Environmentalism as Afterthought

[environmentalafterthought]

Sept 21 - Consider this one a PSA.  A PSA on PAA; what’s PAA you ask, well as the fine folks of Canton, Georgia just found out, its a chemical that somehow contributes to the creation of deboned chickens but apparently tends to go boom too.  That because the acidic compound is also an organic oxidizer which means it has a bubbly personality that when excited effervesces causing quite the scene.  Here, a shipping Truck popping in to the facility appeared to shake the cardboard box that had a frowny face on it rather than a smile (or was it just upside down… could have been the problem) a bit too hard before asking for a last name after the desk clerk scribbled on the electronic pad they carry for receipt purposes.  Four folks (assuming one of them is that poor FedEx driver) ended up in the hospital for breathing issues, which suggests to me this stuff got airborne which means there was probably a small boom.  So, this careless handling of a rather touchy substance that is used across a diverse range of industries subsequently caused a shut down of the dead-end interstate I-575 for over two miles, the same interstate that gets you about as far north of Atlanta as civilization can bear for all those preppers that also have to commute to their daily grind presumably not much further than Roswell cause any further down and you got to be asking yourself, Honey Boo, maybe we ought to just move on down to Buckhead and become yuppies like we always wanted.

At any rate, the purpose of all this was that just a little batch of some PAA, also known as peracetic acid, or more properly peroxyacetic acid, an organic peroxide which has two great tastes that sometimes appear to be a deadly combination, caused some almost inconceivable chaos for those daily commuters.  The substance is generally referred to as a biocide which is just a fancy way of saying it kills things that are alive but instead of just being bad for your health like some of the more common ones like glutaraldehyde, PAA also has the added benefit of being a hardcore oxidizer, so hardcore they put it in hydrogen peroxide just to make it chill!  The food grade stuff like at this chicken farm is usually not so hardcore to cause this kind of chaos unless getting the high grade stuff and making your own mix is your style.  

And frankly, I would have been more than happy to say hey Pilgrims Pride, at least you aren't in the news for contaminating my chicken with salmonella, listeria, and mad cow disease (also please let me know if I will get a peanut allergy from this product or not!) all in one shot; I am guessing this PAA has something to do with it.  I would have been more than happy to let this one go if it didn't appear to be somewhat of a trend these days, since just literally the day before the same thing happened this time at a mushroom farm, cause you know, fungus, in beautiful Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, which is probably just far enough away from Philly (and just close enough to Wilmington) to be considered that part of PA that isn't Philly or Pitts, and so is OK to just consider Alabama, causing a total of nine workers to go to the hospital in the area where they sanitize those cute little mushroom heads (and the only surprising thing to me here is that it takes more workers to sanitize mushrooms then it does to cut the head off a chicken).  And OK, that may just be an odd coincidence, but then how do you explain that ANOTHER chicken farm just three months before, this one just across the border in majestic Selbyville, DE, over 300 gallons of PAA spilled and this time oddly enough apparently it was just hanging out in the parking lot.  Weird, JUST like in Canton?!  And again only four workers got sick at this chicken plant (they say it happens in threes so that will be a total of 12 chicken employees sick when its all said and done, keep an eye out for the next one).

But oh, no, we are not done yet.  Because then, just two months before that in May, across the pond (no the other one on the western side) at a hospital in Melbourne, AU, a woman who had just been rushed in for an emergency C-section (as opposed to those planned ones), was apparently NOT exposed along with the hospital staff to a spill of just 200 mL of the stuff, which is along the lines of a thimble’s worth causing them to evacuate to another part of the hospital to keep on with that baby-birthing stuff.  See, not only does it make chicken and mushrooms yummy, but it ALSO kills the heck out of any microbes that might get stuck on all those medical scopes doctors like to stick inside people.  That makes sense, in that application you want the high-grade stuff, but I guess just preferably not near the people that you also want to make sure get born without any major hiccups.

And by the way, we aren’t done yet, because now across the other pond, the one you probably were thinking of properly the first time, back in December of 2017, PAA was spilled at a Eli Lily facility, and this is where things start to get super weird because all they do here is work on “Global Business Initiatives” and process time cards or something, so why they were getting a delivery (yes, this happened in the parking lot AGAIN!), this time 200 litres of the stuff, which is something like 100 gallons or so, again basically shut down all roadway commutes from Cork to anywhere but Cork heading east.  And if you thought those stiff upper lips on the other island werent going to have to worry about all this, they saw their OWN spill of another 200 litres of the stuff, this time appropriately enough at a crisps packaging plant in sunny Leicester (apparently they just clean the floors with the stuff there) the month before and nobody suffered even a lick which is probably what has been keeping everyone’s guard down since all these started happening one after the other.

Now just think, what will it take for us to start saying, hmmm, this PAA by FedEx thing doesnt seem to be working too well.  Also, having it sitting around just waiting to be poured out in bulk, doesnt seem to be working to well either.  Because again, like a canary in a coalmine, way back in July of 2017, we could have nipped this in the bud when a it was reported that a water treatment plant in Hoboken New Jersey and colocated with a NJ light rail station caused a shutdown of the whole system when apparently a blue-collar guy at the plant got a bad whiff of a spill that caused mass hysteria for two hours during morning commute.

I don’t know what else to say, PAA sounds like some bad stuff, so next time you are sitting in morning gridlock and they do not know when it will be cleared because of some chemical that got loose at the local chicken farm, hospital, water treatment plant, or who knows where else this stuff is getting pooled or delivered, just know you have big PAA to thank for your lost productivity.

[environmentalafterthought]

Jul 29 - In what can only be considered a facepalm of epic proportions, the coal tramper, TB Marina, coming out of Bengkulu with a load of a mere 7,000 tons of sweet bitumen was tossed about in rough seas during high tide off the coast of Lampuuk beach causing the barge to become detached and eventually ran aground a few coal stone’s throw away from shore.  All 7,000 tons dumped into the waters and eventually made it to shore in a pretty effective beach replenishment if that is what they were going for.  Now I know what you are thinking, hey there's no coal-fired power plant in Besar District the nearest one I can think of is Nagan Raya which is nowhere NEAR Lampuuk, and of course you would be right.  The load was destined for the pretty innocent PT LafargeHolcim (or is it HolcimLafarge, I have no clue where that merger is at these days other than the Paris Op hanging an abandoned sign in its front window), a cement manufacturer and if at this point you are saying wait a second when is coal used to make cement, all I can say is you have no imagination whatsoever.

Anyway, not much to see here, Lafarge is just thinking, where’s my damn coal I need to make some cement, meanwhile, TB Marina is back in the water scooting up and down the Indonesian coast, meanwhile, its not like this is the first time this ever happened, with the same thing happening off the plant coast in 2016, when 2,000 ton were dropped in almost the exact same story. So I say the local population just got themselves some free firestarters that will probably last them hopefully until Christmas where they won’t have to worry about getting anything bad in their stocking this year for sure.  Indonesians celebrate Christmas, right?

[environmentalafterthought]

Jun 29 - Not even sure why this made the rounds, pretty much nothing to see here.  Basically your run of the mill oil train derailment in the middle of almost nowhere.  And no offense I swear to the fine folks in the bustling district of Rock Valley, but the only reason you end up in the burg this derailment happened outside, Doon, IA, especially at this intersection with the BNSF-controlled rail line and Garfield is because you got supremely lost trying to impress your friends that you know a short-cut from Sioux City, IA to Sioux Falls, SD that doesn't use the interstate.  Its a fool ‘s errand by the way.

Anyhoo, so the bridge carrying this Texas Tea from strangely enough CANADA to Cushing, OK (notice no Texas actually involved well at least not geographically) decided it had rattled at the spot of that loose bolt for too many decades now and gave its last shake when it ejected one of these fine DOT railcars designed for crude oil and the rest stacked up like a bad game of dominos.  In total 14 cars failed and started leaking, another eight survived and are being salvaged of its refreshing black gold.

The conservative estimate is that 230,000-gallons of oil was lost to the mighty Rock River which makes it down to the Sioux and then The Missouri down there in Sioux City but not a worry because drinking water was not impacted a bit due to massive oil boom deployment and the treatment system’s downstream capability of passing it through an oil-water separator.

Whatever magic they do, it worked cause only Rock Valley actually had to scramble for water being so close to the contamination.  Now the track is open and soon enough its back to business as usual on the open rail for crude oil in the US.

[environmentalafterthought]

Can we be environmentalists, and environmentalist writers, without a hemorrhage of irony, sense of humor, and sensitivity to the illusory play of language?  As long as there is environmental passion, there also lives more faith in honest doubt about the environment, and environmental art and aesthetics, than in the outworn creeds of nature.

-Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature

[environmentalafterthought]

Apr 29 - One minute its a normal sleepy night in Taoyuan City, Taiwan trying to chill until your next shift at Chin Poon Industries, one of the numerous printed circuit board manufacturers in the district (this one exclusive to the automobile industry), next you are cleaning up dead fish because a five-alarm fire (the most alarms a fire can have, i think) broke out in your factory and you no longer have a job.  Its a rough life working the PCB and semi-conductor manufacturer life in Asia; first, you work ridiculous hours day or night, then you pretty much have to live in your factory because you can’t afford to stay anywhere else (and yes you pay to live in your factory), by the way you are not even in your home country, probably coming from some smaller south Asian country like Vietnam or Laos, and then it could be a major accident happens and your home and livelihood go up in flames, oh and you could die from all that like the two Thai workers trapped in their flat when the process coating the unstamped PCBs went up in flames. 

Like big time, so much that five fire fighters died fighting a fire that lasted almost 40 hours when heavy debris impaled them.  If that hadn’t done it, the acidic brew might have which leaked into the local Nankan River; the same river that makes its way out to that big Ocean to the north fouling the waterway and making ceviche out of the local fauna.

After all that catastrophe, on top of all that, the company shares halved almost over night from skittish investors who thought it might not look good for them but the insurance is good and CP Industries is spread throughout China so shares rebounded.  Not sure we can say that about our migrant workers and local fire fighters.

[environmentalafterthought]

Apr 26 - Quite a scene at the Superior Refinery in you guessed it Superior, Wisconsin right on the taint end of Lake Superior, the Great Lakes’ largest lake (I think).  Husky Energy are the fine folks who are stuck holding this hot potato passed around now since Murphy Oil squeezed the last bit of blood out of this turnip in the early 2000s.  A number of mostly chemical manufacturers have tried to make a go at this puppy, selling for almost $500M not even six months ago.  That’s what I call failing up!

The facility was on a shut-down as they desperately struggled to get this show back on the road.  Husky wanted it because it gets them a direct line to their Hardisty Canada storage terminals.  This facility is primarily an asphalt plant but a number of side jobs allowed it to produce some refined product such as gas and diesel as well as a chemicals unit.

The details are mum still a week or two later, but likely some maintenance activities (think hot work) ignited flammable vapors (and from the two explosions that were felt almost a half-mile away as well as the debris and damage found all around the plant, it was probably a lot) in the fluid catalytic cracking unit.  Only eleven workers were injured who were working around the unit when the explosion went, and thats pretty amazing.  Husky made pains to let you know that no hydrogen fluoride was harmed during this incident, so almost certainly the alkylation process was involved with the explosion (where HF is used as a catalyzer in the process).  Use of HF as a catalyzer at refineries is a complaint from communities as old as time.

Also, despite the smoke plume traveling for over 30 miles, no air quality concerns were noted.  As a matter of fact, Mayor of Superior, Jim Paine (sense the theme here?) was quick to end the evacuation order and pointed out less than 20 hours later that  “All indications are that the refinery site is safe and stable and the air quality is clean and normal”.  A relief to the many residents, schools, and businesses under order to leave.

Needless to say, this little engine that could has faced a minor setback and will be back to cranking out those ultra-long carbon chains in no time at all.

[environmentalafterthought]

Mar 15 - Sad series of events out here at the Tri-Chem blending and manufacturing plant just outside Cresson, TX taking a right on Highway 171 coming in from Fort Worth heading towards Granbury.  The facility has just recently kicked off operations no less from its parent operation in beautiful St. Gabriel, LA and now a pretty tragic outcome after one worker was killed (and just confirmed today on the 23rd as the one worker still missing), another seriously burned, along with at least one other minor injury occurring.

This Tri-Chem facility mixed food-grade and industrial phosphates into various mixtures for any number of perfectly normal and possibly a few not so normal processes.  Basics like phosphoric acid to specialty substances like tetrapotassium pyrophosphate (TKPP) and sodium hexametaphosphate (SHMP) are made into varying liquid concentrations.  The early reports suggested an unidentified substance caught fire when a worker dragged his foot on the ground.  The fire spread to the person still in the hospital and then the explosions happened.  That’s where our fatality was just found; it took this whole week just to clean up the debris and hazardous substances before hazmat crews could reach the body for recovery.  That story checks out in my book, I cannot tell you how many fires i have adverted after a nearly fatal foot-friction incident.  The solid SHMP is not much of a health hazard since well its used in processed food preservation but TKPP creates a toxic phosphor-containing brew when burned.

The neighboring Scotts facility up on the Cleburne Highway split which makes Hyponex reported sulfur smells, but then, that could be a case of what Sarah Silverman calls, not being able to smell your own smell.  Meanwhile, poor MetroWest Transload, a lumber railroad transloading facility, almost definitely had to shut down their operations today.  Who knows the future of this site but whatever happens here in the future, the land will definitely be tainted for years to come.

[environmentalafterthought]

Jan 9 - Its been a string of unfortunate events down here in Gadani on the Pakastani Coast at the local Ship Yard which decommisions derelict vessels in a somewhat grusome manner; it appears to involve the murder of indigent workers.  At todays debacle a mere five workers were killed when an abandoned LPG tanker occupying plot 60 mysteriously caught fire (again) during morning tea.  If there was a sign saying X days without a fatality in the yard the sign would have had a 1 on it since a worker was killed just yesterday less dramatically then this particular incident most likely.

I do not want to be the one giving Gadani a black eye here, though, it just sounds like bad luck to me.  For instance, back in late October, the final tally appears to be 27 workers died with multiple more injured on MT Aces, an old Japanese oil tanker when it went up in flames as a worker torch cutting randomly through its interior lingered too long on a buried compressed gas cylinder causing a catastrophic explosion.  Needless to say its one way to breakdown a ship.  There are an endless stream of these incidents most which go unreported or uncared.  Like the time a storage tank fell on some workers.

As if wanton murder of poor people wasnt enough, beyond the obvious enviornmental havoc wreaked by these smoldering demolitions, there are innumerable ecological disasters that happen here on the daily including heavy metal leaching, oil spills, pcb contamination, scatter of asbestos, and the list goes on.  They really should establish some rules about doing this safely, i mean as long as we can do it without slowing down that steady supply of scrap metal and money into Karachi.

[environmentalafterthought]

Dec 14 - Not much to see here folks, its hardly noticeable really.  But if you zoom in on the above picture near that red building in the center of the still you can see the ground looks awfully dark and nothing like the ground so near.  What is it?  Diesel we are told as a very long row of flammable placarded DOT 111 tank cars stretch to the horizon above the stain.  Granted that Bakken oil runs through here at the Missoula rail yard from North Dakota all the way out to Washington before taking either a hard right turn if heading to Canada or a hard left if heading down to California refineries.  Whatever the case, just 7,000 gallons of diesel escaped a “pipeline” and met dirt the day before.  Of course thats only a quarter of one of those tank cars so either they are running light or their empties are nowhere near empty if its not diesel.

Unfortunately, word didnt really spread until another two days after this photo even the local fire department was a bit miffed they didnt get a courtsey notice but then again, this is a railroad line and terriotry is territory.  The rail yard operator felt obligated to do SOMETHING and scooped up the whole lot of dirt impacted by the semi-volatile fuel, down to 20 feet below grade no less.  The final tally was that 2,600 gallons of liquids were recovered and another 1,100 cubic yards of dirt were hauled off, it may not add up to 7,000 and of course we are comparing apples to petroleum hydrocarbons but the main thing is even if it somehow got all the way down to the deep aquifer if anything remained down there past 20 damn feet its not the end of the world because that area is already contaminated from historical impacts from the railroad going back over a century.  Thank goodness for small favors.

[environmentalafterthought]

Nov 22 - Sometimes you just can’t catch a break... it all started the day after a blaze broke out in the wee hours of this late autumn morning at the Airosol Inc facility, almost literally the backbone of Neodesha since 1943 out in Wilson County Kansas.  Neodesha, home to the smartly named Neodesha Plastics (for all your thermoforming and vacuum forming needs), Neodesha Quality Machining, as well as MEC Corporation, just one of the industrial dryer manufacturers in town.  So, not sure from what or how, but a massive fire broke out at a process building on the sprawling industrial park unfortunately just feet away from where homes are parked.

That isn't even the start of the worst of it.  So this Airosol facility, technically home to a packaging company mind you just packaging of industrial solvents and gases that have the trifecta of flammability, corrosivity, and toxicity whose bio states that they "believe in quality products that perform properly, are cost efficient, safe to use and responsibly formulated for environmental impact” (note that afterthought!), released a nasty brew.  A hazardous smoke plume blew north for over a day resulting in mass evacuations and shelter-in-place orders.  Meanwhile, the brew being washed away by an endless amount of water and foam from fire services met up with the Fall River.  Initially, reports stated not to use the water in town because the firemen needed it for their work.  But when the fire was out and the order became don't drink, cook wash, bathe, not even breath or look at the local water (OK to flush toilets with though) and that the local Health Department was going to have to buy a round of water for the hamlet, a three-day round no less, (this after a national disaster was declared by Gov Sam Brownback, opening up those oh-so-sour federal bucks) folks figured out that things weren’t good.  It turns out, the Fall River isn't a dead end, it just flows right into the Verdigris River, and that just happens to be the regional water supply.

Now you might think that would be the end of it, but no, in a story reminiscent of the Elk River fiasco, even days later, water in the Verdigris downriver over 50 miles, even down in Nowata over in Oklahoma they had boil water notices and water system lockouts for days. 

All this AND just in time for Thanksgiving.

[atmospheric-phenomena]

“Super Moon” November 14, 2016

[spaceplasma]

Nope. This moon rise over Los Angeles was captured by photographer  Dan Marker-Moore in 2013.  Here’s the video.

[environmentalafterthought]

October 4 - On the gently lapping banks of Sungai Semenyih way way out from the hustle and bustle and muscle that is Kuala Lumpur, a mystery stirs in the night.  For the second time in two weeks, the water treatment plant has shut down because the works are all gummed up.  The facility has become fouled by massive pollution forcing the shutdown.  It wouldn't be so bad if that plant didn't then turn around and deliver that cool refreshing sungai water to over 300,000 water users in the region.  A foul odor from the plant indicates something is not right.  Not the most ideal sensing tool for identifying outgoing water pollution, but we make do way out in the BFE of Malaysia’s most populous city.

The Department of Environment goes into surveillance mode and bam, 10 days later after another voluminous discharge they find their culprit.  An illegal oil recycling facility nestled in the overgrowth next to a little shop called SR Building Materials.  This used oil hoarder apparently has been operating undisturbed for at least two years.  But now, Chief Minister of Selangor Mohammed Azmin (also head of the local Football Association) says enough is enough.  He tells the DOE to seize the property and evict the culprits.  No appeals needed as this is a cut and dry case says Azmin.

The Semenyih is safe for another day, not counting the untold impacts from the Semenyih Hi-tech Industrial Park and the innumerable other impacts to the region.

[environmentalafterthought]

Oct 14 - Its official; or at least officially positively confirmed after a handful of other investigations in the last ten years and the actual event, the sinking of U-864, on February 9, 1945 by the British near Fedje island, Norway.  But Berlin, we have Mercury!  At one time, 65 tonnes , or over 100,000 lbs of this stuff.  Now its all gone; well not gone gone.  From the sediment sampling done at and around this wreck, maybe dispersed is a better way of looking at it. 

At the wreck site, the researchers performing this study collected a hot sample of over 24,00 mg/kg and a close second above 21,000 mg/kg in the area.  That’s ppm, folks.   10,000 ppm is 1% mass, so in 1 kg of seafloor, 2.4% is mercury.  That’s crazy.  Up and down the coast, 4 miles in both directions, mercury was found at 1,000s of mg/kg which is 5-6 order of magnitudes above background. 

Luckily little methylmercury was found, because that stuff bio-accumulates something fierce.  They think that there isn't a bunch because of the very sandy floor devoid of biogenic life, so no sources of fixing the metallic mercury into the even more toxic form.  Its definitely that and not that it has already been uptaked and walked away with over the years so that it is comingled with the region or even globe.  They did measure the presence in crabs in the region which can be a sink of mercury, but i’m guessing we are a few generations removed from Norwegian grampa crabby who single-clawedly beat off the krauts.

So, once again, Hilter.  Not only was he a monster, but he put the environment at risk.  The mercury and other resources were being delivered to Japan on a supply run, when the British intercepted communique (Thanks, Alan Turing!) that U-864 would be in the area after leaving the port in Bergen.  The British sub HMS Venturer located U-864 from a wobbly engine creating enough sound to seal the subs fate.  It is the only known sinking of a sub between two fully submerged vessels.  All 72 sailors on board including two high-ranking Japanese military scientists died.  War is hell and worse, has effects that linger long after the fighting is done.

[environmentalafterthought]

Sep 30 - It’s getting harder and harder to do the right thing these days what with these stringent regulations and frivolous lawsuits and such. 

Here, off Highway 67 coming into Missouri from the timewarp Alton on the Illinois side at that funky interchange just before I-70 (270 actually, its a spaghetti soup of interstates around there) runs domestic and staid Coldwater Creek.  Its a short meandering path here straight into the Missouri River which of course covers some ground starting somewhere out in Montana or Idaho or something and making it all the way through the Dakotas, Nebraska and all the away across Missouri to its dead end just a few miles up river from the outfall of Coldwater Creek at the Mississippi River.

And we do not know exactly what happened but this much we do: the fine fellows at Pavement Solutions or Strategies or whatever LLC somehow managed to get a drum or some amount of its liquid polymer modifier into a roadway drain or some other hobby hole on the side of the road.  This particular flavor of copolymer known in the industry as Modifier A/NA which is just a super way of conveying that its a blend of styrene-butadiene (only  thing missing is the acrylonitrile!) liquid product that was referred to by this news item as a concrete modifier (man, these people will pour copolymers on just about anything these days and call it value-added).  And no big stress because this is not hazardous, dangerous, sick-inducing or anything like that.

Well, so Pavement Solution Contractors LLC, did the honest thing and called it in to the state spill line or Highway Patrol or whatever as a job well done, they cleaned it all up, nothing more to see here move along I say already!  Until commuters and area citizens started to notice an opaque milky character to that naturally crystal clear creek.  So wouldn't you know it, five days later, PS LLC has to go back out with a bunch of heavy equipment and clean it up right to the letter of the law.

This isnt the only color changing water we have going on either; just a month or two ago in Smyrna, Georgia, the almost exact same story went down.  Some river in Russia a few months back turned blood red, cause you know Putin is so brutal with his iron ore waste.  And then there is the whole PPH Stripped story over in West Virginia we just got the official telling of that which we already knew so its good to have it in zzzzz-inducing report format.  Its good to know that responsible parties are abound out there when this stuff happens, because apparently it happens A LOT!

[environmentalafterthought]

Sep 16 - As the slow moving waters bubble and ebb through fissures and depressions in the serene vista near Mulberry, Florida a kind of waterfall forms in one of natures masterpieces of water migration.  Of course, the water in question is trickling out of a phosphogypsum wastewater impoundment at a fertilizer plant and the waterfall is created by a sinkhole that formed conveniently close to giving that nuisance water idling around for decades a potentially irretrivable place to go: the subsurface Florida aquifer, which unfortunately is also the source of much of the states drinking water.

If you are wondering what phosophogypsum is, well its basically all the stuff out of the ground the fertilizer company didnt want after it made its grade A mixes of soil amendment you buy in sacks at the home despots and that the nice service person loads in your car for you since they are so heavy.  Those sacks don’t contain nasty rock chemicals like sulfates, chlorates, carbonates, metals, and naturally occuring radioactive material like radium or thorium; they dont have them in there because the acidic wastewater does.  Now, that brew, over 200 million gallons of it so far since late August, is making its way down the chute with a straight shot to groundwater.

Whats more, this isnt the first time its happened.  Back in 1994, the same thing happened, without much fanfare.  Its likely happened to lesser degrees many times since. The EPA just reached a consent decree with the operator, Mosaic LLC, which was created from the merger of the former facility operator IMC-Agrico and Cargill, to cleanup numerous facilities like this throught Florida and Louisiana just a year ago.  Perhaps this is a just a treatment technology thought up by a Mosaic wastewater engineer.

[environmentalafterthought]

Sept 10 - The birds eye view of the epicenter at Bay Long where Great Lakes Dredge, the kind souls bringing back the barrier islands of Louisiana since that big spill back in 2010, are now playing the role of dutch boy plugging the dike because the law of unintended consequences struck hard when they dug too deep and ruptured one of a gazillion pipelines that criss-cross the state like spaghetti south of I-10 out to the deep Gulf releasing a mere 6,000-gallons.  The release oiled a fair number of birds (hopefully none of Brown Pelicans) and cost a big kerfuffle requiring a response from the Coast Guard, OSROs, and the state environmental regulator to name a few.

I guess no good deed goes unpunished and really, compared to the Macondo oil spill of 2010, this is just a drop in the bucket on the Louisiana coast.

[environmentalafterthought]

Aug 22 - On a lonely stretch of Highway 377 on the road to Denton from Fort Worth, Texas approximately 26 rail cars carrying coal left the tracks and dumped their load all along a stretch which bad luck would have it happened to include Denton Creek; five those cars ended up in the drink.  Considering a car of this type safely can car 100 tons no problem, that is over 500 tons of coal that ended up in the creek.  Denton Creek flows into the man-made Grapevine Lake which turns into the Trinity River after that.

Officials were painfully clear that no hazardous materials were involved in the accident since coal isn’t hazardous.  Yes it can be burned to create hella energy and yes its essentially a solid petroleum product made up of semi-volatile and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are known carcinogens... but, coal itself as a total package is not defined as a hazardous material so not a worry.

Likely this batch was coming from Wyoming, where the coal is plentiful, and heading for an export terminal somewhere along the Gulf Coast, where they too are plentiful.  The trains pass by with such frequency, this is an acceptable loss of quality control.

Railroads have a seriously vested interest to get the lines cleared and get product moving again, but with the derailment caused by basically complete annihilaiton of the bridge over the creek, they are going to have to work double time to get cars across the creek again.  Also, luckily, since railroad easements are considered private property, no interference from outside regulators need occur and Union Pacific Railroad can get right back to routine coal train operations.