Ohio Quakes Linked to Oil-Drilling Waste Pumped Into Wells

Okay, so technically the recent earthquakes in Ohio were not the result of fracking, but check out the key passage in this USA Today article about the quakes:

Oil-drilling wastewater pumped into a northeast Ohio well "almost certainly" triggered 11 minor earthquakes around Youngstown since last spring, including one Saturday, a seismologist tells the Associated Press.

Ohio officials closed four inactive "fluid injection" wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well, which is near a fault that geologists apparently weren't aware of. Pressure from the wastewater caused the fault to shift.

Northstar Disposal Services has used the wells to dispose of brine wastewater from shale oil and gas drilling, which officials said is different from so-called fracking, the Youngstown Business Journal and AP report.

Despite the disclaimer, The Christian Science Monitor writes that the disposal wells -- and the earthquakes -- are related to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing ("How fracking caused an Ohio earthquake").

The seismologist interviewed by the AP, John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said more minor shakes can be expected throughout 2012.

"The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you've caused them to occur," he said. "This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it's going to be spreading out for at least a year."

"...which is near a fault that geologists apparently weren't aware of..." in other words they were tampering with the geology of a potentially unstable area and had no idea about the risks they were taking. If they had no idea this fault line was there, how many other fault lines in potential fracking zones around the country do they have no idea about?

What is it going to take to stop this insanity, the accidental triggering of a major earthquake in a large metropolitan area? And before you scoff and say that can't happen, I would simply ask this question: how do you know? The science of earthquakes is still not well understood and they have yet to be predicted with any degree of accuracy. For all we know, every day that fracking and other injection techniques being used to extract oil and natural gas is placing us at risk of a major catastrophe. Do you want to be living in the area where the fracking equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster takes place? Because I sure don't.

We should stop this madness once and for all and accept the fact that extending our fossil fuel supplies by a few years is not worth the risk of touching off a major earthquake, especially since we are eventually going to be forced to power down one way or another. But of course we won't. We're on a highway to hell, barreling at top speed with the brake line severed.


Bonus: "No stop signs...speed limits...nobody's gonna slow us down"

The Red Cross is in Dire Need of Financial First Aid

By any measure, 2011 was a very big year for natural disasters in the United States. Tornadoes, blizzards, floods, wildfires and droughts were among the weather releated clamities the country suffered this year. With extreme weather events become more common due to climate change, there has never been a greater need for disaster assistance. Which is what makes this report about budget cuts and job layoffs at the American Red Cross all the more distressing:

For the American Red Cross, it has been a doubly challenging year.

While coping with a relentless series of natural disasters, the organization has carried out a nationwide overhaul that slashed more than 1,500 jobs, pared down many local offices, and left some former loyalists with badly bruised feelings.

President Gail McGovern says the 130-year-old Red Cross had little choice but to restructure in order to ward off a projected deficit. It has merged and consolidated many chapters to reduce duplication, and given the national office control over local fundraising so all funds can be spent as strategically as possible.

"We have remarkably loyal donors, and they're also demanding," McGovern said in an interview. "They want to be sure their hard-earned dollars are being used to optimize the mission and are going to help the people we serve."

During the year, McGovern said, the Red Cross has eliminated roughly 1,000 positions at its local and regional chapters and about 170 positions at its Washington headquarters — in each case about 10 percent of the work force. In addition, about 400 posts out of roughly 20,000 were eliminated in the biomedical and blood services division.

It was also distressing to see that the Red Cross president is not above engaging in a little corporate FlackSpeak:

McGovern insists that the core missions — notably disaster relief, blood banks and assistance to military families — will not be impaired. She said the Red Cross responded vigorously to this year's nationwide onslaught of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and wildfires.

"If there was any doubt in anyone's mind that we would be able to fulfill the mission, that doubt was removed," she said. "If anything, we're doing it better."

I'll take that bet, Ms. McGovern. Because that is the kind of statement you can make that cannot easily be verified or refuted. In fact, the article then goes on to list a number of instances where the Red Cross is not actually doing it better. For example:

In Western Massachusetts, the overhaul was complicated by a decision to cut several programs deemed to be outside the core Red Cross mission. An HIV/AIDS support program was shifted to a regional hospital, but there were hitches finding new agencies to provide non-emergency medical transport.

Digging a little deeper into the article, it becomes apparent that the agency's financial troubles really began at the time of the market crash:

It's the second major Red Cross overhaul in recent years. In 2008, faced with a deficit of about $210 million, it laid off one-third of the 3,000 employees at its Washington headquarters.

Under the leadership of McGovern, who became president in 2008, the deficit was eliminated, but she says the new cutbacks were needed to prevent fiscal problems from resurfacing. The Red Cross estimates that this year's restructuring will save $80 million, including salaries and centralizing administrative operations.

"We did not lightly go ahead and make these decisions," McGovern said. "Layoffs are very difficult in the nonprofit area, because they're not here for the money, they're here because of their hearts."

Which is exactly why you shouldn't be absurdly claiming that you are "doing it better" despite the layoffs, because that is obviously an insult to those who are losing their jobs. Just be honest, Ms. McGovern. The Red Cross is shrinking because the money to fund it is drying up. Fewer people with good jobs means fewer donors to give to charitable organizations like the Red Cross. It's an important truth that people need to hear so that they can prepare themselves for the eventual day when the Red Cross will no longer be there for them when disaster strikes.

NOVA Irene Update

Well, I don't particularly hate Irene. Locally, she's been nothing more than a mere annoyance. We've had light-to-moderate rainfall for about 10 hours now with an occasional wind gust. If you hadn't turned on a teevee for the past week, you might be inclined to think that it was merely another stormy night.

Looks like the East Coast and particularly New York City dodged The Big One this time around, but that's not to say there won't be a lot of unpleasantness for the coastal communities. Weird week in these parts, with first the Earthquake and then the hurricane. All told, it could have been a LOT worse.

I hope everyone stays safe, and I'll be resuming normal blogging tomorrow.

A Hard Rain’s-a-Gonna Fall

Like everyone else who lives on the East Coast, I am bracing myself for the impact from Hurricane Irene. Fortunately, where I live in Northern Virginia is well inland and not even near the tidal Potomac River. The last time we went through this was with Hurricane Isabel in 2003. That time we lost power for a day-and-a-half at my place and had to boil water for a few days after that. Isabel, however, tracked much farther inland than this storm, which is looking to severely impact the coastline from the Carolinas northward. Though initially more powerful, Isabel was also a much smaller storm. Irene is monster-sized.

Back in 1999, I happened to be on a work trip down in Georgia when Hurricane Floyd roared up the East Coast. That time I had the unfortunate experience of getting caught up in the largest civilian evacuation in U.S. history as much of the state of Florida bugged out before that monstrous storm, only to have it make a last minute turn and slam into the Carolinas instead. Such is a reminder that, even with all of our modern forecasting technology, these things still have quite an element of chance to them. For me it was an awful 14-hour drive to find a hotel room in North Carolina, only to wake up the next day with the storm bearing down on me anyway.

I hope everyone within the path of this monster stays safe. Don’t take any foolish chances out there this weekend. Subject to the power going out or the Internet going down, I’ll report back in with the effects as we experience them here in the DC area. As of right now, it looks like the first rain bands are a couple of hours away.

CNN FAIL – How the So-Called “Leader” in News Dropped the Ball on Covering the Joplin Tornado

Everyone now knows that around 5:30 PM CDT this past Sunday night a massive tornado struck the unfortunate town of Joplin, Missouri, causing massive devastation, taking well over 100 lives and injuring many more. It was just the latest of a series of horrifying weather-related natural disasters, from floods to wildfires to tornadoes; that have devastated the middle section of the country this year. Joplin received a particularly vicious blow when a main hospital and several fire stations were virtually destroyed by the storm, and it was immediately apparent that outside help was desperately needed as quickly as possible.

So you would have thought that CNN, which laughingly bills itself as the Worldwide Leader in News, would have been right on top of the story from the get-go. Especially since a rival network, The Weather Channel, almost immediately began broadcasting live from just outside the ruined St. John’s Hospital by virtue of having had a storm chasing team led by on air meteorologist Mike Bettes fortuitously on the scene. The images of Bettes choking with emotion while standing in the ruins chatting with dazed survivors outside the hospital complex--which looked eerily like the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City right after the 1995 bombing--should have alerted anyone who saw them that a major humanitarian crisis was occurring in real time.

So I was amazed when I switched over to CNN around 6:30 PM CST to see that they hadn’t bothered to cut into their regularly scheduled Sunday night programming and were still showing an episode of CNN Presents. Even worse was CNN HLN, the later set of initials for which used to stand for Headline News and once upon a time provided 24/7 half-hour news broadcasts—hence the name. HLN was showing an episode of Showbiz Tonight, and switching back and forth between the utterly vapid report on the antics of yet another superficial celebritard and The Weather Channel vividly brought home to me yet again, as the late Joe Bageant often pointed out, just how disconnected the holographic world of the American media has become these days from everyday reality in this country.

Not until seven o’clock did CNN rouse out of its slumber and begin to provide live coverage, by which point Bettes had been on the air for over an hour pleading for anyone and everyone to send help. Even then, CNN was reduced to having its anchor chat on the phone with a local reporter who was slowly trying to make her way to St. John’s Hospital. When she arrived near the scene after much difficulty the anchor implored her to tell him what she saw, to which I lost patience and literally yelled at the screen, “Switch over to the Weather Channel, you dumbfuck. It’s right there!” But at least by this point CNN’s main network was actually covering the story. HLN did not bother altering its regular programming at all, at least not during the couple of times I checked as the evening wore on. Showbiz Tonight was followed by something I have never watched nor ever care to watch called the Joy Behar Show.

I don't know why CNN was so slow on the uptake in recognizing the magnitude of the story, but I surmise the likely reason is budgetary cutbacks that have probably left it with a skeleton staff during slow news periods like Sunday nights. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from wasting their remaining resources sending reporters out to produce useless shit like Showbiz Tonight. Seriously, if I actually gave a damn about the antics of talentless wastes of space like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber I would turn on E! Network, thank you very much.

We will never know if CNN’s tardiness in getting its act together on this story slowed down recognition of the seriousness of the situation and hence the speed of the response among EMTs, doctors and other emergency responders outside of the immediate Joplin area. But the delay is a damning indictment of 24/7 cable “news” networks, the purpose of which first and foremost is supposed to be their ability to quickly get the word of important stories out to the public.

Had Mike Bettes and The Weather Channel crew not happened to have been lucky enough to be right on the scene of the disaster when it unfolded, who knows how long the CNN coverage might have been delayed. And this is not to completely let The Weather Channel off the hook, either. It was reported online very early on that Bettes had asked his bosses to suspend the network’s commercials as they did during their live broadcast of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, tornado aftermath last month. The network honchos obviously refused, because for the rest of the night viewers were treated to five minute chunks of real life mayhem interrupted by ads for lawn care products and antihistamine sprays. No doubt they thought the spike in ratings caused by the coverage justified showing such poor taste in the face of disaster.

This is also not to single out CNN alone for its ineptness. “News” has always been a commodity subject to the whims of the corporations who underwrite its production. In recent years, however, the negative effects of corporate sponsorship have degraded the mainstream media to the point that here we see an example of how it is no longer even any good at producing what it was always good at producing in the past—coverage of a major natural disaster. If they can’t get a story as basic as the Joplin tornado right, how do you think they are going cover those truly serious issues that really matter to us all—like resource depletion, climate change and economic collapse?

One last word before I close. At one point on Sunday night the CNN anchor reported that he was getting many tweets from viewers demanding to know what was going on with the weather that was causing all these disasters. He then blathered in typical news speak, “this is a question we’ll be asking,” rather than just stating the obvious—climate change. Because heaven forbid a ‘news’ anchor in America in this day and age would EVER be caught telling the truth on the air.