more homes rely on cellphones instead of landlines.

The Intellectualist

Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens

by Yossarian Johnson     October 21, 2017

America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged

America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged by a flourishing middle class.

Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations.

In his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Temin paints a bleak picture where one country has a bounty of resources and power, and the other toils day after day with minimal access to the long-coveted American dream.

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In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been.

Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.

The parallels are unsettling. As noted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking:

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin describes multiple contributing factors in the nation’s arrival at this place, from exchanging the War on Poverty for the War on Drugs to money in politics and systemic racism. He outlines the ways in which racial prejudice continues to lurk below the surface, allowing politicians to appeal to the age old “desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks”, encouraging white low-wage workers to accept their lesser place in society.

“We have a structure that predetermines winners and losers. We are not getting the benefits of all the people who could contribute to the growth of the economy, to advances in medicine or science which could improve the quality of life for everyone – including some of the rich people,” he laments.

The antidote, as prescribed by Temin, is likely a tough sell in today’s political climate.

Expanding education, updating infrastructure, forgiving mortgage and student loan debt, and overall working to boost social mobility for all Americans are bound to be seen as too liberal by many policy makers.

Until the course is changed, he warns, the middle class will continue to fade and America will remain unsustainably divided.

ThinkProgress

A plastics factory in West Virginia has been on fire for 5 days and no one knows the health impacts

Governor hopes EPA experts will help West Virginia deal with disaster.

Mark Hand           October 26, 2017

A fire burns at the former Ames plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The fire started on October 21, 2017. CREDIT: Creighton Linza/YouTube screenshot

It’s been more than five days since a major industrial fire started at an old warehouse in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and state officials still have not been able to put together a list of the potentially toxic materials that were stored in the 420,000-square-foot facility.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) declared a state of emergency in Wood County, where public schools have been closed all week due to the poor air quality and health concerns from the fire. Local and state officials are struggling to determine the potential long-term impacts from the fire. “We don’t really know all the specifics about as far as the endangerment to our people,” Justice said at a press conference Tuesday.

Air quality tests are not finding significant pollutants in the air coming from the warehouse, known as the Ames plant, officials said. Residents as far as 30 miles away in Wood County, West Virginia, though, have complained about the smell from the fire. Parkersburg, a town of about 31,000 residents located on the Ohio River, is the county seat of Wood County.

The WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center in Parkersburg has treated 50 to 60 patients in its emergency room for fire-related symptoms since Saturday. Patients complained of respiratory issues, headaches, sore throat, eye irritation, coughing, and shortness of breath, according to news reports.

In Texas, after Hurricane Harvey flooded the southeastern part of the state, the owners of a chemical plant allegedly downplayed the health impacts of explosions at the plant. Officials from plant owner Arkema Inc. held press conferences where they repeatedly denied the chemicals were harmful to the public or first responders. As it turned out, more than a dozen first responders fell ill in the middle of the road and were sent to the hospital.

At Tuesday’s press conference, it was noted that some of the firefighters who responded to the warehouse fire in Parkersburg were not wearing gear to protect them from the potentially harmful smoke.

The Parkersburg warehouse, owned by Intercontinental Export-Import Inc., was being used to store recyclable plastics. Intercontinental Export-Import is a subsidiary of SirNaik, a company founded in 1987 for the purpose of purchasing and selling recycled plastics.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued an order on Thursday requiring Intercontinental Export-Import to “immediately provide a detailed inventory of all materials that were burned” at the Parkersburg warehouse. In the order, the DEP said Intercontinental Export-Import operates large warehouses and recycling facilities in and around Parkersburg that “are known to contain several polymer materials in the form of pellets, flake, strand, beads, plop, dust, granules, and resins.”

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Wednesday that DEP inspectors visited the warehouse earlier this year and found violations that indicated continued problems at the facility that two local volunteer firefighters had warned nearly a decade before could be at risk of a major fire. The DEP employees inspected the warehouse in February, concluding that the facility’s “general housekeeping” was “unsatisfactory,” according to Gazette-Mail reporter Ken Ward.

Although state and local officials have been unable to identify the products inside the warehouse, a list of products that were potentially inside the plant at the time of the fire were PVC, nylon, titanium dioxide, fibergalass, formaldehyde, teflon, according to the sheriff’s office of Washington County, Ohio, located across the Ohio River from Parkersburg.

The West Virginia governor said he is “enormously” concerned over the potential long-term problems from the fire. He is hoping that experts from the federal Environmental Protection Agency who “may know something that we may miss” will “come and assist us.”

“We have done multiple, multiple, multiple testings of the air and so far, the multiple testings are OK. But there may be some expert that’s out there that knows there’s something that’s not OK,” Justice said.

Earlier this year, Justice joined President Donald Trump at a rally in West Virginia to announce that he was switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Justice has been a strong supporter of Trump since he assumed the presidency.

Under Trump’s proposed 31-percent budget cut for the EPA, the resources to respond to emergencies such as the Parkersburg fire, along with much of the other state-level work performed by the agency, would be eliminated or sharply reduced. EPA staff and scientists at its regional offices across the country regularly respond to emergency calls from city and state officials. Funds to respond to many of those calls, including from West Virginia officials, would no longer be available under Trump’s budget.

Behind West Virginia’s Massive Chemical Spill, A History Of Poverty And Pollution 

West Virginia has a long history of industrial and environmental disasters. In early 2014, up to 300,000 residents in the Charleston, West Virginia, area were without access to potable water for several days after a major chemical spill. State environmental officials estimated as much as 7,500 gallons of a chemical used to process coal  —  crude MCHM  —  spilled into the Elk River, a tributary of the Kanawha River.

The state is home to the worst industrial accident in U.S. history when 750 workers drilling the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel in the early 1930s died from silicosis. Workers were forced to break through 99.4 percent pure silica in Fayette County, West Virginia, as part of a hydroelectric project. The silica the workers inhaled created extensive and fibrous nodules on the lungs. The workers found it harder to breathe and, ultimately, they suffocated to death.

In Parkersburg, fire officials said they are making progress in fighting the fire but are unable to provide an estimate of when the fire will be out. Once the fire is extinguished, fire marshals will be able to investigate the cause of the blaze and state officials will have a better opportunity to determine what materials were housed in the facility.

More than 100 firefighters from 40 fire stations, including stations in Ohio, have been on the scene since Saturday. Specialized Professional Services Inc., a hazardous materials and environmental emergency company, has been helping with the emergency.

With the fire still burning, officials with the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department issued a statement Thursday recommending that residents “avoid contact with the smoke and remain indoors if possible, with windows and doors closed until the smell is no longer detectable.”