History > 2011 > USA > Weather / Nature / Environment (I)

Fishermen and members of the community

listen to Ken Feinberg, administrator of the BP claims fund,

on March 28 at a public meeting in Mathews, La.

Photograph: Julia Rendleman

The Houma Courier/AP

Boston Globe > Big Picture

Gulf oil spill one year later        22 April 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/04/gulf_oil_spill_one_year_later.html

Beyond the Oil Spill,

the Tragedy of an Ailing Gulf

April 20, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — The anniversary has passed, the cleanup goes on, and still southern Louisiana sinks steadily into the sea.

Even in the worst days of the BP spill, coastal advocates were looking past the immediate emergency to what the president’s oil spill commission called “the central question from the recovery of the spill — can or should such a major pollution event steer political energy, human resources and funding into solutions for a continuing systemic tragedy?”

That tragedy is the ill and declining health of the Gulf of Mexico, including the enormous dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi and the alarmingly rapid disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, roughly 2,000 square miles smaller than they were 80 years ago. Few here would take issue with the commission’s question, but the answer to it is far from resolved.

Eclipsed by the spill’s uncertain environmental impact is the other fallout: the vast sums in penalties and fines BP will have to pay to the federal government. In addition to criminal fines and restitution, BP is facing civil liabilities that fall roughly into two categories: Clean Water Act penalties and claims from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, whereby state and federal agencies tally the damage caused by the spill and put a price tag on it. This could add up to billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars.

BP is not the only company involved with the Deepwater Horizon accident that could be on the hook for these damages. In a sign of the bitter legal fight brewing among defendants, BP on Wednesday sued the maker of the blowout preventer and the owner of the oil rig, arguing that their negligence led to the spill.

But for people along the gulf, the issue of who pays the damages is less important than will they get paid.

Officials and coastal advocates all along the coast agree that the money could be an enormous boon for the gulf, as it would be impossible to obtain money like that through the normal political channels. But that is the only agreement.

Negotiations are under way among the area’s Congressional delegation on a bill that would follow the presidential commission’s recommendation in allocating four-fifths of BP’s Clean Water Act penalties — which could range from $5.4 billion to $21 billion — on the Gulf Coast. Without separate legislation, the money would go into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to help pay to clean up future spills; once that fund reaches $2.7 billion, the rest would go into the Treasury.

But while such bills have been proposed in the House and Senate, gulfwide support of any one bill remains elusive. Disagreement remains among gulf state legislators over basics like how the money would be split and what it could be spent on. Among the concerns are how much leeway states would have to fund projects not related to ecosystem restoration — Alabama officials, for example, have broadcast a desire to build a convention center — and whether the money would be shared equally among the states or allocated based on the spill’s environmental impact, in which case Louisiana would get a much larger piece.

A deal among the gulf state delegation, of course, does not ensure the bill’s passage through Congress, particularly given the pall of austerity that has descended on Washington. Donald Boesch, a marine science professor at the University of Maryland who was on the presidential oil spill commission, said the political concessions necessary to a gulfwide agreement, like the flexibility to spend the money on economic projects, could deter lawmakers from other states, who would be hesitant to allow money to go to projects that are not directly tied to spill recovery.

Some lawmakers, Professor Boesch said, have also been given pause by the relentless criticism from Louisiana’s political leaders of the Obama administration’s post-spill regulations. Arguing that the new rules have jeopardized the state’s drilling-dependent economy, Louisiana lawmakers have recently championed bills in the House of Representatives that would speed up and possibly bypass federal reviews of offshore drilling leases.

“To many it seems what they’re asking for is to get back to the way they were operating before, without recognizing that things have changed,” Professor Boesch said in an interview. “You’re not willing to take steps to protect the environment, so why are you to be believed that you can take steps to restore the environment?”

If the political route fails, there is Plan B: the federal authorities could direct some money toward restoration as part of an eventual settlement.

“If no new legislation is passed,” David M. Uhlmann, an expert in environmental law at the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail message, “the Justice Department is likely to negotiate for a large natural resource damage claim, perhaps even at the expense of civil penalties, and may try to obtain additional funds for restoration efforts as part of any criminal plea agreement or civil consent decree.”

This could please environmentalists, as natural resource damage claims are required by law to be spent on restoration, and it could also make BP happier, as the payment of such claims have tax advantages and simply sound better than penalties.

But, Professor Uhlmann added, “far more would go to restoration if Congress takes action.”

Like all else in this spill, the natural resources damage assessment, while scientifically driven, is not untouched by politics. A plan of action requires some agreement among the various players, which has thus far been in short supply.

And if the money is worked out, said Oliver Houck, a professor at Tulane Law School who specializes in environmental law, there is still no consensus among scientists and officials on how best to fix the gulf’s most pressing problems.

“Even if all the other dominoes fall right, and none of them are falling right, you’re left with what to do with that big money,” he said. Speaking of Louisiana’s wetlands loss, he pointed out that the damage was more extensive and the solutions more limited than many acknowledge.

“We may be better off using this money to assist people to relocate people and move out,” Professor Houck said, “and let natural healing take place.”

    Beyond the Oil Spill, the Tragedy of an Ailing Gulf, NYT, 20.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21spill.html

Man With $20 Billion

to Disburse Finds No Shortage of Claims or Critics

April 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

From the numbers alone, you might think Kenneth R. Feinberg would be a popular guy.

Since taking over the $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Gulf Coast oil spill in July, he has handed out $3.8 billion, with $2.6 billion in no-strings-attached emergency payments and $1.2 billion in final and interim payments. More than a half-million people and businesses have filed claims with the fund, and nearly 70 percent of the claims have been resolved through payment, request for more information or rejection.

But Mr. Feinberg has become the man the Gulf Coast loves to hate. Residents yell at him in meetings, coastal politicians and the news media accuse him of acting in bad faith, and plaintiffs’ lawyers say he is working for BP.

A federal judge has ruled that while Mr. Feinberg’s work may benefit BP, his claims decisions are independent. Still, many who have dealt with the claims process complain that it is opaque at best, low-balls their compensation and varies payouts capriciously for neighbors in like circumstances.

“People are having any number of kinds of issues with the claims process,” said Martha Bergmark, the president of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that receives money from the fund to provide legal aid. “It’s getting invented on the fly here.”

Politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers decry as extortion Mr. Feinberg’s quick-pay option, which provides thousands of dollars to those willing to sign away their right to sue without having to prove economic loss. The critics say the difficulties of the claims process all but force claimants into the quick-pay system.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, sent a scorching letter to Mr. Feinberg last month saying he was “making empty promises to Louisianians” citing the complaints of seven constituents who said they had not been paid, or paid enough.

Opposition to Mr. Feinberg in Alabama has flared, and The Press-Register of Mobile called last year for him to be fired, though the paper no longer pushes the point. “When it became clear he wasn’t going to be fired, we just continued to hold his feet to the fire,” said Ricky R. Mathews, the paper’s publisher, who calls the fund a “very clumsy process.”

He added, “I believe from the very beginning he completely underestimated how big this was going to be.”

Mr. Feinberg says the attacks are misguided, and in many cases, flat wrong. In response to Mr. Vitter, he wrote that the examples did not stand up to scrutiny. One, he wrote, submitted claims for emergency payments “in an amount 2 1/2 times the business’s total gross sales” from its 2009 tax return; another submitted documentation “consisting solely of a letter from her mother as the business owner,” and several had filed multiple claims or offered little or no documentation. Yet another, he wrote, had submitted a business claim that included his wife’s losses, though his submitted tax returns reported her occupation as “housewife,” and did not show “any reference to her role, if any, in the business.” That claim was for more than twice the man’s previously reported fishing income.

In an interview, Mr. Feinberg was undaunted. “I will not pay claims that can’t be proven, that lack proof, that are not substantiated,” he said. “I won’t do it!” He admitted that “there may be inconsistencies” in a system of this size. “But I think those inconsistencies are relatively rare,” he added.

“One of the reasons your neighbor gets paid and you didn’t might have something to do with human nature,” he said. People in similar situations might approach the claims process with more proof or less, and higher or lower evaluations of their losses.

He said, “Don’t always believe everything you’ve heard from your next-door neighbor.”

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

    Man With $20 Billion to Disburse Finds No Shortage of Claims or Critics, NYT, 18.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19feinberg.html

Many Hit by Spill Now Feel Caught in Claim Process

April 18, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN SCHWARTZ

BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — By October, Tim Nguyen found that his work in a
Mississippi shipyard was no longer paying the bills. His hours had been cut back, part of the general ebb of work along the Gulf Coast after the terrible summer of BP.

Mr. Nguyen went to an office of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which was set up to administer BP’s $20 billion fund for coastal businesses and residents.

He was told he could not file a claim. A law firm he had never heard of had already filed one in his name.

“I never signed up with anybody,” he said.

In the six months since, Mr. Nguyen, 43, has been in limbo, suspended between the law firm and the claims facility. He has yet to receive a dime.

The 30,000 or so Vietnamese-Americans living along the Gulf Coast, many of whom have few resources outside of their boats and bare hands, know about life at the mercy of nature. But a year ago this week, they began learning a far more frustrating kind of vulnerability: put out of work by an energy giant, they turned for help to a claims system that many found to be opaque and unresponsive.

For people in Mr. Nguyen’s situation, and it is impossible to know how many others there are, the disorientation has been particularly deep, as they found themselves caught up in a legal process they did not even seek.

Like Mr. Nguyen, some maintain that they never signed up with lawyers, but found that claims had been filed on their behalf (about 50 people have made formal complaints to the claims facility along these lines).

Others along the coast said they had handed over financial records to people who promised them quick and free financial assistance, only to discover later that they had actually hired a lawyer.

And then there are those, like Tam Tran, a 59-year-old oyster shucker. He said he had been misled into signing up for a lawyer by a woman who told him he was applying for medical assistance. In the process of trying to extricate himself from this lawyer, Mr. Tran said, he found he was also a client of another.

Discovering the problem, as Mr. Tran learned, can be merely the beginning, leading to months of back and forth between the firm and the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, during which the claimant, often badly in need of money, is frozen out of the system entirely.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, who administers the claims facility, said such cases, “where the lawyer claims to represent the claimant and the claimant denies it,” had created “an obstacle to the efficiency and speed in getting the checks out.”

“The G.C.C.F. is constantly having to deal with this problem,” Mr. Feinberg said.

Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents, frustrated by the process, have actively sought legal help for their claims for loss of income or property damage. In return for their efforts in obtaining a satisfactory claim settlement, lawyers take part of the recovery, though many involved in the BP litigation say they are not charging for the no-documentation quick-pay settlements. Clients who forgo the claims process for a fight in the courts face a longer wait and the risk of coming away with nothing, but they also have a chance of a much larger payout.

One challenge of mass litigation is matching the thousands who are seeking redress with the firms that have the experience and resources to battle big corporations. Clients are often referred to these firms by local lawyers, who may in turn hire contractors, who themselves may hire runners to work as translators and to advertise the firm.

In cases where there seems to have been a breakdown — like the one involving Mr. Nguyen, who found himself listed as a client of a lawyer named Mikal C. Watts, and to his further surprise, as a Louisiana shrimper rather than a Mississippi shipyard worker — it is hard to know where the breakdown occurred.

Last summer and fall, numerous Vietnamese households — including some who say they were not even affected by the spill — received letters signed by Mr. Watts, of San Antonio. The letters, in Vietnamese, addressed some recipients by name and others as: “Dear Client.” The letters directed people to send their financial records and added, “Do not sign anything from BP or anyone else except Watts Guerra Craft,” the name of the firm.

“As far as I know almost every other house got it,” said Felix Cao, a law student at Loyola University in New Orleans. “I don’t know how they even found my address.”

Mr. Cao said he did not know whether he had become a client or simply a marketing target. He said he was not affected by the spill.

Nor was Nga Nguyen, who lives in New Orleans and also received one of the letters. “I think they just went through the phone book,” she said.

Mr. Watts is on the plaintiffs’ steering committee, an exclusive group of lawyers selected by Judge Carl J. Barbier of Federal District Court in New Orleans in October to manage their side of the litigation. Lawyers on such committees typically reap a financial bonanza for their efforts. A large list of clients can help secure a seat on the committee. Mr. Watts declared on his application that he had 41,000 clients, a tally he now puts at 43,000.

All of them, he said in an interview, came through referrals from other lawyers. He also said they were all substantiated: “I have a signed contingency-fee contract with every client.”

Mr. Watts met with resistance from the BP compensation fund when he tried to file emergency claims for all of his clients last August. When the fund questioned the number of clients, Mr. Watts tried to file fewer, some 26,000. He said the smaller group was composed of clients whose basic identifying information had been confirmed at that point. (Almost all of the others have since been confirmed, he said.) People familiar with the claims process said nearly every submission was listed as a deckhand with identical earnings. The fund demanded further documentation.

“We sent him the raw information he asked for,” but Mr. Feinberg kept changing the rules, Mr. Watts said. Now Mr. Watts said he is chiefly pursuing litigation.

“I reached the conclusion that Feinberg was delaying presentment,” he said, a view that has been echoed by others. “I think he’s a good man,” Mr. Watts said of Mr. Feinberg, but “I think he’s been overwhelmed by the process.”

In recent weeks, as the fund began to send out final settlements, Mr. Watts’s list again raised eyebrows. In the case of 35 Watts clients, the fund sent out checks to Mr. Watts and notices to the clients. But 11 of those clients protested that they were not represented by him.

“I have no doubt that people who are in dire need of money are going to go to the G.C.C.F. and make their own claims,” Mr. Watts said, “and when they are told they are represented and can’t get their money, they are going to ask if they can release their lawyers.” He added that he had released about 100 clients altogether. “These people need their money, and I am not going to stand in the way of their getting it,” he said.

The problem in many cases seems to have started at the ground level. Here in Bayou La Batre, Vietnamese people tell of contractors who allowed relatives to sign them up in absentia, or who encouraged potential clients to sign official-looking forms — in English — without explaining that the forms were legal retainers. The stories vary but the same few names come up.

Having heard similar reports last September, Lan Diep, an Equal Justice Works and AmeriCorps fellow working on the Gulf Coast, visited the office of one such contractor, in a ranch house just outside of town.

Not letting on that that he spoke English, Mr. Diep was told by a man at the house that he could get money simply by filling out a form and handing over some financial documents. He was given a retainer for Brent Coon and Associates, a Texas law firm, he said, but was not told that he was signing up for a lawyer nor was he allowed to keep a copy for himself.

The house belonged to Tina Lam, who works for her brother, a contractor, who in turn works for a Mobile lawyer, who has been referring cases to Mr. Coon since the summer.

A dozen or so unhappy clients attended a meeting sponsored by the Coon firm here last month, with some saying they had been charged fees despite having never hired the firm.

At the meeting, Ms. Lam insisted that she had fully explained to people what they were signing up for, adding that it was her policy not to allow anyone to take the forms with them.

Mr. Coon, in an interview, did not address Bayou La Batre, but said he had already released hundreds of clients, many of them Vietnamese, on an array of complaints.

Some of the problems, he said, seemed to arise from miscommunication; others involved people who simply decided they no longer wanted representation, possibly to circumvent paying fees; and in some cases, he acknowledged, “people are probably overstepping” in signing up clients.

Mr. Coon attributed such widespread turmoil in part to Mr. Feinberg’s repeated statements that people did not need legal representation to file their claims, a sore point for other lawyers as well as legal rights advocates, who say many problems could have been avoided by starting a well-financed legal aid program in the spill’s early days. Part of it, though, could be the sheer scale of the system, Mr. Coon said, adding that he had never encountered so many anomalies.

Since the spill, several dozen people have taken complaints like this to the branch office of Boat People SOS, a national nonprofit group that serves Vietnamese-Americans.

“It’s really disheartening to see this vulnerable population being taken advantage of time and time again,” said Grace Scire, the group’s Gulf Coast regional director.

Tuan Do, who began working in the office after being laid off from his job as a store clerk during the oil spill, listened to these stories while making his own way through the claims system.

Late last year, he filed for a modest settlement, and like so many others, he has been waiting ever since. Two weeks ago, Mr. Do checked with the claims facility on his status. They said they could no longer discuss it with him.

To his surprise, he found out that he now had a lawyer in Mr. Watts.

    Many Hit by Spill Now Feel Caught in Claim Process, NYT, 18.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19spill.html

Deadly Twisters

Renew Questions About Pressure on Emergency Budgets

April 18, 2011
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

ATLANTA — Emergency management officials in Southern states said recent budget cutting did not limit their ability to respond to the scores of tornadoes that touched down in six states on Friday and Saturday, leaving at least 44 people dead, injuring hundreds and causing devastating damage to houses, businesses and farmland.

But the officials said the punishing string of storms, and the anticipation of hurricane season, would bring renewed scrutiny of whether emergency preparedness and response was being compromised by fiscal pressures at all levels of government.

Nationwide, even as states have slashed their budgets in consecutive years, spending on state emergency management systems has actually increased slightly, according to the National Emergency Management Association. The accumulated budgets of those agencies in the 50 states and the District of Columbia totaled $316.8 million in the 2010 fiscal year, up from $294.3 million in 2009.

While some of the affected states have trimmed their emergency response budgets in recent years, officials there said they had managed the reductions by reducing spending on travel, training and public education, not on direct disaster response efforts.

In North Carolina, which was hardest hit and where there were at least 22 deaths from storms that hit Saturday night, damage assessment teams of federal, state and local workers began touring 11 counties on Monday, said Patty L. McQuillan, a spokeswoman for the state’s Division of Emergency Management.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had dispatched 12 damage assessment teams to North Carolina, three to Mississippi and one to Alabama. A team was in Oklahoma over the weekend.

Ms. McQuillan said North Carolina’s emergency response agency had lost two positions to budget cuts last year — an administrative assistant and an emergency planner — leaving the agency with 176 employees. The reductions did not diminish the state’s response, she said.

This year, Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, and the state’s Republican-led legislature are considering proposals to merge all of the state’s public safety, corrections and emergency management agencies into a single department.

State Representative Leo Daughtry, a Republican who is chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee for those agencies, said the storms would give lawmakers a reason to further study that move. But he said he did not anticipate they would change the sentiment toward reorganizing departments to save money and simplify lines of command.

Ms. Perdue said on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday that she had spoken to President Obama and met with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She said she expected a federal emergency declaration by the end of the week.

In Alabama, where there were seven deaths, Gov. Robert Bentley recently ordered 15 percent cuts from all state agencies for the current fiscal year in order to close a $100 million shortfall. Art Faulkner, the director of the state’s Emergency Management Agency, said he had eliminated 4 positions in recent months, leaving 103, and would most likely cut two more.

But he said the reductions primarily meant that his staff was communicating with local officials more by telephone and video conferencing, rather than traveling the state.

“We made cuts in the areas that were the least critical to our ability to respond to these types of storms,” Mr. Faulkner said.

Despite the devastation in places where the tornados touched down, insurance officials said property insurance rates were unlikely to rise as a result.

Insurers can’t arbitrarily raise rates” after a string of destructive storms, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute. Only if a new trend were to emerge over several years would companies then go to that state’s regulators and argue a rate increase was justified, she said.

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta,

and Mary Williams Walsh from New York.

    Deadly Twisters Renew Questions About Pressure on Emergency Budgets, R, 18.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19response.html

After Storms, a Widespread Path of Death and Damage

April 17, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

The terrified look in one of her employee’s eyes was the first clue Terri Rodriguez had that something was terribly wrong Saturday afternoon.

The worker had been washing kitchen equipment behind Golden Corral, a popular restaurant in Sanford, N.C., when he spotted a giant black funnel cloud bearing down. It was one of more than 90 tornadoes — what one meteorologist described as a “family” of them — that hit the state on Saturday.

He ran to Ms. Rodriguez, who walked out the back door. She dodged a piece of flying wood, and then she saw it: a dark funnel cloud thick with wood and metal only a couple of blocks away.

About 140 people were eating in her restaurant, many of them in front of the thick plate-glass windows that run the length of the place.

“All I could think is that I have to get them away from the glass because I knew it would just cut them in half,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “I thought, where can I put them? Then I yelled: ‘Tornado! Everyone to my kitchen!’ ”

People packed into the meat cooler and behind the stoves. Others jammed into the restrooms. Then they waited. After five minutes, Ms. Rodriguez said, the darkness lifted and she peeked out the back door.

The tornado, she said, had bounced up, skipped the Golden Corral and made a sharp turn, setting down on top of a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center a few hundred feet away.

“I could see the roof was just gone and all of the Lowe’s stuff flying up in the air,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

The Lowe’s store in Sanford, a town of about 29,000 in the center of the state, was essentially demolished. But an estimated 70 customers were saved when another fast-thinking manager herded customers and his staff into a windowless storeroom.

The storm killed at least two people in the Sanford area and injured several more, according to Sheriff Tracy Carter of Lee County.

A string of tornadoes that began Thursday night in Oklahoma left of a trail of death and millions of dollars in damage from the middle of America to the Eastern Seaboard. But they reached their zenith on Saturday night in North Carolina.

Officials said the storms killed at least 43 people and injured hundreds more. No damage estimates were immediately available, but they will most certainly run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Although April and May are the worst time for tornadoes in the South, this storm system, which had its roots in the Pacific Ocean, was unusual for its size and duration, officials said. The storm would calm itself a bit at night and then gain renewed strength with the day’s heat, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It brought flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms laced with giant balls of hail to Oklahoma on Thursday, killing two elderly sisters, before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia.

The effects from the storms could be felt as far as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area on Saturday night, when furious wind-driven rains covered roadways and produced isolated flooding.

When the system hit North Carolina on Saturday night, it spawned a record 92 tornadoes in the state, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than 80 others. At least 14 deaths were in Bertie and Hertford Counties, in a rural northeast corner of the state where cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and soybeans anchor the economy.

“Normally the storms that hit here are pretty severe but smaller in size,” said Cal Bryant, the editor of The Roanoke-Chowan News Herald, which serves a part of North Carolina that was most severely hit. “Now they are thinking it may have been one big tornado. They’re trying to find where it stopped, and they haven’t got there yet.”

Mr. Bryant, who spent Sunday with survivors in Bertie County, said rescue crews were going house to house looking for dead or injured residents and assessing damage. At least 60 houses, some of them mobile homes, were destroyed, and he expected the count to go higher.

Scott Sharp, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Raleigh, said the devastation was due to “a family of tornadoes” that were part of the same thunderstorm system, with one rotating updraft cropping up after another had dissipated.

Still, the storm was not as bad as something meteorologists call “Super Tuesday,” when a string of tornadoes in February 2008 claimed 56 lives, said Mr. Carbin of NOAA. But it was unusual in that all of the weather stemmed from one huge storm.

But for many of the states that lay in the path of this system, including North Carolina, which had not seen such severe weather since the early 1990s, it was a storm that will most likely takes months to recover from.

Gov. Bev Perdue of North Carolina, like governors in three other Southern states, declared a state of emergency on Sunday. Twelve teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were expected to arrive in North Carolina by Monday. The agency is also sending teams to Mississippi and Alabama, said Rachel Racusen, a FEMA spokeswoman.

In Raleigh, a city of 400,000, major avenues downtown were blocked by fallen trees. Buildings were flattened in at least eight areas of Wake County, said Sarah Williamson-Baker, a spokeswoman for the county.

Three siblings, who ranged in age from 2 to 5, were killed in a mobile home park in Raleigh when a tree fell on their home. The three were in a bathtub, according to a local news report.

The tornado seemed to make a direct cut through the area, Ms. Williamson-Baker said.

“There’s many places where there’s little left of buildings, and then in other places nearby, there’s almost no damage,” she said.

Elizabeth Strauch, 41, lives in the Cranberry Ridge subdivision in Wilson, N.C. Her house was destroyed. When she heard the tornado, she ran to a closet with her cat and some personal belongings.

“What I thought was a tree falling down on the house was my roof falling down and the attic falling through,” she said. She opened the door of her closet, pushed back the debris and ran to her neighbors. The whole thing lasted about three minutes.

“I thought I was going to die,” Ms. Strauch said. “I was hysterical.”

Near Raleigh, dormitories and classrooms at Shaw University, the oldest historically black university in the South, were so damaged that classes were canceled for the rest of the semester.

“After an assessment by experts, I will determine if summer school can be held on campus or will be available only online,” the university president, Irma McClaurin, said in a statement. “I think we are blessed that despite tremendous structural damages to dormitories and the Willie Gary Student Union that not one single person (student, faculty, staff or community members) was injured. We can all give thanks for that.”

In Sanford, many were grateful, too. John Douglas, 42, a contractor, was inside a tractor supply store when the tornado ripped the roof from the building.

He and a friend jumped on top of his daughter Abby, 9, as part of the ceiling fell on top of them. He suffered a few minor scrapes and bruises, but they all walked away otherwise unhurt.

“Everything was flying around inside the store. You could see the sky through the roof,” Mr. Douglas said. “We just prayed to the Lord to help us through this.”

Around the parts of the Southern states that were hardest hit, volunteers began organizing food drives and fund-raisers. Many people were connecting through Facebook and Twitter, and others were simply showing up to see how they might help.

In Sanford, the Salvation Army thrift store opened its doors at 3 p.m. and two hours later had already accepted about 400 bags of clothes and household goods, said Derek Oley, 29, the manager. They will start supplying food to people Monday.

“This community is just so awesome right now,” Mr. Oley said. “People are just coming out from everywhere to help out.”


Kim Severson reported from Atlanta. Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, Tarini Parti from Raleigh, N.C., and Joseph Berger from New York.

    After Storms, a Widespread Path of Death and Damage, R, 17.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/us/18tornado.html

Death toll at 43 as tornadoes and storms rake South

RALEIGH, North Carolina | Mon Apr 18, 2011
1:31am EDT
Reuters
By Ned Barnett

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Three days of severe storms and tornadoes in the southern United States have killed at least 43 people while downing power lines and wrecking hundreds of buildings, officials said on Sunday.

North Carolina accounted for the bulk of casualties and property losses, with 22 people killed and about 130 others injured. Significant damage was reported in at least 26 counties and power outages affected more than 200,000 people.

"Despite all the damage, the thing we heard the most today was how grateful people are to be alive," North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue told reporters after touring storm-damaged areas on Sunday.

She spoke with President Obama, who pledged "whatever it takes to rebuild North Carolina," Perdue said.

In Virginia, there were four confirmed deaths and reports of three unconfirmed deaths, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Virginia emergency officials said that 177 structures had been damaged by the severe weather.

It appeared to be the deadliest U.S. storm since February 2008, when 57 people died in two days from tornadoes in the South and Ohio Valley, said AccuWeather.com meteorologist Andy Mussoline, who said the death toll may change.

Dominion Virginia Power said the two nuclear reactors at its Surry Power Station in southeastern Virginia shut down automatically on Saturday when an apparent tornado touched down and cut off an electrical feed to the station.

Backup generators operated normally and both units "are in safe and stable condition," the utility said in a statement.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Roger Hannah said on Sunday no radiation was released during the storm and shutdown. "Everything worked the way it should," he said.

A SWATHE FROM OKLAHOMA TO THE ATLANTIC

The storms began in Oklahoma on Thursday, then moved through the South and hit the East Coast by Saturday. There were 241 tornadoes reported, with 50 confirmed.

Seven people died as a result of the storms in Alabama, seven died in Arkansas and one died in Mississippi. Two people were killed in Oklahoma when a tornado flattened buildings.

Governors in North Carolina and Virginia declared a state of emergency as authorities scrambled with rescue and cleanup operations.

In North Carolina, high winds destroyed more than 130 homes and damaged more than 700, the governor's office said.

Bertie County, a sprawling, rural area in northeastern North Carolina, was the hardest hit. Eleven residents died and 50 others were taken to hospitals, officials said on Sunday.

"We're used to hurricanes. We're used to tornadoes. We're used to floods. But we're not used to losing 11 of our citizens," said Bertie County Manager Zee Lamb.

Lamb said the powerful winds destroyed 75 homes, scattering their contents over a mile-wide area.

"The thing about this storm that is different than a typical tornado was the width," Lamb said. "It wasn't just 100 or 200 yards wide, but a half-mile wide and it stayed on the ground for six miles or so."

There were tales of survival.

"One couple went into a room for no particular reason. It's just where they decided to camp out. And every room in the house was destroyed except for that room," Lamb said.

In Sanford, North Carolina, a Lowe's and Wal-Mart were destroyed, as was a middle school in Greene County along with half the school buses parked nearby. In Raleigh, Shaw University and other buildings absorbed significant damage.

Progress Energy, the main utility in eastern North Carolina, said 220,000 customers were without electricity at the peak of the storm, with 78,000 homes and utilities still without power on Sunday morning.

The storm snapped hundreds of power poles and 30 transmission structures were damaged, company spokesman Mike Hughes said. In some areas, tornadoes swept away poles and wires and dropped them elsewhere.

"There are some parts where a tornado took the utility structure away and we cannot find it," Hughes said.

The stormy weather let up on Sunday, but Mussoline said more tornadoes could threaten the southern plains and Ohio Valley in the coming week, notably on Tuesday.

"At this point, it looks like the southeast will be spared the worst this upcoming week," he said.

 

(Additional reporting by Colleen Jenkins, Wendell Marsh and David Morgan in Washington; Editing by Peter Bohan)

    Death toll at 43 as tornadoes and storms rake South, R, 18.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/18/us-weather-storms-idUSTRE73G1PG20110418

A year on, Gulf still grapples with BP oil spill

VENICE, La./WAVELAND, Mississippi | Fri Apr 15, 2011
9:58am EDT
Reuters
By Anna Driver and Matthew Bigg

VENICE, La./WAVELAND, Mississippi (Reuters) - When a BP oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last April, killing 11 workers, authorities first reported that no crude was leaking into the ocean.

They were wrong.

The disaster that captivated the world's attention for 153 days struck at 9:53 p.m. CDT on April 20, when a surge of methane gas known to rig hands as a "kick" sparked an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig as it was drilling the mile-deep Macondo 252 well off Louisiana's coast. Two days later, the rig sank.

One year on, oil from the largest spill in U.S. history clogs wetlands, pollutes the ocean and endangers wildlife, not to mention the toll it has inflicted on the coastal economies of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and especially Louisiana.

It was the biggest ever accidental release of oil into an ocean.

Even so, environmental damage from the ruptured well that spewed more than 4 million barrels of oil (168 million gallons) into the Gulf in three months seems far less dire than the worst predictions, according to some Gulf residents and experts.

"It's a horrible mess but it's not the end of the world," said Edward Overton, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

"Some people thought it would be the end of the Gulf for decades and that's not even near the case," Overton said. "None of those predictions were right."

Such considerations are cold comfort to Gulf residents who saw their livelihoods decimated by the spill. More than 500,000 have claimed compensation from a $20 billion fund set up by BP -- at the insistence of President Barack Obama -- and administered by Kenneth Feinberg.

The mitigated view will also do little to stem the tide of litigation that will take years to make its way through federal court in New Orleans and beyond as plaintiffs seek to extract damages from London-based BP, which owned the Macondo well, and Swiss-based Transocean, which owned the rig.

"Fishermen are still worried that there's oil on the bottom of the Gulf. But we've got no control over that," said Errol Voisin, manager of the Lafitte Frozen Foods plant in Louisiana, who spoke ahead of a new shrimping season.

 

"INSULT TO INJURY"

The National Wildlife Federation paints a picture of an ocean ecology mauled by the spill and facing a long road to recovery. Thousands of birds and other wildlife died.

Sea turtles were hit hard. The western population of the bluefin tuna, which breeds only in the northern Gulf, was breeding just as oil spewed from the ocean floor. Contamination may have reduced juvenile tuna production by 20 percent.

In many cases, the slick compounded factors that already threatened the environment. Wetlands, for example, act as a natural barrier against storm surges but for decades oil industry penetration and other factors have eroded them.

Few places illustrate the damage more poignantly than Bay Jimmy, a breeding ground for shrimp, fish and oysters nestled in a labyrinth of waterways south of New Orleans.

Marshland around the bay still bears scars from the oil spill, with some areas ringed by dead grasses. Oil oozes from the ground just as it did last summer.

"When the oil hit, it was like adding insult to injury .... The concern for us is in terms of habitat for the wildlife," said Maura Wood, NWF's senior outreach coordinator.

Yet for all that, assessing the spill's impact presents a puzzle, experts say. Two examples illustrate the challenge.

"OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND"?

This year, 153 bottle-nosed dolphin carcasses have washed up on Gulf coasts: 65 of those were infants: new born, stillborn or born prematurely, according to figures from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The dolphins were conceived at the time of the spill, said Moby Solangi, president of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi.

To determine the cause of death requires a necropsy, which Solangi can perform at the institute, as well as toxicological and other forms of analysis.

But in February the government halted all external investigations into dolphin deaths and turned the matter over to NOAA, which is yet to release any findings.

"It is frustrating to any scientist. Certainly we want to get results," Solangi said in an interview.

For Samantha Joye, a marine sciences professor at the University of Georgia, the problem is the slow pace of research into exactly how oil affected the ocean.

Joye first identified so-called undersea 'oil plumes' during the spill and has since found evidence, such as crabs behaving sluggishly that seems to point to damage to the ocean floor. But she acknowledges more work needs to be done.

"I would like to be able to make conclusive statements about the health of the Gulf of Mexico but I can't because there's a lot we don't know," Joye said in an interview.

"There seems to be this 'If we can't see it, it's not going to hurt us' mentality. There's no oil on the surface therefore the problem is solved. That's just not true," she said.

 

CONFLICTING VIEWS ON ECONOMIC TOLL

One corporate casualty of the spill was BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who lost his job last July in a storm of criticism over perceived insensitivity to Gulf coast residents. He was replaced by Bob Dudley.

The oil giant says it has spent over $16 billion on redress and restoration projects, with total spending estimated at $40.9 billion.

BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told shareholders on Thursday the company's response to the spill "was without precedent, and I think, has been recognized as such."

Protesters against the spill, some from the United States, demonstrated at BP's annual shareholder meeting in London.

The disaster wiped about $70 billion from BP's market value, knocking its share price down from $61 a few days before the explosion to $26.75 in late June. The stock has recovered to close Thursday at $45.54 a share.

BP at least is upbeat about the Gulf's recovery.

"We are absolutely confident that the water is safe. The residents and tourists are telling us that the beaches have never looked better, the seafood is safe and delicious and I hear fishing is excellent right now as well," Mike Utsler, chief operating officer of BP's Gulf Coast Restoration Organization wrote in Facebook comments published this week.

But there are no clear overall estimates of economic damage from the slick as it ripped through sectors as diverse as fishing, tourism, municipal finance, real estate, banking and services.

In fact, there are almost as many conflicting views of the economic toll as there are stakeholders on the coast.

Tom Becker, president of the Charter Boat Captain's Association of Mississippi, said his business was down at least 50 percent because of a perception among potential clients that Gulf waters remain unsafe.

Rene Cross, owner of the Cypress Cove Marina in Venice, Louisiana, canceled his Cajun Canyons Billfish Classic deep sea fishing tournament last year as the government closed Gulf waters to fishing. But he is restarting the event this spring.

"We are getting reports of marlin getting caught, some nice fish. That's a positive sign for us," Cross said.

Many Gulf fishermen said they were waiting for full compensation from fund administrator Feinberg, a financial and psychological hardship among coastal residents who pride themselves on fierce independence.

Darlene Kimball, an oyster buyer at Pass Christian's harbor in Mississippi, opened her receipt books to show that this time last year she was buying up to 1,500 sacks of oysters a day. Last week that figure was down to 47 on some days.

When officials inspected the offshore beds, they found large numbers of dead oysters, so they did not do the dredging necessary for the new season.

Experts are yet to identify the cause of those deaths, though tests show live oysters are clean and Gulf seafood is now the most heavily tested in the world, residents said.

"I can't say for sure what killed the oysters because I'm no marine biologist. But what happened? They (the oysters) were there on April 20. We have not gotten paid (by Feinberg) and our business is nowhere near back to normal, Kimball said. "It's not fair. We didn't ask for this spill."

(Additional reporting by Verna Gates in Birmingham, Leigh Coleman in Biloxi, Pascal Fletcher in Miami and Chris Baltimore in Houston, writing by Matthew Bigg; Editing by Philip Barbara)

    A year on, Gulf still grapples with BP oil spill, R, 15.4.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/15/us-oil-spill-anniversary-idUSTRE73E2OW20110415

Pass the Boone Pickens Bill

April 11, 2011
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

On Wednesday, amid all the hullabaloo over the budget battles, a simple, discrete and largely overlooked bill was dropped into the Congressional hopper. Sponsored by two Democrats and two Republicans — that’s right: an actual bipartisan piece of legislation — its official title is the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act, or the Nat Gas Act, for short. People in the know, however, call it the Boone Pickens bill.

Boone Pickens and I go way back; he was the subject of my first-ever business story, for Texas Monthly, nearly 30 years ago. Though we’ve had our ups and downs since then, and though our politics are very different, I like and respect him. In recent years, we’ve become friends.

Which is to say: I’ve got a bias here. Then again, so does Boone. Although he is usually described as a Texas oilman, that’s a bit of a misnomer. Boone has spent most of his career drilling not for oil but for natural gas, which he knows more about than just about anyone. His late-life occupation has been running a natural gas-oriented hedge fund, which has made him, at the age of 82, a billionaire several times over.

Out of that deep knowledge has come a powerful belief: that the country’s energy salvation depends on moving away from the fuel we don’t have — namely, oil, where imports, some of which come “from our enemies” (to quote Boone), account for two-thirds of our oil needs. Instead, we should move to a fuel we have in abundance: natural gas. Most experts say there is enough natural gas in the ground to last a century; Boone’s convinced that modern drilling techniques will allow us to find enough for several centuries.

His critics like to point out that anything that boosts natural gas will put money in his pocket. But so what? He’s already plenty rich, and, he says, “I’m sure not doing this for the money.” Besides, he’s right.

The bill introduced last week is an offshoot of the Pickens plan, his cri de coeur for energy independence, which he put together in 2008 and has spent more than $80 million promoting. Although Boone believes that our continued reliance on OPEC oil is dangerous, he also knows that even if you drill, baby, drill, as many Republicans want, it won’t make much difference. Quite simply, America is running out of oil. The Pickens plan calls for increased use of wind, solar, nuclear, even coal. ”I’m for anything that’s American,” he said.

But, of course, you can’t use solar or wind to power a vehicle, which is what most imported oil is used for. You can, however, use natural gas. Nor is this some pie-in-the-sky technology; there are already 12 million vehicles around the world that use either liquefied or compressed natural gas, though only 140,000 in the U.S. (They’re mostly buses and trash haulers.)

The Pickens bill creates tax incentives — $1 billion a year for five years — to encourage manufacturers to begin building heavy-duty trucks that will be powered by natural gas instead of diesel. It also gives some tax incentives to truck-stop owners who install natural gas filling stations to help create the infrastructure.

On the face of it, this seems like a pretty small goal for a guy who’s got such big ideas about energy independence. Partly, Boone is being realistic. It would be politically impossible to convert cars to natural gas or to ask for gigantic tax breaks in this time of austerity.

Even so, this one small step could make a big difference. Of the 20 million barrels of oil we use each day, 70 percent goes for transportation fuel. The 8 million heavy-duty trucks on the road today account for 23 percent of that fuel. Although the tax incentives in the Pickens bill would be enough to cover only about 140,000 new trucks, he hopes that it will catapult the industry toward natural gas even without the subsidies. Just moving the country’s big trucks to natural gas, he says, could cut our OPEC imports in half.

Every president since Jimmy Carter has called for the country to become more energy independent. Yet none of them have ever done anything to accomplish that. The result is that our reliance on foreign oil has inexorably increased. With the current turmoil in the Mideast, the price of gasoline breaking the $4-a-gallon barrier and the Chinese becoming voracious competitors for imported oil, this would seem an ideal time to pass a law that could lessen our dependence on foreign crude.

Oilmen are incorrigible optimists, and Boone is no exception; he thinks the bill will pass quickly. Not long ago, President Obama spoke out in favor of it, in a speech that included a shout-out for Boone. Already, the bill has attracted 157 co-sponsors. “I think the House can pass it in 30 days,” Boone says.

I hope he’s right. Natural gas is cheaper than oil. It’s cleaner. And it’s ours. If Congress can’t pass this thing, there’s really no hope.

    Pass the Boone Pickens Bill, NYT, 11.4.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12nocera.html

Our atom plants safe, U.S. and Europe regulators say

VIENNA | Mon Apr 4, 2011
5:55pm EDT
Reuters

VIENNA (Reuters) - Nuclear power plants in the United States and Europe are safe, regulators said on Monday, promising to look at ways to strengthen safety further in the wake of Japan's atomic disaster.

Japan is battling to stabilize a nuclear power plant after a huge earthquake and tsunami devastated it three weeks ago. Radioactivity from the stricken site has contaminated land, air and sea and forced a review of atomic power plants worldwide.

"Back in the United States, because of similarities in the design and because of the possibility for natural disasters of this type in the United States, we ask questions about our own facilities and our own approach to regulation," U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko said.

"Let me say firmly that we believe right now plants in the United States are safe. We believe we have a very strong program in place to ensure that safety," he told reporters.

He was making his remarks after the opening of a two-week conference of nuclear regulators from 72 countries in Vienna hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Although scheduled before the earthquake, the conference to review the 1996 Convention on Nuclear Safety is focusing on the need to strengthen measures in light of Japan's emergency.

European leaders want to subject reactors to "stress tests" to guard against crises like the one at the Fukushima plant. Some countries have raised the possibility of closing any of Europe's 143 reactors that fail them.

Andrej Stritar, head of the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) which is helping to prepare the tests, said the tests would not ask whether Europe's nuclear power plants were safe.

"That is maybe how these stress tests are misunderstood ... The proper question is, how do we make them even safer? So they are safe today, because otherwise they wouldn't be licensed, they wouldn't be allowed to operate."

(Reporting by Sylvia Westall and Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Louise Ireland)

    Our atom plants safe, U.S. and Europe regulators say, R, 4.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/04/us-nuclear-us-europe-idUSTRE7336O120110404

Arkansas Quake Is Its Most Powerful in 35 Years

February 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

A 4.7-magnitude earthquake that researchers described as the largest in Arkansas in 35 years was recorded late Sunday night near Greenbrier. It was the latest in a swarm of quakes that has bedeviled the region since early last fall.

There were no reports of major damage, though some residents spoke of dislodged screen doors and cracked ceilings. Damage or not, some said this was the longest and scariest quake yet.

“It felt like a real loud thunder, but like 10 times worse than that,” said Kim Bannister, 34, who lives just outside Greenbrier and who, like most in the region, has become somewhat accustomed to earthquakes. “I have felt some of them, but nothing like last night.”

The swarm in central Arkansas has brought dozens of rumblings each week, many of them with magnitudes beyond 2.0.

The situation has garnered national attention because of its possible connection to natural-gas drilling operations in the area. Researchers with the Arkansas Geological Survey have pointed out spatial and temporal relationships between the earthquakes and the use of injection wells, which are used to dispose of the wastewater left over from gas drilling. (Researchers see no such correlation between the quakes and the drilling itself, a process called hydraulic fracturing.)

While a possible connection is being studied, the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission has imposed an emergency moratorium on the drilling of new injection wells in the area. Wells that were active before the moratorium, which began in December, remain in use.

Determining such a connection is not easy: there have been similar, naturally occurring earthquake swarms in the area in the past. But there is also a growing body of research suggesting that injections wells can induce earthquakes, and there is some circumstantial evidence that this might be happening in Arkansas.

Most of the earthquakes in the latest swarm have been too small to be felt. The worst seemed to have passed after some midsize quakes in October and November, but in the past few weeks, several quakes were recorded with measurements over a 3.0 magnitude.

Sunday’s quake, which occurred around 11 p.m. and was felt in at least five states, surpassed all others recorded in this or any of the previous swarms, said Scott Ausbrooks, a state geological survey researcher.

He said that the fault along which the quakes were occurring could yield an earthquake measuring up to 5.5 magnitude if it were to erupt all at once. But he said that was unlikely.

    Arkansas Quake Is Its Most Powerful in 35 Years, NYT, 28.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01earthquakes.html

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

February 26, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.

In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.

That has experts worried.

“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.

Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.

Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

In New York, the wastewater was sent to two plants that discharge into Southern Cayuga Lake, near Ithaca, and Owasco Outlet, near Auburn. In West Virginia, a plant in Wheeling discharged gas-drilling wastewater into the Ohio River.

“Hydrofracking impacts associated with health problems as well as widespread air and water contamination have been reported in at least a dozen states,” said Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a business in Ithaca, N.Y., that compiles data on gas drilling.

Problems in Other Regions

While Pennsylvania is an extreme case, the risks posed by hydrofracking extend across the country.

There were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry.

Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.

Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast majority drilled in the past five years.

In a sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston and Los Angeles.

Industry officials say any dangerous waste from the wells is handled in compliance with state and federal laws, adding that drilling companies are recycling more wastewater now. They also say that hydrofracking is well regulated by the states and that it has been used safely for decades.

But hydrofracking technology has become more powerful and more widely used in recent years, producing far more wastewater. Some of the problems with this drilling, including its environmental impact and the challenge of disposing of waste, have been documented by ProPublica, The Associated Press and other news organizations, especially out West.

And recent incidents underscore the dangers. In late 2008, drilling and coal-mine waste released during a drought so overwhelmed the Monongahela that local officials advised people in the Pittsburgh area to drink bottled water. E.P.A. officials described the incident in an internal memorandum as “one of the largest failures in U.S. history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”

In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.

“It’s ruining us,” said Kelly Gant, whose 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have experienced severe asthma attacks, dizzy spells and headaches since a compressor station and a gas well were set up about two years ago near her house in Bartonville, Tex. The industry and state regulators have said it is not clear what role the gas industry has played in causing such problems, since the area has had high air pollution for a while.

“I’m not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or anything like that,” Ms. Gant said. “I’m just a person who isn’t able to manage the health of my family because of all this drilling.”

And yet, for all its problems, natural gas offers some clear environmental advantages over coal, which is used more than any other fuel to generate electricity in the United States. Coal-fired power plants without updated equipment to capture pollutants are a major source of radioactive pollution. Coal mines annually produce millions of tons of toxic waste.

But the hazards associated with natural-gas production and drilling are far less understood than those associated with other fossil fuels, and the regulations have not kept pace with the natural-gas industry’s expansion.

Pennsylvania, Ground Zero

Pennsylvania, which sits atop an enormous reserve called the Marcellus Shale, has been called the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.

This rock formation, roughly the size of Greece, lies more than a mile beneath the Appalachian landscape, from Virginia to the southern half of New York. It is believed to hold enough gas to supply the country’s energy needs for heat and electricity, at current consumption rates, for more than 15 years.

Drilling companies were issued roughly 3,300 Marcellus gas-well permits in Pennsylvania last year, up from just 117 in 2007.

This has brought thousands of jobs, five-figure windfalls for residents who lease their land to the drillers and revenue for a state that has struggled with budget deficits. It has also transformed the landscape of southwestern Pennsylvania and brought heavy burdens.

Drilling derricks tower over barns, lining rural roads like feed silos. Drilling sites bustle around the clock with workers, some in yellow hazardous material suits, and 18-wheelers haul equipment, water and waste along back roads.

The rigs announce their presence with the occasional boom and quiver of underground explosions. Smelling like raw sewage mixed with gasoline, drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit close to homes.

Anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material.

While most states require drillers to dispose of this water in underground storage wells below impermeable rock layers, Pennsylvania has few such wells. It is the only state that has allowed drillers to discharge much of their waste through sewage treatment plants into rivers.

Regulators have theorized that passing drilling waste through the plants is safe because most toxic material will settle during the treatment process into a sludge that can be trucked to a landfill, and whatever toxic material remains in the wastewater will be diluted when mixed into rivers. But some plants were taking such large amounts of waste with high salt levels in 2008 that downstream utilities started complaining that the river water was eating away at their machines.

Regulators and drilling companies have said that these cases, and others, were isolated.

“The wastewater treatment plants are effective at what they’re designed to do — remove material from wastewater,” said Jamie Legenos, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, adding that the radioactive material and the salts were being properly handled.

Overwhelmed, Underprepared

For proof that radioactive elements in drilling waste are not a concern, industry spokesmen and regulators often point to the results of wastewater tests from a 2009 draft report conducted by New York State and a 1995 report by Pennsylvania that found that radioactivity in drilling waste was not a threat. These two reports were based on samples from roughly 13 gas wells in New York and 29 in Pennsylvania.

But a review by The Times of more than 30,000 pages of federal, state and company records relating to more than 200 gas wells in Pennsylvania, 40 in West Virginia and 20 public and private wastewater treatment plants offers a fuller picture of the wastewater such wells produce and the threat it poses.

Most of the information was drawn from drilling reports from the last three years, obtained by visiting regional offices throughout Pennsylvania, and from documents or databases provided by state and federal regulators in response to records requests.

Among The Times’s findings:

¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.

¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.

¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

Results came from field surveys conducted by state and federal regulators, year-end reports filed by drilling companies and state-ordered tests of some public treatment plants. Most of the tests measured drilling wastewater for radium or for “gross alpha” radiation, which typically comes from radium, uranium and other elements.

Industry officials say they are not concerned.

“These low levels of radioactivity pose no threat to the public or worker safety and are more a public perception issue than a real health threat,” said James E. Grey, chief operating officer of Triana Energy.

In interviews, industry trade groups like the Marcellus Shale Coalition and Energy in Depth, as well as representatives from energy companies like Shell and Chesapeake Energy, said they were producing far less wastewater because they were recycling much of it rather than disposing of it after each job.

But even with recycling, the amount of wastewater produced in Pennsylvania is expected to increase because, according to industry projections, more than 50,000 new wells are likely to be drilled over the next two decades.

The radioactivity in the wastewater is not necessarily dangerous to people who are near it. It can be blocked by thin barriers, including skin, so exposure is generally harmless.

Rather, E.P.A. and industry researchers say, the bigger danger of radioactive wastewater is its potential to contaminate drinking water or enter the food chain through fish or farming. Once radium enters a person’s body, by eating, drinking or breathing, it can cause cancer and other health problems, many federal studies show.

Little Testing for Radioactivity

Under federal law, testing for radioactivity in drinking water is required only at drinking-water plants. But federal and state regulators have given nearly all drinking-water intake facilities in Pennsylvania permission to test only once every six or nine years.

The Times reviewed data from more than 65 intake plants downstream from some of the busiest drilling regions in the state. Not one has tested for radioactivity since 2008, and most have not tested since at least 2005, before most of the drilling waste was being produced.

And in 2009 and 2010, public sewage treatment plants directly upstream from some of these drinking-water intake facilities accepted wastewater that contained radioactivity levels as high as 2,122 times the drinking-water standard. But most sewage plants are not required to monitor for radioactive elements in the water they discharge. So there is virtually no data on such contaminants as water leaves these plants. Regulators and gas producers have repeatedly said that the waste is not a threat because it is so diluted in rivers or by treatment plants. But industry and federal research cast doubt on those statements.

A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.

The industry study focused on drilling industry wastewater being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would be far more diluted than in rivers. It also used estimates of radium levels far below those found in Pennsylvania’s drilling waste, according to the study’s lead author, Anne F. Meinhold, an environmental risk expert now at NASA.

Other federal, state and academic studies have also found dilution problems with radioactive drilling waste.

In December 2009, these very risks led E.P.A. scientists to advise in a letter to New York that sewage treatment plants not accept drilling waste with radium levels 12 or more times as high as the drinking-water standard. The Times found wastewater containing radium levels that were hundreds of times this standard. The scientists also said that the plants should never discharge radioactive contaminants at levels higher than the drinking-water standard.

In 2009, E.P.A. scientists studied the matter and also determined that certain Pennsylvania rivers were ineffective at sufficiently diluting the radium-laced drilling wastewater being discharged into them.

Asked about the studies, Pennsylvania regulators said they were not aware of them.

“Concerned? I’m always concerned,” said Dave Allard, director of the Bureau of Radiation Protection. But he added that the threat of this waste is reduced because “the dilutions are so huge going through those treatment plants.”

Three months after The Times began asking questions about radioactive and other toxic material being discharged into specific rivers, state regulators placed monitors for radioactivity near where drilling waste is discharged. Data will not be available until next month, state officials said.

But the monitor in the Monongahela is placed upstream from the two public sewage treatment plants that the state says are still discharging large amounts of drilling waste into the river, leaving the discharges from these plants unchecked and Pittsburgh exposed.

Plant Operators in the Dark

In interviews, five treatment plant operators said they did not believe that the drilling wastewater posed risks to the public. Several also said they were not sure of the waste’s contents because the limited information drillers provide usually goes to state officials.

“We count on state regulators to make sure that that’s properly done,” said Paul McCurdy, environmental specialist at Ridgway Borough’s public sewage treatment plant, in Elk County, Pa., in the northwest part of the state.

Mr. McCurdy, whose plant discharges into the Clarion River, which flows into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, said his plant was taking about 20,000 gallons of drilling waste per day.

Like most of the sewage treatment plant operators interviewed, Mr. McCurdy said his plant was not equipped to remove radioactive material and was not required to test for it.

Documents filed by drillers with the state, though, show that in 2009 his facility was sent water from wells whose wastewater was laced with radium at 275 times the drinking-water standard and with other types of radiation at more than 780 times the standard.

Part of the problem is that industry has outpaced regulators. “We simply can’t keep up,” said one inspector with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection who was not authorized to speak to reporters. “There’s just too much of the waste.”

“If we’re too hard on them,” the inspector added, “the companies might just stop reporting their mistakes.”

Recently, Pennsylvania has tried to increase its oversight, doubling the number of regulators, improving well-design requirements and sharply decreasing how much drilling waste many treatment plants can accept or release. The state is considering whether to require treatment plants to begin monitoring for radioactivity in wastewater.

Even so, as of last November, 31 inspectors were keeping tabs on more than 125,000 oil and gas wells. The new regulations also allowed at least 18 plants to continue accepting the higher amounts set by their original permits.

Furthermore, environmental researchers from the University of Pittsburgh tested wastewater late last year that had been discharged by two treatment plants. They say these tests will show, when the results are publicly released in March, that salt levels were far above the legal limit.

Lax Oversight

Drilling contamination is entering the environment in Pennsylvania through spills, too. In the past three years, at least 16 wells whose records showed high levels of radioactivity in their wastewater also reported spills, leaks or failures of pits where hydrofracking fluid or waste is stored, according to state records.

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts.

A review of response plans for drilling projects at four Pennsylvania sites where there have been accidents in the past year found that these state-approved plans often appear to be in violation of the law.

At one well site where several spills occurred within a week, including one that flowed into a creek, the well’s operator filed a revised spill plan saying there was little chance that waste would ever enter a waterway.

“There are business pressures” on companies to “cut corners,” John Hanger, who stepped down as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in January, has said. “It’s cheaper to dump wastewater than to treat it.”

Records back up that assertion.

From October 2008 through October 2010, regulators were more than twice as likely to issue a written warning than to levy a fine for environmental and safety violations, according to state data. During this period, 15 companies were fined for drilling-related violations in 2008 and 2009, and the companies paid an average of about $44,000 each year, according to state data.

This average was less than half of what some of the companies earned in profits in a day and a tiny fraction of the more than $2 million that some of them paid annually to haul and treat the waste.

And prospects for drillers in Pennsylvania are looking brighter.

In December, the Republican governor-elect, Tom Corbett, who during his campaign took more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined, said he would reopen state land to new drilling, reversing a decision made by his predecessor, Edward G. Rendell. The change clears the way for as many as 10,000 wells on public land, up from about 25 active wells today.

In arguing against a proposed gas-extraction tax on the industry, Mr. Corbett said regulation of the industry had been too aggressive.

“I will direct the Department of Environmental Protection to serve as a partner with Pennsylvania businesses, communities and local governments,” Mr. Corbett says on his Web site. “It should return to its core mission protecting the environment based on sound science.”

    Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers, NYT, 26.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html

Snow Falls on San Francisco After a 35-Year Wait

February 26, 2011
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — As a Pacific storm coincided with a blast of cold Canadian air over their fair city, residents here saw snow late Friday, a long-absent visitor for a city accustomed to fog, sweater-weather and other nearly bone-chilling accoutrements.

Predictions had called for the possibility of the first significant snowfall in San Francisco since February 1976, when all of an inch fell, according to the National Weather Service. And just before midnight, several high-lying city neighborhoods, including Twin Peaks, at some 900 feet, reported light snowfall.

The scattering of flakes capped a weeklong flurry of activity among civic leaders and commuters — as well as dreams of flying down some of the city’s famous inclines.

“I can’t wait. It’ll be crazy,” said Marisa Belaski-Farias, 23, a graphic design student from Hawaii who has never seen snow in person. “I have a cardboard box at home. Hopefully there will be enough snow to sled.”

All Friday, it looked like that outing might have to wait. The storm brought soaking rain and howling gales in the early hours, but in classic San Francisco fashion — weather here can vary hour to hour and block to block — the morning rain gave way to clear skies and, in some quarters, profound disappointment.

“It’s a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco,” one Twitter user, LNSmithee, wrote in midafternoon. “Under normal circumstances, that would be great. But earlier this wk, we were promised snow.” (An unhappy emoticon was attached.)

But just before midnight, those snow showers fell, inteterrupting local televsison broadcasts for up-to-the-minute reports. Meteorologists were reporting the city might — just might — get a dusting on Saturday as well, as a Canadian cold front lingered over the city and spotty showers moved in from the ocean. But according to Chris Stumpf, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Monterey, Calif., “It’s going to be a little bit harder to get it to sea level.”

The very possibility that San Francisco could see snowfall led to all manner of mock dismay by online wiseacres, including Isitsnowinginsfyet.com, a Web site that offered a blunt assessment of the outcome at that time: “No.”

Just before midnight, that assessment was updated: “Yes!”

There were more serious responses. Mayor Edwin M. Lee warned of unseasonable cold and asked city homeless shelters to increase capacity and outreach to the indigent. Crews planned to monitor roads for flooding, while the Department of Public Works planned to offer free sandbags.

Snow is more common outside the city, with small amounts accumulating at scenic mountain peaks. It is rare in San Francisco because moisture hitting Northern California is generally warmed by the Pacific before making landfall.

In this case, however, the rain was being met by a cold blast coming in overland from the north.

Still, for some, the hype turned their feelings to mush even before the storm came and went without leaving any snow.

“I’m already over the snow in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Owens, a Twitter user. “And it hasn’t even happened yet.”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    Snow Falls on San Francisco After a 35-Year Wait, NYT, 26.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27snow.html

Scientists Are Cleared of Misuse of Data

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.

The inquiry, by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department). Some of the e-mails involved scientists from NOAA.

Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.

In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”

Nor did the report fault Jane Lubchenco, NOAA’s top official, for testifying to Congress that the correspondence did not undermine climate science.

The finding comes at a critical moment for NOAA as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. NOAA is the federal agency tasked with monitoring climate data.

The inquiry into NOAA’s conduct was requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change. Mr. Inhofe was acting in response to the controversy over the e-mail messages, which were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, a major hub of climate research.

Mr. Inhofe asked the inspector general of the Commerce Department to investigate how NOAA scientists responded internally to the leaked e-mails. Of 1,073 messages, 289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.

The inspector general reviewed the 1,073 e-mails, and interviewed Dr. Lubchenco and staff members about their exchanges. The report did not find scientific misconduct; it did however, challenge the agency over its handling of some Freedom of Information Act requests in 2007. And it noted the inappropriateness of e-mailing a collage cartoon depicting Senator Inhofe and five other climate skeptics marooned on a melting iceberg that passed between two NOAA scientists.

The report was not a review of the climate data itself. It joins a series of investigations by the British House of Commons, Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council and the National Research Council into the leaked e-mails that have exonerated the scientists involved of scientific wrongdoing.

NOAA welcomed the report, saying that it emphasized the soundness of its scientific procedures and the peer review process. “None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA’s understanding of climate change science,” Mary Glackin, the agency’s deputy undersecretary for operations, said in a statement.

But Mr. Inhofe said the report was far from a clean bill of health for the agency and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists “engaged in data manipulation.”

“It also appears that one senior NOAA employee possibly thwarted the release of important federal scientific information for the public to assess and analyze,” he said, referring to an employee’s failure to provide material related to work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a different body that compiles research, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

    Scientists Are Cleared of Misuse of Data, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/science/earth/25noaa.html

A Climate Skeptic With a Bully Pulpit in Virginia Finds an Ear in Congress

February 22, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

RICHMOND, Va. — For nearly a year, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s crusading Republican attorney general, has waged a one-man war on the theory of man-made global warming.

Invoking his subpoena powers, he has sought to force the University of Virginia to turn over the files of a prominent climatology professor, asserting that his research may be marred by fraud. The university is battling the move in the courts.

At the same time, Mr. Cuccinelli is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its ruling that carbon dioxide and other global warming gases pose a threat to human health and welfare, describing the science behind the agency’s decision as “unreliable, unverifiable and doctored.”

Now his allegations of manipulated data and scientific fraud are resonating in Congress, where Republican leaders face an influx of new members, many of them Tea Party stalwarts like Mr. Cuccinelli, eager to inveigh against the body of research linking man-made emissions to warming.

“There’s a huge appetite among the rank-and-file to raise fundamental questions about the underlying science,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican strategist and energy lobbyist.

Responding to those concerns, the new Republican majority has introduced legislation that would strip federal regulators of their power to police the industrial emissions that contribute to climate change. But party leaders, treading warily, have cast their arguments against regulation largely in terms of economic consequences, playing down the prospect of major hearings to examine the scientific basis of human-caused warming.

Even dedicated opponents of climate action concede that hauling climate scientists before Congress and challenging their findings could easily backfire, as many representatives lack a sophisticated grasp of climatology and run the risk of making embarrassing errors.

“It’s a trap for a lot of members,” said Marc Morano, a former Republican staff member on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee and publisher of Climate Depot, a Web site that advances the arguments of climate skeptics. “They’re apt to make mistakes.”

Meanwhile, a planned investigation by Representative Darrell Issa of California into alleged instances of manipulation and fraud by climate scientists — broadly similar to those cited by Mr. Cuccinelli in his legal complaints — has been indefinitely postponed.

Yet as the Republican leadership puts the brakes on a climate science confrontation, Mr. Cuccinelli has forged ahead.

In the process, his critics say, he has not only made mistakes, but also twisted facts to bolster his case against the climatologist, Michael E. Mann, now a professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Sherwood L. Boehlert, a retired Republican congressman from New York and a former chairman of the House Science Committee, is among those who have sharply criticized Mr. Cuccinelli’s tactics.

“I find no logical explanation for spending taxpayer dollars on this politically designed, headline-grabbing pursuit of his,” said Mr. Boehlert, whose panel in 2006 investigated nearly identical charges by climate skeptics that Dr. Mann had falsified results but found no evidence of wrongdoing.

More than 800 professors and scientists in Virginia have petitioned the attorney general to abandon his pursuit of Dr. Mann. As the university fights the investigation, a state judge has ruled substantially in its favor although a final decision has yet to be made.

The case has also been divisive in Virginia politics, with the Democrat-controlled State Senate voting on Feb. 3 to strip Mr. Cuccinelli of the power to investigate future instances of academic fraud at public universities. The following week, senators passed a budget amendment requiring the attorney general to keep detailed expense records on projects that exceed 100 work hours — a proposal aimed at forcing Mr. Cuccinelli to open the books on his investigation of Dr. Mann.

Both measures passed easily and with the support of Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, though neither is expected to clear the Republican-held State House.

Mr. Cuccinelli seems unfazed by the backlash. “We’ll see the documents,” he said confidently in an interview in his Richmond office, referring to Dr. Mann’s e-mails and computer files.

Although cast by his foes as an angry ideologue, Mr. Cuccinelli, 42, was amiable and upbeat in discussing the litigation. He ruefully acknowledged the backlash against his investigation of Dr. Mann. “I can tell you that out of all the things we’ve done in this first year in office, none has attracted more vitriolic assault,” he said.

He described the inquiry as a legitimate function of his office. “I would expect any attorney general sitting in this chair to do the same thing,” he said.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s conservative views make him no stranger to controversy. Before his election as attorney general in November 2009, he served nearly eight years in the State Senate, where he was known for his hard-right stances on illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, gun control and abortion and for clashing with moderates within his party.

Shortly after taking office in January 2010, he sued the Obama administration over the health care overhaul, which Mr. Cuccinelli called unconstitutional. A federal judge ruled partly in his favor, catapulting him into the national spotlight, although the decision was quickly appealed.

On climate change, Mr. Cuccinelli said he had begun to pay serious attention to the issue only recently, after momentum began to grow behind legislation to establish a national cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. He did “basic reading,” he said, and became convinced that scientific proof linking industrial emissions to warming was lacking.

His doubts deepened in late 2009, he said, when a large cache of e-mails between scientists from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in Britain, were illicitly published online.

Climate change skeptics seized on the e-mails as proof that the science linking man-made emissions to warming was doctored and exaggerated, and skeptical bloggers dubbed the episode Climategate. Multiple investigations, including one by the British House of Lords, cleared the researchers involved of scientific wrongdoing.

Despite those conclusions, Mr. Cuccinelli asserted in the interview and in response to written questions that the contents of the leaked e-mails indicated a conspiracy among top scientists to exaggerate carbon dioxide’s effect on global temperatures. “They suggest knowledgeable deception on the part of a number of folks,” he said.

“It’s when you introduce the evidence of some people being deceptive that you have the basis for the concerns about our state tax dollars and state institutions being misused,” he said. “It doesn’t happen without the Climategate e-mails.”

Mr. Cuccinelli maintains that he is merely investigating potential financial abuses, not challenging Dr. Mann’s scientific conclusions. But the state’s legal briefs in the case are at their essence a critical assessment of Dr. Mann’s research, which has centered on the historical reconstruction of global temperatures. And even prominent climate skeptics challenge the attorney general’s contention that he is not pursuing the climatologist over his scientific work.

At a May 2010 conference bringing together leading skeptical researchers, for instance, Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining engineer and amateur statistician whose critical analysis of Dr. Mann’s research and demands for data from British scientists were at the heart of the e-mail scandal, denounced the Virginia inquiry.

“I strongly disagree with Cuccinelli’s recent investigation of potential financial abuse,” Mr. McIntyre said. “Regardless of what one may think of the quality of Mann’s work, he has published diligently.”

The investigation has also run into legal hurdles, with a state judge hearing the case questioning the strength of evidence against Dr. Mann.

“The nature of the conduct is not stated so that any reasonable person could glean what Dr. Mann did to violate the statute,” Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. wrote in an August ruling. The judge did not dismiss the case, however, allowing the state to amend and refile its subpoena.

Climate experts also sharply question claims of fraud cited in Mr. Cuccinelli’s lawsuit against the E.P.A.

Most notably, citing an independent 2009 report, the State of Virginia’s complaint asserts that climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked e-mails — doctored Russian temperature data to exaggerate warming. Because the Climate Research Unit provides basic temperature data to scientists around the world, any corruption of the data seriously undermines the theory of man-made warming, the suit argues.

Yet Alexander Bedritskiy, president of the World Meteorological Organization and the top climate change adviser to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, said that the Russian report was thoroughly discredited by top scientists in his country more than a year ago.

“Any scientific discussion on the results, pretending to be science-based, does not make sense,” Dr. Bedritskiy said in an e-mail.

He also noted that the author of that report, Andrei Illarionov, is not a climate scientist but an economist with the Cato Institute, a conservative research group in the United States.

Mr. Cuccinelli could not say how he had verified the accuracy of the report, which is written in Russian, but said that his legal complaint had been “heavily researched.” The research did not consist of consultations with scientists, however, he said.

“We have to have a certain understanding of our context to operate, but that doesn’t require expert witnesses,” he said.

The E.P.A. lawsuit, with dozens of co-plaintiffs and the full force of the federal government opposing it, is expected to result in a highly complex court battle potentially spanning several years — a prospect Mr. Cuccinelli appears to relish.

A wide range of legal experts said the suit had a low chance of success. “It’s the legal equivalent of the ‘Hail Mary’ pass,” said Michael B. Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School and an authority on climate change law.

Political experts further questioned whether another drawn-out battle on climate change science would appeal much to voters.

“There is a significant portion of the Virginia public that sees these issues as distractions from what the attorney general should be focusing on,” said Mark J. Rozell, a professor of political science at George Mason University.

“There are many people who are deeply uncomfortable with the crusader-type style that he is cultivating,” he said.

    A Climate Skeptic With a Bully Pulpit in Virginia Finds an Ear in Congress, NYT, 22.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/science/earth/23virginia.html

A Homecoming for Bighorn Sheep in Colorado

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

SEDALIA, Colo. — The mechanics were simple. A trailer latch popped, a gate swung open and three wild bighorn sheep — two females, presumably pregnant, and a year-old lamb, definitely frisky — trotted up the rocky slope of Thunder Butte under a pale afternoon sun.

It is the back story of the animals’ release this week by wildlife biologists here in the mountains southwest of Denver that can stagger the mind with its complications of coincidence, historical accident, devastation and hope.

A truck breakdown on a highway in February 1946 played a role, believe it or not, as did the biggest Colorado wildfire in memory, the Hayman, in June 2002. The fire roared through the cliffs in the Pike National Forest with flames hundreds of feet high, scouring the land of trees across 138,000 acres.

Human intervention, from the mining boom in the late 1800s, when timber was cut by the trainload for fuel and construction, through the bighorn reintroduction program in the Hayman burn area by the Colorado Division of Wildlife, begun last year, completed the circle of natural and wild that brought the bighorns home. They were last seen in this area in the mid-1960s.

However the pieces fit, biologists and land managers say a bighorn homecoming to the Hayman is a powerful reaffirmation of hope in the West for a creature that has long symbolized the ideals of sure-footed survival in the high lonesome aeries where they evolved and still persist. Sheep restoration began here last year with the first 12 animals and continued with 12 more this month.

“We’re back,” Janet George, a senior biologist at the Colorado Division of Wildlife, said as the animals peered around at their new home (their eyesight is excellent, which is why they stake out rocky perches, the better to spot approaching predators). “This was historically bighorn range, and then it couldn’t sustain a sheep herd any more,” Ms. George said. “And now nine years after the fire, it can again.”

But back to that truck accident. In early 1946, state wildlife managers were hauling 14 bighorns near Colorado Springs, intending to start a herd of transplants near Pikes Peak. When the truck broke down, the animals were instead released right where they were. The 14 pioneers — 10 ewes, 2 rams and 2 lambs — drifted north and established vibrant herd from which the Hayman group was drawn for release.

The accidental but successful herd created the gene pool, and the Hayman fire restored a habitat of treeless rock that bighorns love, and where they seek shelter from predators who cannot match them in cliff-side clambering.

Their agility is partly due to unique hooves that have evolved specifically for climbing rocks, with a hard outer wall and a soft inner wall for traction. Combined with iron-lunged endurance, they can even sometimes evade mountain lions, which are fierce and fast but quickly winded.

It is a life and a niche in the high rocky places, where — crucially — humans usually do not build ranches or mansions, that has allowed the bighorns’ numbers to hold strong along the spine of the Rockies from Colorado through Wyoming, Montana and into Alberta, Canada, each of which has bighorn populations estimated at 7,000 animals or more.

But the Hayman burn site is as much a character in this saga as the animals, and the healing from its giant scar has been slow. On June 8, 2002, a United States Forest Service employee named Terry Barton said that she burned a letter from her estranged husband at a campground, and that the fire spread. Ms. Barton ultimately pleaded guilty to arson and spent six years in prison.

Hayman was also calamitous for Denver’s water system, which has spent millions of dollars rebuilding and cleaning a reservoir in the burn area that became clogged with sediment from eroding soils that were no longer held in place by grasses and trees.

Ms. George, the state biologist, said it would take decades before Thunder Butte became reforested. That is very good news for the sheep, which have survived in part by avoiding forests, where predators like lions can drop from above.

But that is also assuming that the historical cycle of rebirth and growth repeat in the same way. With climate change and planetary warming in the decades to come, Ms. George said, the next-generation forest here might be very different from the one that was erased by Hayman.

Meanwhile, as the three new residents disappeared up into the rocks, another biologist with the Division of Wildlife, Heather Halbritter, was tracking the nine sheep released earlier this month from that same post-1946 group, using the radio-beacon collars they had been fitted with.

“They’re in those rocks, up along the ridgeline,” she said, waving the tracking device and pointing in the very direction the newcomers were going. A herd reunion might be in the offing.

Then the two ewes and their tag-along lamb stopped on a cliff. As if posing for a picture, or assessing the strangely beautiful moonscape of the Hayman, they stood in silhouette.

“That’s what sheep do,” Ms. George said. “They climb out on a rock and look.”

    A Homecoming for Bighorn Sheep in Colorado, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/19bighorn.html

Winter’s Punch Crumbles Roofs in New England

February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — The woods may be lovely, dark and deep, but for small New England towns like this one, snow no longer brings the peaceful sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

These days, a forecast of snow is more likely to elicit groans — both from weary humans demoralized by the pummeling from Mother Nature and from the many flat roofs on older buildings that are so common to this region. Down they have come, collapsing under record snow loads that are not melting but only accumulating, gathering mass until the structures can no longer bear the weight.

Homes, shopping plazas, a facility for people with mental illness, an airport hangar, a church, a saw mill, greenhouses, small businesses and at least 130 barns, those set pieces of the New England landscape — all have imploded under the snow. After a brief warm spell with no precipitation in recent days, temperatures were set to plunge back into the single digits this week, resuming the freeze part of the thaw-and-freeze cycle that has been so damaging.

The exact number of collapses is not clear, but local news Web sites feature interactive maps that pinpoint many of them. (One lets readers calculate their distance from each collapse.)

They include one in Bozrah, a small town east of here, where the roof caved in on a chicken coop, killing 85,000 chickens. (The Humane Society of the United States said so many chickens should not have been confined to cages in the first place.)

Humans have had narrow escapes. Among the narrowest occurred here last Wednesday, when two men working in an accounting office on the second floor of a 120-year-old brick building here on Main Street heard creaking noises. When they went to the third floor, they saw the roof beams buckle. They ran out, moments before the building came crashing down.

The accounting firm was left in the rubble. So were the theater costumes and props that were stored on the third floor by the Oddfellows Playhouse. Partly crushed on the street level were a picture-framing store, a gift shop, and a barbershop with its four antique leather chairs.

The bricks spilled out across Main Street, which was partly evacuated. Nearby businesses were shuttered and inspected for damages. Part of the area is still cordoned off.

“We kind of thought the end of the world was coming,” said Bessie Bianco, 24, the office manager of Sew-Fine upholsterers across the street, who witnessed the building’s fall. “The older generations say they’ve never seen anything like this. It’s really daunting. It’s tiring.”

An endless “wintry mix” has sunken southern New England into something like a vast, nondescript seafood stew, with residents barely bothering at this point to distinguish between snow and rain, sleet and freezing rain, day and night.

It began Christmas weekend and has hardly let up. What is unusual is that between the back-to-back storms, the residue has not gone away. Instead, it has congealed into more of the same old, same old — on the ground, pedestrians pick their way on narrow icy paths through cinder-caked mounds of snow; on the roofs, layers of ice and snow create ice dams that can back up underneath shingles and lead to cracks, leaks and cave-ins.

The effects have rippled through every aspect of life, cooping up people with cabin fever and leaving commuters to stand on Metro-North’s busy New Haven commuter rail line, which has cut service because its aging cars do not function in extreme cold. The state is allowing towns to dump snow in certain waterways since they have nowhere else to put it.

“Clearly we aren’t used to dealing with such volume,” Ms. Bianco said. “Maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire they have better snow-removal tactics, but people here weren’t even thinking about their roofs. A friend of mine, an icicle fell from her roof through the front windshield of her car. It was probably six feet tall. It went right through.”

Schools across the region have been evacuated because of concerns that their snow-laden roofs could give way. Officials said the evacuations were precautionary but some parents went into a swivet, demanding to know why the schools had not been checked when they were empty. And they are empty a lot — this year’s many snow days are leading to makeup days that could wipe out spring break and extend into June.

The Connecticut National Guard has been called up for grueling roof-shoveling duty. Each shovelful of wet snow can weigh 50 pounds. (The state has also deployed prison inmates to shovel out buried fire hydrants.)

Ryan Ward, 30, a private roofer, was shoveling off the top of Bill’s Sport Shop here on Monday night. Even in the dark, he said he had to keep working. “Everybody knows that if you don’t get it done right away, someone else will take the job or the building will collapse,” he said.

An ad on Craigslist is seeking 250 workers for “9-10 hours a day, 7 days a week” and notes, “You must be able to lift 50 lbs. continuously for 8 plus hours a day and stand.”

The ad was from Craft Solutions Inc., a disaster-relief company based in Baton Rouge, La., but it is aimed at workers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The pay was advertised as $15 an hour plus a $30 per diem and overtime after 40 hours a week. But Tom McAlister, a supervisor at the company, said in a phone interview that the pay was increased to $18 an hour because the competition for roof shovelers was so fierce. His company has rounded up what he called “grunt labor” for floods and hurricanes, but this is the first time he has put out a bulletin for snow shovelers.

“Bad as it may be, I love y’all’s snowfall,” he said, mostly in jest.

    Winter’s Punch Crumbles Roofs in New England, NYT, 8.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/us/09roofs.html

Clean Air Under Siege

February 5, 2011
The New York Times

Shortly after he entered the Senate in 2007, John Barrasso told his Wyoming constituents that the country’s biggest need was an energy policy to deal with carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

That was then. In lockstep with other Senate Republicans, he helped kill last year’s energy and climate bill. Now he has introduced a bill that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency and any other part of the federal government from regulating carbon pollution.

Congress’s failure to enact a climate bill means that the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate these gases — an authority conferred by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2007 — is, for now, the only tool available to the federal government to combat global warming.

The modest regulations the agency has already proposed, plus stronger ones it will issue later this year, should lead to the retirement of many of the nation’s older, dirtier coal-fired power plants and a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions.

Mr. Barrasso’s bill is not an isolated challenge. Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” has unveiled a somewhat narrower bill to undercut the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide. Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican and new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, simultaneously introduced a companion bill.

There are a half-dozen other such measures in circulation, at least one of which would weaken the agency’s long-held powers to regulate conventional ground-level pollutants like soot and mercury.

One or another of these bills has a real shot in the Republican-controlled House. Their chances are slimmer in the Senate, where the bigger danger is a proposal by Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, that would block any new regulations on power plants and other industrial sources for two years.

That is just obstruction by another name. It would delay modernization and ensure that more carbon is dumped into the atmosphere. History shows that regulatory delays have a way of becoming permanent.

It is tempting to blame the entire energy industry for these attacks on the E.P.A.’s authority. The oil companies are pushing hard against any new rules. The utilities are split. Some companies like General Electric — whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is now advising President Obama — signed on to the energy bill that passed the House last year, when it was still under Democratic control.

Mr. Inhofe, an outlier before the midterm elections, has a lot more company now. Even among lawmakers who accept the facts of global warming, he is getting considerable mileage with baseless charges that the E.P.A. is running amok.

The agency does have a heavy regulatory agenda. It will issue proposals not only on greenhouse gases but also ozone, sulfur dioxide, and mercury, which poisons lakes and fish. These regulations are fully consistent with the Clean Air Act. Some of them should have been completed during the Bush years; all are essential to protect the environment. The agency’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, has moved cautiously, making clear that she will target only the largest polluters and not, as the Republicans claim, mom-and-pop businesses.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama promised to protect “common-sense safeguards” to the nation’s environment. The rules under siege in Congress will help clean the air, reduce toxic pollution in fish and slow emissions of greenhouse gases. It is hard to imagine anything more sensible than that.

    Clean Air Under Siege, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06sun1.html

A Dot on the Map, Until the Earth Started Shaking

February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

GUY, Ark. — Everybody around here is getting used to the earthquakes, and that does not sit well with Dirk DeTurck.

He sent out 600 fliers and made, well, had to be around 100 phone calls, trying to attract people to his meeting on earthquake preparedness. And yet on a recent Tuesday night, he stood in the local school cafeteria and looked out at only a dozen or so people, including two women from the local extension homemakers club who had scheduled their own meeting on the topic a couple of weeks later.

“I think people are getting comfortable,” said Mr. DeTurck, a former Navy mechanic. “I mean, they have in California. They’ve become real comfortable with the shaking.”

Whether they have become comfortable is debatable, but the people of Guy, a town of 563 about an hour north of Little Rock, have had to learn to live with earthquakes.

Since the early fall, there have been thousands, none of them very large — a fraction have been felt, and the only documented damage is a cracked window in the snack bar at Woolly Hollow State Park. But in their sheer numbers, they have been relentless, creating a phenomenon that has come to be called the Guy earthquake swarm.

This was followed by the Guy media swarm, with reporters pouring in through the surrounding orchards and cow pastures to ask residents what the quakes feel like.

Mr. DeTurck and many others described a boom followed by a quick, alarming shift, a sensation one man compared to watching the camera dive off a cliff in an Imax movie. Some say they have felt dozens, others only four or five, and still others say they have only heard them.

They do, however, have similar suspicions about the cause.

Several years ago, the gas companies arrived, part of a sort of rush in northern Arkansas to drill for gas in a geological formation called the Fayetteville shale.

Local landowners signed leases and royalty agreements with the companies on the promise of a few hundred dollars or more a month. Drilling sites started showing up in the fields, and the trucks began rumbling through day and night. Residents began to wonder whether all of this was such a good idea.

“They took advantage of people’s ignorance,” said Greg Hooten, the superintendent of the local water utility, who now worries about the effect of the drilling on the groundwater. Nonetheless, Mr. Hooten had signed an agreement for drilling on his property. “Who’s going to stop the gas and oil companies?” he asked.

The companies are engaging in hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand and chemicals are injected at high pressures into underground formations to open pockets of gas. Much of the watery mix that is injected into wells comes back out as waste, and something has to be done with it.

Disposal wells are dug, and the wastewater is injected deep into the earth. Last summer a few of these injection wells appeared near the town, including the one across from Big Pop’s fruit stand, just past the school.

Then the ground started shaking.

There are two important facts about the Guy swarm. The first is that such swarms have happened around here twice in the past three decades, long before the gas companies came.

The Enola swarm in the early 1980s occurred about 10 miles to the southeast. Over a comparable six month period, 550 locatable earthquake events occurred in the Enola swarm, compared to 640 around Guy. In both cases, thousands of smaller quakes were recorded by seismographs.

The largest back then measured a magnitude 4.5; the largest this time has measured 4.0.

Though the exact causes are unknown, the Enola swarm and another similar swarm in the area in 2001 are considered natural occurrences. (They also do not appear to be related to the major New Madrid Seismic Zone, which reaches into the state’s northeastern corner.)

But researchers with the Arkansas Geological Survey say that while there is no discernible link between earthquakes and gas production, there is “strong temporal and spatial” evidence for a relationship between these quakes and the injection wells.

For decades, scientists have been researching induced seismicity, or how human activity can cause earthquakes. Such a link gained attention in the early 1960s, when hundreds of quakes were recorded in Colorado a few years after the Army began injecting fluid into a disposal well near the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

So last year, when earthquakes were recorded in small, discrete clusters in north central Arkansas, researchers perked up. Knowing that there would be two new active injection wells around Guy, they set up a network of measuring stations in the area last summer.

Sitting in the lobby of the Oil and Gas Commission office in Fort Smith, just a few hours before Mr. DeTurck would have his meeting, Scott Ausbrooks, a geologist with the Arkansas Geological Survey, pulled up a slide on his laptop. The screen was crossed by squiggly lines in an imitation of a seismograph. There were scores of blips, some small, others hysterical.

“All this activity happened after these wells had gone online,” Mr. Ausbrooks said.

Then he pointed to a map, where the quakes were represented by colored dots. The injection wells appeared almost as small doses of fertilizer, surrounded by a fruitful and colorful bloom.

Gas company representatives are skeptical.

“We’ve found no causal connection,” said Charles Morgan, a lawyer representing Poseidon Energy Services, which has a proposed injection well in limbo under a state-imposed moratorium. “The evidence is anecdotal at best.”

Mr. Ausbrooks said the fact that swarms had naturally happened here did not necessarily discount a link.

“What you could be looking at is a case where the strain was already there,” he said. “You’d be fast-forwarding the clock.”

There has not been a quake measuring over magnitude 3.1 recorded since early December, but researchers are studying whether the ebb and flow of the quakes match that of the activity at the injection wells.

Mr. Ausbrooks and his colleagues were in Fort Smith to present their data to the staid men of the commission, who were considering an extension of the one-month moratorium on new disposal wells in about 600 square miles around Guy (the seven existing wells in the area remain active, though the gas companies are required to submit regular operational reports).

Citing a need for further research, the commission voted for a six-month extension of the moratorium without hearing the presentation or facing much of a fight from the gas company lawyers.

And so the people of Guy, like Betty Baker, 73, will continue to ride out the swarm. Ms. Baker, one of the handful of concerned residents at Mr. DeTurck’s meeting, said she had never felt the quakes, though her dog Teddy seemed to jump on the bed at odd moments. She had, however, heard the booms.

“But I live near a machine shop, so I’m not sure if it’s there,” she added. “That machine shop does make a lot of racket.”

    A Dot on the Map, Until the Earth Started Shaking, NYT, 5.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06earthquake.html

Rare Storm Hits Texas, Causing Chaos for Drivers

February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — A rare winter storm dropped sleet and snow over much of Texas early Friday, creating chaos on icy roads and hampering travelers from Dallas in the north to Brownsville in the south.

Dallas took the brunt of the storm, as snowfall forced the closure of Love Field on Friday morning and caused more than 120 flights to be canceled at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

The city has been battered with three days of bitter cold, ice storms, rolling blackouts and transit breakdowns as it prepares to host the Super Bowl on Sunday. By 6 a.m., most of the metropolis was blanketed with 5 to 6 inches of snow, and snow was expected to fall until noon, the National Weather Service said.

Paul McDonald, a forecaster with the service, said the mass of arctic air that had blanketed much of the country had caused three days of frigid weather in Texas as well, freezing the ground. Then overnight, two low-pressure systems moved into the state — one from New Mexico and one from the Gulf of Mexico — and collided with the cold air, producing snow and ice. Though Texas usually has balmy enough temperatures this time of year to melt ice and snow as it hits the roadways, this time the pavement iced over.

“If the air had not been so cold, we would have seen a little light draggle, but cause the air was so chilly it turned into snow,” he said. “We get about one event like this every 10 years.”

In Austin and San Antonio, sleet covered the roads after midnight before snow began to fall in the early morning. Major roadways were closed and accidents snarled traffic in both towns.

Students at the University of Texas in Austin went out to frolic in about two and a half inches of snow as administrators canceled classes.

Public schools were also closed throughout central and southern Texas, including Houston, which has the largest district with 200,000 students. Students also got a free winter-weather day — almost unheard of in Texas — in El Paso, Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Brownsville.

The treacherous roads produced scenes of havoc in several cities as Texas motorists, who are unused to driving in snow, slid off the road and collided. At least 20 vehicles, among them a tractor trailer and a bus, were involved in a pileup late Thursday on Interstate 10 in San Antonio, one of dozens of wrecks the police there were responding to as they tried to close entrance ramps to the freeway, a local newspaper reported.

In Houston, officials closed parts of several freeways early Friday morning and shut down toll roads for the rest of the day. The icy roads were a major factor in at least 100 wrecks reported in the early morning before the roads were closed. Freezing rain and drizzle overnight combined with temperatures below 20 in the morning to create a layer of ice on the roads here.

Even the southern tip of the state did not escape the freeze. Major highways in the Rio Grande Valley were closed on Thursday evening, as well as several international bridges into Mexico and the main bridge connecting South Padre Island to the mainland.

    Rare Storm Hits Texas, Causing Chaos for Drivers, NYT, 4.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/05storm.html

Weather a Factor in Slow U.S. Job Growth

February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MOTOKO RICH

The United States labor market slowed to a crawl in January, adding just 36,000 jobs last month, far below consensus market forecasts.

With 13.9 million people still out of work, the unemployment rate actually fell to 9 percent, from 9.4 percent, in part because of a readjustment of population figures and also because fewer people looked for jobs during the month.

The disappointing jobs number, restrained by snowstorms and government layoffs, was far below what economists generally say is needed to merely keep pace with normal population growth.

Although some economists said they would largely disregard January’s data because of the effects of bad weather, others said that underlying job growth was still not robust.

“You can blame weather for the number being as low as it is,” said Steve Blitz, a senior economist for ITG Investment Research. “But even if you abstracted out the weather, you’re still not getting the dynamic job growth that is going to cut the unemployment rate significantly.”

Private companies added 50,000 jobs in January, while federal, state and local governments shed 14,000 jobs.

The job figures came in a week when several other indicators pointed toward an accelerating recovery. A closely watched survey of purchasing managers rose to its highest level since May 2004, and chain store sales increased at a faster pace than expected in January.

Health care, manufacturing and retail provided the strongest job growth, while construction continued to lag. Temporary help, which had been strong throughout 2010, actually lost 11,400 jobs.

Some economists said January’s snowstorms appeared to especially affect construction, which lost 32,000 jobs, and transportation and warehousing, which shed 38,000 jobs.

For the unemployed, the slow addition of jobs is increasingly frustrating. “If you want to get there and you’re sitting in an airplane, the fact that the airplane is moving 20 miles faster down the runway doesn’t matter to you,” said Cliff Waldman, economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a trade group. “You want it to take off.”

The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of the job market also included its annual “benchmark revisions,” which suggested that job growth during 2010 was actually lower than originally reported.

The report included upward revisions to November and December’s numbers, lifting job creation in November to 93,000 from 71,000, and in December to 121,000 from 103,000.

The disproportionate burden that the grim labor market has imposed on the less skilled remained pronounced in January’s numbers. The unemployment rate among those with less than a high school diploma was 14.2 percent, while the rate among those with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 4.2 percent.

Recruiters and staffing companies underscored the fact that employers who are currently hiring are looking to fill slots that generally require candidates with college degrees. Evan Davis, chief operating officer of MRI Network, which has 700 franchised recruiting offices throughout the United States, said that the company had witnessed a strong increase in postings for information technology, engineering and health care jobs. In fact, Mr. Davis said, some employers were having difficulty filling such slots.

“It’s actually hard to meet the demand that’s out there,” he said. “It’s really hard to find top talent.”

Economists noted that job growth would not truly hit the kinds of levels needed to seriously dent the unemployment rate until employers beyond a handful of industries started hiring in earnest. Construction, which was among the hardest hit during the recession, has also not revived.

“It’s very brutal in our industry,” said Brantley Barrow, chairman of Hardin Construction, a builder of office buildings, malls and hotels based in Atlanta. “Even though the general economy is getting better, it’s going to be another year or two before things start to improve in our industry.”

The numbers underscored the assessment of the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, who said on Thursday that “until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established.”

    Weather a Factor in Slow U.S. Job Growth, NYT, 4.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/business/economy/05jobs.html

Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows

February 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

NEW ORLEANS — When Hurricane Katrina hit and the murky waters rushed through levee breaches, even the facts were drowned.

Official documents were destroyed, years of photographs were ruined, and a city’s ability to know itself was lost. Answers to basic questions like how many people lived here, where they lived and who they were could not be easily answered.

Now there finally are some numbers, and they show that the city is 29 percent smaller than a decade ago.

The Census Bureau reported on Thursday that 343,829 people were living in the city of New Orleans on April 1, 2010, four years and seven months after it was virtually emptied by the floodwaters that followed the hurricane.

The numbers portray a significantly smaller city than in the previous census, in 2000, though it should be said that New Orleans had been steadily shrinking even then. In 1990, it was the 24th-biggest city in the country, in 2000, the 31st, and now it has surely dropped from the top 50.

The latest figure is lower than estimates cited widely by many here in recent months. It is lower, by roughly 10,000, than the official census estimate in the summer of 2009.

“It’s not an unqualified good thing to have big numbers,” said Mark VanLandingham, a professor at Tulane University who has expressed frustration with frequent calls from local officials, sometimes successful, for the Census Bureau to raise the city’s population estimate. “It made it very difficult to figure out what was actually going on.”

The census findings reveal some other changes in the population, as well.

According to Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census results for The New York Times, the city has roughly 24,000 fewer white residents than it did 10 years ago, though the proportion of the white population has grown to 30 percent.

The city has 118,000 fewer black residents. New Orleans, once more than two-thirds black, is now less than 60 percent black.

There are 56,193 fewer children, a drop of nearly 44 percent.

The movements in the region can be seen with some clarity as well. St. Tammany Parish, a suburban refuge for many New Orleanians after the storm, grew by nearly a quarter. St. Bernard Parish, which is downriver from the city and was almost completely overwhelmed by the floodwaters, shrank by nearly half.

The Hispanic population of neighboring Jefferson Parish, home to many of those who came to fill the city’s ravenous appetite for construction labor, jumped by 65 percent.

Some may yet challenge these figures, arguing that the count overlooked people living in abandoned houses or moving in with one relative after another as they wait for rents to come down or houses to be rebuilt. There is no question such people exist in New Orleans; whether they were all counted is another matter.

Emily Arata, the deputy mayor for external affairs , said the city was not planning to challenge the numbers, in part because such challenges do not traditionally succeed but also because it was satisfied that the figure fell within 3 percent of the 2009 estimate.

The numbers have consequences, of course. Many of them will play out in the heated political battle to come in March when the State Legislature meets to discuss redistricting.

Louisiana has lost a Congressional seat, something that was possible even without the storm, given the state’s anemic population growth in the first five years of the decade. But while the loss itself may not be a result of the floodwaters, its effect will be.

With such a significant drop in New Orleans’s black population, will the state’s majority-minority Congressional district remain centered in the city? Will it snake upward from New Orleans, along the Mississippi to East Baton Rouge, now the largest parish in the state?

“The one thing that people need to realize about these numbers is that everything is on the table,” said Norby Chabert, a Democratic state senator from Houma, south of New Orleans. “The political assumptions that have been bedrock for however many years now are out the window.”

Far more is at stake than political representation.

Certain to be a contentious topic at the legislative session in March are the scores, if not hundreds, of laws on the Louisiana books that exempt New Orleans from a variety of state rules. These exemptions, which go back decades, coyly apply to any city in the state of more than 400,000 people, a description that no longer applies to New Orleans.

“There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” predicted Emile Bruneau, a former legislator who represented a district in New Orleans.

In an e-mail, James Perry, a former mayoral candidate and the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, called the city’s population figure “likely devastating,” and raised concerns that it could lead to drops in federal financing for housing, infrastructure and public health efforts, as the city is still steadily pushing forward in recovery.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying that “accurate census estimates in future years will ensure that city government and local nonprofit organizations will have the federal funds necessary to provide our growing population with important services.”

But he and officials like Ms. Arata emphasized that the city’s recovery should not be judged by census data but by the reforms under way now, many of which are addressing problems that have plagued the city for years. The mayor, in his statement, mentioned the overhaul of the city’s schools and the broad and ongoing redesign of its troubled criminal justice system. Indeed, as the census numbers were trickling out, the City Council was voting to build a new, and smaller, jail.

There are some who say it is premature, even wrong, to focus only on the 343,829 people who are here (compared with 484,674 in 2000). “I think it does point to that we have a problem with a large percentage of displaced people,” said Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, which is based at Tulane.

Dr. Hill described shortcomings in housing programs, particularly in initiatives meant to restore the city’s rentals, that disproportionately affected black residents. Such failings may have been a reason why so many former residents have not returned.

The 2010 census tracked people’s current locations, not their past homes nor future intentions. And indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to know how many of the New Orleanians of 2000 who are not here still want to return. It is not even known where they are. But nonprofit rebuilding groups say their waiting lists are long.


Matthew Ericson contributed reporting from New York.

    Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows, NYT, 3.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/us/04census.html

As Much of the Nation Digs Out, a Freeze Sets In

February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

Out went the blizzard, and in came the deep freeze.

As Chicago awoke to the task of clearing up from the third biggest snowfall in its history — a monster of a storm that smothered the city in 20.2 inches of snow, stranded drivers on Lake Shore Drive and gave children their first snow day in a dozen years on Wednesday, and then again on Thursday — the temperature plunged to a bone-chilling zero degrees. And it was not alone: dozens of states from Texas to Wisconsin saw the snow and ice stop falling, only to be replaced by a cold snap.

Travel was better Thursday morning than it had been in days, but there were still plenty of hitches and headaches. More than a thousand flights had been canceled by 7 a.m. Thursday — with about half at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and half at Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, a major hub for Continental Airlines. Still, it was only a small fraction of the 6,484 flights that were canceled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.com, a Web site that tracks air travel.

Train service was improving, as well. While there were still some cancellations in the Chicago area, Amtrak said it planned to restore service in most places on Thursday, a day after snow and ice forced it to shut down service between New York and Philadelphia during the Wednesday morning rush hour. But it was still a dodgy, slippery commute in many hard-hit places.

And officials warned that there were still dangers: heavy snow coated with ice sent roofs collapsing in the Northeast; black ice on sidewalks made it a day of slip-and-fall cases at many emergency rooms, and the deep, heavy snow accumulations raised fears that some shovelers could risk heart attacks from the exertion of clearing it.

Two-thirds of the country on Wednesday seemed to be reeling from one form of extreme weather or another. There were tornado warnings along the Gulf Coast. Snow and ice forced Texas to institute rolling power blackouts. The heavy snow in Oklahoma left The Tulsa World unable to print the newspaper for the first time in its 106-year history. Both Milwaukee and Chicago groaned under heavy snow.

In New York, falling ice shut both the Verrazano-Narrows and George Washington Bridges for part of the morning. And the snow, ice and freezing rain continued to move east across New England, and might have contributed to the collapse of an office building in Middletown, Conn., that sprayed bricks across Main Street.

With 30 states feeling the storm’s impact, the National Weather Service had to upgrade its Web site to handle traffic that reached up to 20 million hits an hour, officials said. Snow fell from New Mexico and Texas up to Minnesota, and east to Maine. Several places were hit with more than two feet of snow, and by Wednesday evening more than a foot of snow had been recorded in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and several other states were close behind.

In Washington, President Obama was briefed by officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The dangers of the storm were not over, and officials said it might have contributed to deaths from causes like car accidents and heart attacks in several states.

“The deep snow accumulation will make shoveling very difficult,” warned the National Weather Service, “and potentially deadly.”

Of course, all was not Snowmageddon. The white snow softened the hard edges of cities and towns around the nation, turning them into glittering Currier & Ives-like vistas, with stalactite icicles dripping from the eaves of houses.

But there were also plenty of headaches, and not only from the tear-inducing cold air that began to trickle down from the north. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were left without power, especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Commutes were slippery messes, where they were possible at all. In many places the temperatures dipped just in time to turn slushy streets into dangerously icy streets. Shoveling felt like a Sisyphean task, as new snow and ice kept coating the cleared sidewalks.

In Boston, which has already received more than five feet of snow this winter, the back-to-back snowstorms on Tuesday and Wednesday had some people feeling like they were living in a continuous loop. That it was Feb. 2 — Groundhog Day — was not lost on Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. “It’s Groundhog Day, and literally like ‘Groundhog Day’ the movie,” he said, in a nod to the film in which a day keeps repeating itself.


Reporting was contributed by Monica Davey from Chicago, Malcolm Gay from St. Louis, A. G. Sulzberger from Kansas City, Mo., and Katie Zezima from Boston.

    As Much of the Nation Digs Out, a Freeze Sets In, NYT, 2.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/us/03storm.html

Chicago Humbled by Powerful Storm

February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS

CHICAGO — When Jenny Theroux plotted her commute home Tuesday afternoon, she was certain she would arrive well before the full force of the blizzard hit. For the final leg of her trip, she turned onto Lake Shore Drive, this city’s wide and busy thoroughfare along Lake Michigan, at 4 p.m.

But instead of spending her usual 20 minutes along that stretch of road, Ms. Theroux sat in her car for the next 12 hours and 45 minutes at a dead stop, trapped in a line of hundreds of other cars and at least three city buses, everyone going nowhere.

As 70-mile-an-hour gusts whipped her Mazda 3 and eerie thunder boomed nearby, snow fell so fast that she could not see through the gauzy blur beyond her windshield. Ms. Theroux called Chicago’s municipal help line, turned the engine on occasionally to warm up, and waited and waited, just 800 frustrating feet from an exit ramp.

“I started to worry I might run out of gas and be frozen,” Ms. Theroux, 23, recalled on Wednesday in a tired, strained voice. “I’m from a small town in Minnesota, where if you get stranded, you’re basically all alone. But here I was, right here, and I felt the same way — completely isolated.”

Chicago, a city that prides itself on its ability to conquer any snowstorm that comes its way, woke up Wednesday to discover that hundreds of people had been trapped for hours — scared and confused, in part because of the vague advice they heard from emergency workers — along a prominent roadway that runs smack through the heart of the city.

Among the scenes described by those who spent most or all of the harrowing night on Lake Shore Drive: Frustrated drivers trying to unclog the roads by pushing stuck and abandoned cars through snow-filled exit ramps; a band of passengers crowded inside one Chicago Transit Authority bus — an express, of course — deciding after five hours to make a run for it (many were forced to turn back); people who ventured out, perhaps from their homes along Lake Shore Drive, to deliver cereal bars, water and Gatorade to those stranded.

As abandoned vehicles still sat in drifts along Lake Shore Drive on Wednesday morning, city officials said that the hundreds of people involved had been safely rescued, and that they did not know of anyone who had been seriously injured from being trapped in their cars for hours.

To those who were “very inconvenienced,” Raymond Orozco, chief of staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley, issued an apology, but would not single out anything in particular that the city might have done differently. By Wednesday, more than 20 inches of snow had fallen in parts of Chicago.

In his 31 years of working for the city, Mr. Orozco said, “I haven’t experienced anything like Lake Shore Drive last night.”

City officials warned Tuesday that snow would begin falling by midafternoon and that conditions would become treacherous into the night, particularly along lakefront roads where the winds were expected to whip Lake Michigan’s waves into ocean-grade breakers.

Workers fled downtown early, jamming roads earlier than usual, especially Lake Shore Drive, which is eight lanes wide in some sections. Then, as evening arrived, five accidents shut down the thoroughfare — one sent a bus spinning across three lanes.

And so, before 8 p.m., the city took the rare step of officially closing the road. But the drivers already on it were stuck there for ages. Some said they were trapped behind the broken-down bus. Others said a single car — stalled or stuck — blocked a key exit ramp for hours. (Lake Shore Drive was reopened just before 6 a.m. central time on Thursday, the Chicago police said.)

“I feel like they just left us there,” said Rachel Massa, 28, who spent seven hours in her car, trying to glean guidance from the radio and from friends who called the city’s 311 office and searched the Internet on her behalf. “What was supposed to happen to all of the people who were already there?”

Some drivers said they were never approached by police officers, firefighters or any other city authorities. A few, in desperation, climbed out of their cars and tried to brainstorm with stranded strangers what they should do.

By many accounts, firefighters and others did appear — and checked on people inside the city buses to make sure they were O.K. — but they had a simple message: Stay put. Do not abandon your car. Help is coming.

On one standing-room only bus (with no toilet), passengers bonded over shared Cheez-Its, crossword puzzles and jarring moments when the back door would suddenly burst open in the raging wind.

At least one passenger said she was having trouble breathing at one point, but appeared better after getting help from another passenger with medical experience. After more than five hours, about a dozen passengers decided to flee on their own.

“Just as we stepped out, snow was pounding in our faces, and there we were, trying to walk down Lake Shore Drive,” said Jonah Burrell, 29, whose downtown advertising firm is ordinarily a 15-minute bus ride from his North Side home.

Mr. Burrell and others were quickly spotted by emergency officials and told to return to the bus (they did), while others, pushed on by adrenaline and frustration, struggled through giant drifts and were carried to safety by officials who came upon them.

“If we stood still,” said Cole Jarvis, 27, an architect, “we would have been frozen.”

Some motorists who stayed put were eventually able to reach exit ramps and drive away.

But many, like Ms. Theroux, had to be picked up by emergency buses in the early morning, their cars left behind to be towed by the city.

“Now I’ve got that to figure out before I sleep,” Ms. Theroux said. “Where is my car and how do I get it back?”

    Chicago Humbled by Powerful Storm, NYT, 2.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/us/03chicago.html

Storm Leaves Much of Country Shivering, Shoveling and Awaiting More

February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

The blizzard that dropped a foot or more of snow across a staggeringly wide area of the country, from Oklahoma up through a paralyzed Chicago and across parts of an ice-glazed New England, finally began to weaken Wednesday. It left behind a long trail of spun-out cars, darkened homes, closed schools and stranded fliers.

But the harsh winter weather was not over, forecasters warned: a bitter cold front threatened to follow the storm, bringing subzero temperatures to many areas trying to dig out.

So even as Chicago was trying to recover from the third-biggest snowfall in its history — a monster of a storm that smothered the city in 20.2 inches of snow, stranded hundreds of drivers on Lake Shore Drive for hours, closed the city’s schools for the first time in a dozen years and whipped up gusts that reached 70 miles an hour at one point — the National Weather Service was still issuing warnings. The temperature there was expected to fall to 5 below zero overnight, and to 20 below in outlying areas, with the wind chill making it feel colder.

“It’s going to be a while before the snow and ice melts in a lot of areas,” said Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, noting that cold air was expected to pour down from northern Wisconsin all the way to Houston, which is forecast to have a hard freeze. “This was a large, giant, powerful storm.”

It was a terrible day for travel, whether by train, plane or automobile. More than 6,000 flights, about a fifth of the country’s air traffic, were canceled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.com, which tracks air travel. Amtrak shut down service between New York and Philadelphia during the morning rush hour, and canceled many trains in and out of Chicago. Not only were side roads closed by snow and ice, but Interstate highways also were shut down.

Two-thirds of the country seemed to be reeling from one form of extreme weather or another. There were tornado warnings along the Gulf Coast. Snow and ice forced Texas to institute rolling power blackouts. The heavy snow in Oklahoma left The Tulsa World unable to print the newspaper for the first time in its 106-year history. Both Milwaukee and Chicago groaned under heavy snow.

In New York, falling ice shut both the Verrazano-Narrows and George Washington Bridges for part of the morning. And the snow, ice and freezing rain continued to move east across New England, and might have contributed to the collapse of an office building in Middletown, Conn., that sprayed bricks across Main Street.

With 30 states feeling the storm’s impact, the National Weather Service had to upgrade its Web site to handle traffic that reached up to 20 million hits an hour, officials said. Snow fell from New Mexico and Texas up to Minnesota, and east to Maine. Several places were hit with more than two feet of snow, and by Wednesday evening more than a foot of snow had been recorded in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and several other states were close behind.

In Washington, President Obama was briefed by officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The dangers of the storm were not over, and officials said it might have contributed to deaths from causes like car accidents and heart attacks in several states.

“The deep snow accumulation will make shoveling very difficult,” warned the National Weather Service, “and potentially deadly.”

Of course, all was not Snowmageddon. The white snow softened the hard edges of cities and towns around the nation, turning them into glittering Currier & Ives-like vistas, with stalactite icicles dripping from the eaves of houses. School closings made snowball fights easier, and the children of Chicago, many of whom had never had a snow day in their lives, found themselves sprung from classes not only on Wednesday but on Thursday as well.

But there were also plenty of headaches, and not only from the tear-inducing cold air that began to trickle down from the north. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were left without power, especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Commutes were slippery messes, where they were possible at all. In many places the temperatures dipped just in time to turn slushy streets into dangerously icy streets. Shoveling felt like a Sisyphean task, as new snow and ice kept coating the cleared sidewalks.

In Boston, which has already received more than five feet of snow this winter, the back-to-back snowstorms on Tuesday and Wednesday had some people feeling like they were living in a continuous loop. That it was Feb. 2 — Groundhog Day — was not lost on Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. “It’s Groundhog Day, and literally like ‘Groundhog Day’ the movie,” he said, in a nod to the film in which a day keeps repeating itself.

Reporting was contributed by Monica Davey from Chicago, Malcolm Gay from St. Louis, A. G. Sulzberger from Kansas City, Mo., and Katie Zezima from Boston.

    Storm Leaves Much of Country Shivering, Shoveling and Awaiting More, NYT, 2.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/us/03storm.html

Storm Stops Travelers as It Moves Across U.S.

February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

A paralyzing 2,000-mile swath of winter at its snowy, icy, messy worst pushed eastward across the United States on Tuesday, disrupting the rhythms of everyday life and punctuating this season’s recurring lesson that humankind has no dominion over nature.

Airlines canceled thousands of flights. Governors called out the National Guard. Schools closed early, if they opened at all. Interstate highways became treacherous ribbons of black ice. Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency apprised President Obama of their battle plans for foul weather threatening more than 30 states, including New York, where city streets were paved over by thick films of ice from a wintry mix Wednesday morning that made walking a hazard.

By Tuesday evening, the storm had brought Tulsa to a virtual halt with more than a foot of snow, it layered the roadways of St. Louis with an icy sheen, and draped Chicago with a swirling snowfall so thick that the white-gray sky and the gray-white ground blurred into one enveloping test pattern. All the while, the storm was moving inexorably to the Northeast, where many people watched the televised weather reports — of blinding snow and stranded cars — and imagined their Wednesday.

Those inclined to rage against the elements — for following what seems to be a weekly delivery schedule of misery — were humbled into sheltered silence by the gusting winds. A wise choice, given that throughout the day the National Weather Service was issuing warnings for certain areas that read like snippets from a disaster-movie screenplay:

“DANGEROUS MULTIFACETED AND LIFE-THREATENING WINTER STORM ... BEFORE MAKING DECISION TO TRAVEL ... CONSIDER IF GETTING TO YOUR DESTINATION IS WORTH PUTTING YOUR LIFE AT RISK ... DO NOT TRAVEL! IF YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST TRAVEL ... HAVE A WINTER SURVIVAL KIT WITH YOU.”

An interactive map on the weather service’s Web site appeared to support the uppercase urgency. By midafternoon on Tuesday, a pink-and-red band (denoting blizzard and winter-storm warnings) stretched from the Dallas area — where plans for Sunday’s Super Bowl continued in weather familiar to the game’s two teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers — to points beyond the Acadia National Park in Maine.

“It’s having a gigantic geographical impact,” said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service who tracked the storm from the safety of his office in relatively unscathed Camp Springs, Md.

Mr. Oravec offered a basic lesson in meteorology to explain weather that transcends the word “inclement.” A cold air mass from Canada has become entrenched across the north-central United States, while storms in the Mississippi Valley have been drawing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Cold air plus moisture equals snow, and ice, and a new year that we are still ringing in with shovel scrapes against pavement.

For the first part of Tuesday, much of the country girded. In Illinois and Missouri, for example, the Ameren utility company shifted into what it called “storm mode,” preparing for downed power lines by assembling more than 2,300 external linemen from other states; there were more than 35,000 power failures in Illinois by late Tuesday afternoon. And in Chicago, emergency-management workers braced for a storm that might rival the blizzard of 1967, when 23 inches of snow paralyzed the city for days.

Chicago and St. Louis, Kansas City and Detroit and hundreds of other communities prepared for what they knew was coming, based on reports coming out of Tulsa, where City Hall shut down, the Hard Rock Casino experienced a partial roof collapse and firefighters had to rescue people from stranded public buses. The fast-falling snow and the strong winds transformed parts of the city into a municipal parking lot.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of cars stranded in the city, from private to emergency vehicles,” Paul Strizek, of the city’s Public Works Department, told The Tulsa World. “Even with four-wheel drive, people are having difficulty getting around.”

The Tulsa World, meanwhile, announced that it would not be able to deliver the newspaper on Wednesday — for the first time since it began publication in 1905. “We could print it, but we can’t deliver it,” said Joe Worley, the executive editor.

Mr. Worley said that the paper’s Web site would continue to be updated throughout Wednesday, but added, “We’re just not used to snow over a foot deep.”

In Kansas City, Mo., people spent the day the way people do when trying to decide whether to believe reports of imminent bad weather. They cleaned out the Home Depot of salt, scrapers and shovels, stocked up on milk and debated the trustworthiness of weather forecasts.

Near downtown, two bundled-up homeless men emerged from under a bridge, carrying their possessions in plastic bags. One said he planned to sleep outdoors again on Tuesday night; the other man said he was not so sure.

By dusk, though, a heavy and steady snowfall blanketed Missouri, ending any debate about the storm’s impact and raising the hope that the two homeless men had found proper shelter.

Conditions became so hazardous that the Missouri Department of Transportation took the unprecedented step of shutting down the state’s entire stretch of Interstate 70, the 250-mile main artery that runs from St. Louis to Kansas City.

“I can’t tell you how many slide-offs we’ve had,” said Capt. Greg Kindle of the Missouri State Patrol. “We’re at the point where we’re not towing them out. We’re just giving them a ride and leaving the car till it clears up.”

By midafternoon the storm had made it to Chicago, a city that tends to see snowstorms as inadequate tests of its stoicism. In this case, at least, the city benefited from the advance warning. Almost organically, the evening rush hour moved up a few hours. Restaurants and parking garages closed early, and the working denizens of downtown fled with the giddiness of schoolchildren granted early recess and anticipating a day off on Wednesday.

Everywhere, cabs were packed, although their drivers were not always calm.

Mahrous El Gamal, whose windshield wipers could not keep up with the slushy snow, said the anxious chatter of passengers desperate to get home had convinced him to call it a day.

“They’re saying it’s going to be remembered for the rest of our lives?” he said. “They scare the hell out of me with that. That’s it. I’m done.”


Reporting was contributed by Monica Davey and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons in Chicago, A. G. Sulzberger in Kansas City and Malcolm Gay in St. Louis.

    Storm Stops Travelers as It Moves Across U.S., NYT, 1.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/us/02storm.html

Flights Canceled as Midwest Braces for Another Storm

February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With blizzard conditions and possible ice storms bearing down on the Midwest on Tuesday morning, airports began canceling flights and nervous residents braced for what was predicted to be a dangerous deluge.

“We sold a whole lot of ice melt yesterday and quite a few have been in already this morning,” said Arthur Eickhoff, owner of L.A. Hardware in Kansas City, Kan., which opened at 7 a.m. “They worried about it and are getting ready for it.”

Though the roads here early Tuesday morning carried just a fraction of an inch of snow, they were quieter than normal, if far from empty, during the usual commuting hours, with many residents apparently taking the urgings of the governors of Kansas and Missouri to avoid traveling to work.

Throughout the area, winds picked up, making the thin varnish of ice that formed Monday that much more treacherous.

“Numerous” traffic accidents had caused dozens of injuries and at least one fatality, said Lt. John Hotz, a spokesman for the Missouri State Patrol. Many roads were already getting several inches of snow an hour, with as many as 20 inches expected in some parts of the state. “We’re still encouraging people not to travel at all if they don’t have to,” Lt. Hotz said.

The massive storms have already forced airports from Dallas to New York to start delaying or canceling flights. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was closed Tuesday morning .

In Chicago, some snow had fallen overnight, but the worst of the storm was expected to hit on Tuesday afternoon. More than 600 flights were already canceled at O’Hare International Airport in advance of the storm, officials said on Tuesday morning.

Hundreds of schools in the Chicago area announced they would close early. Chicago election officials said early voting in the city’s race to replace Mayor Richard M. Daley would be suspended on Wednesday except for at one downtown location. In Springfield, both chambers of the state legislature canceled sessions.

The forecast from the National Weather Service released early Tuesday predicted Chicago would receive as much as 18 inches of snow. The combination of strong winds and heavy snow could cause prolonged power outages, the weather service said.

The storms are proving unmerciful to government budgets, as well. The latest winter storm brings yet another big bill, on top of a lot of other big bills, for all the towns and cities that have to dig out again.

“On a weather map, some people see snowflakes. I see dollar signs,” R. T. Rybak, the mayor of Minneapolis, said Monday as a light snowfall brightened the white mounds lining the city streets.

Not that officials have any choice. The streets have to be cleared, of course, but often with fewer plows and less salt than in years past.

Many cities — New York among them — have already overspent their snow budgets and many more expect this storm to push them into the red. In Minneapolis, a record-setting series of snowstorms in December pushed the city over the snow-removal budget for 2010 by $3.3 million — more than the city spends on pothole repairs for the entire year.

Virg Bernero, mayor of Lansing, Mich., said that the snowstorm came at a “desperate time” for the city and that paying for snow removal would force him to make cuts elsewhere.

But, echoing the warnings of a number of mayors, he said that experience (and an uprising that forced him to make a public apology) has taught him not to skimp when it comes to plowing.

“The snow must be dealt with,” Mr. Bernero said. “The streets must be made safe.”

The expected damage from the storm is likely to take days to determine, but it was poised to deliver to the center of the country an unusually treacherous mix of snow, sleet, ice and high winds, inspiring forecasters to escalate the disaster rhetoric to an audience famously inured to extreme weather.

The cities bracing for the biggest impact include Milwaukee, St. Louis and Chicago, where the National Weather Service predicted more than 18 inches of snow, which would be the most for one storm in at least a decade. It also warned of potentially deadly conditions.

There were warnings for much of the Midwest, too, that high winds could lower visibility so much that plows could not operate, forcing roads to be closed.

“When you hear the word historic come up, you’re a little more concerned,” said R. Mark DeVries, maintenance superintendent with McHenry County Department of Transportation, northwest of Chicago.

“Certainly we haven’t had a storm with this potential in many, many years,” Mr. DeVries said. “But regardless of whether it reaches historic proportions or not, we expect it will be very difficult to work through.”

The Weather Service issued winter storm warnings for 19 states, from New Mexico to Vermont, and blizzard warnings for six Midwestern states, including Missouri where there were predictions of as much as an inch of ice accumulation around St. Louis.

The governors of several states declared emergencies related to the storm. And schools, businesses and government offices throughout the region were closed in advance.

Crews started working in earnest on Monday to get ahead of the mess, and in many cases they were hampered by fewer resources at their disposal. The city of Milwaukee, for example, has significantly cut back on the amount of salt bought.

Public works departments around the nation have been among the hardest hit by budget cuts, with 60 percent of cities and 68 percent of counties reporting reductions — far more than those that reported cutting social services, parks or libraries, according to a survey taken last summer by the National League of Cities.

But a number of city leaders said that they would have to find financing for snow removal — which in Kansas City costs about $150,000 an inch — even if it meant moving money from other worthwhile projects.

“It doesn’t make too much difference what’s in the budget,” said Richard L. Hanneman, former president of the Salt Institute, a trade association.

“If the citizens want the roads cleared, politicians will find a way to clear the roads,” Mr. Hanneman said. “And if they go over budget, they will figure out how to let the grass grow longer or the potholes grow deeper to find the money somehow.”


Monica Davey and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from Chicago.

    Flights Canceled as Midwest Braces for Another Storm, NYT, 1.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/us/02storm.html

This Winter, New York City Is the New Buffalo

January 27, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

There was the recently familiar annoyance — at the buses that did not come, at the thigh-high stoops that had to be shoveled.

There was the unmistakable beauty — the snow-laden trees, the backdrops that Norman Rockwell could not have improved upon.

And there was the nagging question: Is New York City the new Buffalo, where snow — snow on the ground, snow on the roof, snow on the windowsill, snow in the forecast, snow measured with a yardstick, not a mere ruler — is just a fact of everyday life? All snow, all the time.

“I’m so used to it at this point,” said Diana Biederman, a publicist in Manhattan. “What days don’t we have snow?”

And so a fresh sense of snow fatigue settled over a city that has been hit hard in the last few weeks. Nineteen inches of heavy, wet snow fell on Central Park. That was only an inch less than the 20 inches that paralyzed the city a month ago, according to the National Weather Service. Parts of Connecticut and New Jersey got nearly as much, and snowfalls totaled at least a foot from Philadelphia to Boston.

In New York, where the slow response to the Dec. 26 blizzard became a black eye for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other officials, the battle was joined early. The mayor said on Thursday that 1,700 plows had worked overnight and that the city had hired 1,500 people to shovel crosswalks and bus stops.

But the city canceled school — Thursday was the ninth school day lost because of snow since 1978 and the fifth under Mr. Bloomberg — and transit officials suspended bus service until the storm had blown through, something they did not do as the December storm was bearing down and hundreds of buses got stuck in the snow, blocking plows and other traffic.

This time around, the mayor said at a news briefing, several dozen ambulances got stuck in the snow, but relief ambulances arrived quickly to carry patients to hospitals. And while the 911 system was flooded with calls and dispatches were slowed, “no calls ever remained in a queue,” the mayor said.

Transit officials also curtailed subway service when the storm was at its fiercest. Jay H. Walder, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said a few trains were stuck in the snow “for short periods of time,” but in contrast to the post-Christmas storm, few passengers were trapped onboard overnight. A transit spokesman said some remained on a train at the end of the line at Coney Island — they had nowhere else to go, and the heat was on in the train.

Mr. Walder said that the Metro-North Railroad through Westchester County and Connecticut “lost all service” for a while early Thursday. He said the Long Island Rail Road coped with delays during the morning rush as crews cleared station platforms and stairs.

At the airports, delays and cancellations were the order of the morning, though there, too, things were clearing up by the middle of the day.

There were signs that the snow was changing people’s routines. People sent e-mails and text messages about how a snow shovel was their new BFF — even apartment dwellers like Annie Tan, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, bought one. Or they did what Alan Flax, a real estate broker from Forest Hills, Queens, did. He hired someone to help dig out his car, which was in Manhattan, on East Houston Street near Essex Street.

“It seems like an awful lot of snow in a short window,” he said. “Every week or every 10 days, it’s not just a little snow, it’s a lot of snow. It’s got me scratching my head — when did New York City become so snowbound?”

This is now the snowiest January since the National Weather Service started keeping track in 1869, and could end up being the snowiest month ever. So far the January total stands at 36 inches, 8.6 more than in 1925, the previous record-holder.

Tim Morrin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s New York-area office on Long Island, also noted that this was already the sixth-snowiest winter on record, with a total of 56.5 inches. The snowiest was 1995-96, with 75.6 inches.

“And we have all of February and all of March to look forward to,” Mr. Morrin said. “We remain in a pretty cold pattern that would be conducive to more snow.”

Even in January. The Weather Service is calling for more snow, but only a little, by Saturday.

Which will bring New York closer to Buffalo’s total for the winter so far, 61.6 inches.

Steve McLaughlin, a weather service meteorologist there, said measurable snow had been recorded in Buffalo on 39 days.

“We keep getting our inch a day, an inch a day,” he said. “All we do up here is nickel-and-dime it, but we’ll beat you anyway. We have to keep up the reputation.”

Colin Moynihan and Andy Newman contributed reporting.
 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 27, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Port Authority had closed La Guardia airport early on Thursday morning. It was Teterboro Airport that was closed, not La Guardia.

    This Winter, New York City Is the New Buffalo, NYT, 27.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/nyregion/28snow.html

Yet Another Storm Buries the Northeast

January 27, 2011
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN and KATIE ZEZIMA

A two-stage winter storm struck, paused, gathered its breath and delivered a crippling blow to the Northeast early Thursday, dumping more than a foot of snow, closing airports and schools, stranding commuters and shattering January records.

The storm, appearing as a giant white smudge over the Northeast on radar maps, seemed to land hardest in New York City and the surrounding area. Nineteen inches of heavy, wet snow fell on Central Park, tied for the highest total in the region and only an inch less than the 20 inches that paralyzed the city a month ago, according to the National Weather Service. But parts of Connecticut and New Jersey received nearly as much, and snowfalls totaled at least a foot from Boston to Philadelphia.

New York City schools and offices were closed, as were Newark, Teterboro and John F. Kennedy airports. Commuter bus service was suspended throughout New Jersey, Long Island and most of New York City, as hobbled train systems struggled to absorb the overload. The storm created a fresh sense of snow fatigue in a region that has been unusually battered.

Yet in New York City, where the slow municipal response to the Dec. 26 blizzard became a black eye for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and transit officials, things were not as dire as they could have been. Mr. Bloomberg said on the radio Thursday morning that all primary roads had been plowed and some secondary streets were beginning to be cleared.

By suspending bus service in the city, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority avoided a rerun of the December storm, when hundreds of buses got stuck in the snow, blocking plows and other traffic. And unlike a month ago, there did not immediately appear to be any riders stuck overnight on disabled subway trains.

At a 10 a.m. news briefing, Mr. Bloomberg said that while a few ambulances got stuck in the snow, relief ambulances arrived quickly to ferry the ailing to hospitals. And while the 911 system was flooded with calls and dispatches were slowed, “no calls ever remained in a queue,” the mayor said.

This is a dramatically different situation from the December blizzard, when ambulance delays were linked to deaths, hundreds of ambulances got stuck in the snow and 911 calls were not answered for hours. The debacle led the city to adopt a 15-point snow emergency management plan. Mr. Bloomberg said he expected every street in the city to have been plowed by Friday morning and urged drivers to stay off the roads, lest they be towed by the city at their owners’ expense if they get stuck.

The cancellation of school meant that thousands of city high school students scheduled to take the state Regents exam could not do so, but the mayor said: “That’s a problem for the state. We’ll get to it later.”

Even before the storm started walloping the region overnight, the National Weather Service had estimated that more than 37 inches of snow — almost double the winter average — had fallen in Central Park this winter. The overnight storms broke January snowfall records for Central Park, Newark, LaGuardia Airport, Bridgeport and Islip, the Weather Service said Thursday morning.

In addition to the 19 inches in Central Park, the heaviest totals included 19 inches in Clifton, N.J.; 18.5 inches in North Haven, Conn.; 18.9 at Newark airport; and 16.5 inches in Northport, N.Y., on Long Island, the Weather Service said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bloomberg declared a weather emergency. The weather declaration wasn’t the only one that warned of another midwinter mess. The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning through 6 a.m. Thursday for the city, Long Island and parts of northeastern New Jersey. The Weather Service also issued a coastal flood advisory through 5 a.m., warning residents along the coasts in parts of Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island that streets and roadways could experience minor flooding.

The snow hit some regions harder than others. In Washington, D.C., downed power lines left hundreds of thousands of customers without power on Wednesday, and officials were warning residents to keep their cars off the snow-slicked roads. The weather even played havoc with President Obama’s schedule: After returning to Washington from a quick trip to Wisconsin on Wednesday, Mr. Obama’s motorcade spent an hour in rush hour traffic. He was supposed to return to the White House by helicopter, the Associated Press reported, but Marine One was grounded because of the weather.

In Massachusetts, hundreds of schools were closed and yet another commute was snarled by snow. According to the National Weather Service nearly 10 inches of snow fell at Logan Airport as of 7 a.m. Areas south and west of Boston saw the most accumulation, with Milford, Mass., getting 16 inches and North Attleboro, Mass., 13.

Two men had to be rescued from a car inside the parking garage of a Lynn, Mass., commercial building after its roof collapsed early Thursday morning. Both men were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with minor injuries, said Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority was experiencing heavy delays on its train, subway and bus lines, and one branch of the trolley/subway line was shut down because of a switch problem. Logan Airport remained open.

Mr. Judge said about 5,700 people lost power last night, mostly in Southeastern Massachusetts. Power is restored to all but 1,000 people, Mr. Judge said.

The storm rolled in overnight, fortuitous timing for plow operators who could barely keep up with snow that fell at a rate of up to two inches an hour, Mr. Judge said. Having no one on the road and residents who mostly delayed their start times at work made it much easier for crews to clear roadways, though things were plenty sloppy early Thursday morning.

“Those crews were out there dealing with the snow when there weren’t as many people on the road,” Mr. Judge said. “The reason it probably wasn’t in as good of shape this morning is when it’s coming down an inch an hour the crews can stay on top of it, and many times it was coming down two inches an hour. They do a sweep, come back and they’re butting their heads against the wall.”

Snowfall — and snow budgets — are far above the average for this time of year, but there is still plenty of winter left.

“I guess the average for the year for the Greater Boston area is around 40 inches, and now we’re at about 60,” Mr. Judge said. “We’re about halfway there to get to the record, which is really scary when you think about it.”

Back in New York, Mr. Bloomberg’s weather-emergency declaration — which is not the same as a snow emergency — meant that alternate-side parking and parking-meter payments were being suspended immediately. So were garbage pickups, at least “until further notice,” according to the declaration.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 27, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Port Authority had closed
La Guardia airport early on Thursday morning. It was Teterboro Airport that was closed, not La Guardia.

    Yet Another Storm Buries the Northeast, NYT, 27.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/nyregion/28snow.html

Judy Bonds, an Enemy of Mountaintop Coal Mining, Dies at 58

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Ankle deep in the stream by the house where his coal-mining family had lived for generations, Judy Bonds’s 6-year-old grandson, Andrew, scooped up fistfuls of dead fish one day back in 1996.

“What’s wrong with these fish?” he asked.

“I knew something was very, very wrong,” Ms. Bonds told Sierra magazine in 2003. “So I began to open my eyes and pay attention.”

Ms. Bonds soon discovered that the fish had been poisoned by debris from the mines in the mountains above the West Virginia hollow where her family had lived since early last century. Within six years, she and her Marfork Hollow neighbors had to abandon their homes.

That day in the stream, Ms. Bonds found her mission. Since then, thousands of people — neighbors, environmental activists, politicians, mining company officials, industry regulators and crowds at the rallies she organized — have heard from the short, round-faced woman known as the godmother of the movement to stop mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Ms. Bonds died of cancer — it had spread from her lungs — on Jan. 3 in Charleston, W.Va., at age 58, said Vernon Haltom, who leads the Coal River Mountain Watch, an advocacy group. He and Ms. Bonds had been its co-directors since 2007.

Based in a former post office in Whitesville, W.Va., the organization is dedicated to banning the mining process by which mountaintops are blasted off to expose coal seams, with tons of loose rock cascading into adjacent valleys and carbon dioxide billowing into the atmosphere.

The tumbling rock — called valley fills — clogs streams and rivers and leaches chemicals, previously sealed underground, into water systems.

“There are many things we ought to do to deal with climate change,” James E. Hansen, a climatologist at NASA and Columbia University, said Thursday, “but stopping mountaintop-removal is the place to start. Coal contributes the most carbon dioxide of any energy source.” Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun and prevents it from escaping the atmosphere.

In 2001, three years after she joined Coal River Mountain Watch as a volunteer, Ms. Bonds became the organization’s $12,000-a-year outreach director, a position she accepted after working as a waitress, then manager, at a Pizza Hut while a single mother.

In her new job, she began staging protest rallies, testifying at regulatory hearings, filing lawsuits, picketing mining company stockholders’ meetings, organizing letter-writing campaigns. A primary target was the Massey Energy Company, which owned the mines around Marfork Hollow and other Appalachian communities. Last April, an explosion at the Massey Company’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., killed 29 miners in what was the nation’s worst mining disaster in 40 years.

“She became the voice for communities around the country fighting mountaintop-removal,” Mr. Haltom said of Ms. Bonds. “She spoke to audiences of one person to 6,000.”

One of her standard lines was, “Stop poisoning our babies.”

In 2003 Ms. Bonds received the Goldman Environmental Prize, an annual $150,000 prize that goes to unrecognized “grass-roots environmental heroes.”

“Her dedication and success as an activist and organizer have made her one of the nation’s leading community activists confronting an industry practice that has been called ‘strip mining on steroids,’ ” the Goldman Foundation said.

For years, Ms. Bonds had envisioned a “thousand-hillbilly march” in Washington. That wish was fulfilled last September, when about 2,000 people joined what was called the Appalachia Rising, leading to the arrest of about 100 protesters outside the White House. But by then she was too ill to join the march.

Julia (she preferred to be called Judy) Belle Thompson was born on Aug. 27, 1952, one of nine children of Oliver and Sarah Thompson. Her father stopped working in the mines at 65 and soon died of black lung disease. Besides her grandson, she is survived by her daughter, Lisa Henderson; two brothers, Ernie and Paul; and three sisters, Wanda Webb, Marilyn Thompson and Jamie Adkins.

Danger came with Ms. Bonds’s activism: phone threats, insults, physical attacks.

“She was walking right behind me when she got belted by a burly miner’s wife,” said Dr. Hansen, who in June 2009 joined a march at Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, W.Va., to protest its proximity to a coal-processing silo and a slurry dam, parts of a 2,000-acre mountaintop-removal site.

“She fought to get a safe new school for the kids,” Mr. Haltom said. “In the old one, the kids breathe coal dust in class.”

But last April, he continued, “everything came together: a new school at a safe location about 10 miles up the road. The kids will start attending class there in the fall of 2012.”

    Judy Bonds, an Enemy of Mountaintop Coal Mining, Dies at 58, NYT, 15.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16bonds.html

Snowfall Blankets Region and Snarls Flights

January 11, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

A ferocious winter storm that tore across the southeastern seaboard slammed into New York City overnight, forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights and threatening train, bus and rail service for millions of commuters across the region Wednesday.

The giant amoeba-shaped snowstorm officially touched down in Central Park between 8:30 and 9 p.m. Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. But hours earlier, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had already declared a weather emergency, something he did not do during the Dec. 26 and 27 blizzard that paralyzed the city with 20 inches of snow.

By the time the storm started pummeling the region, hundreds of flights throughout the three major New York airports had been canceled, and nearly every domestic flight through Wednesday afternoon — thousands — had been scrubbed. Service on some subway lines, like the B train, was suspended earlier than usual Tuesday night, and Long Island Railroad officials said they had canceled some trains Wednesday morning and would replace them with buses. Metro North scaled back to a Sunday schedule.

With the arrival of snow in New York and the unusually severe storm in the South — which dumped more than a foot of snow in some areas — the National Weather Service said an unusual nationwide occurrence had taken place. There was now snow on the ground in every single one of the 50 states — including Hawaii, which had snowfall on one of its volcanoes — except for Florida. New York City was also well on its way to surpassing the 22.4 inches of snowfall in a normal season, with 21.8 inches as of Tuesday, said Christopher Vaccaro, a weather service spokesman.

Many New York City streets - even busy Manhattan thoroughfares like 34th Street - were a slippery mess Wednesday morning, with cabs slowly inching along to avoid accidents. Dozens of suburban school districts decided to shut down as the force of the storm became apparent.

Unlike his reaction to the previous blizzard, Mayor Bloomberg took major steps to show that the city was prepared for the worst. But his declaration of a weather emergency is not the same as a snow emergency, which would have required residents to remove their cars from about 300 designated routes. Instead, the city said New Yorkers could leave their cars on the streets, but by the curb, not in the traffic lanes. The declaration said that any vehicles “found to be blocking roadways or impeding the ability to plow streets” would be towed at the owners’ expense.

The declaration was issued even though the snowstorm, the powerful product of a combination of the weather systems that had already disrupted daily routines in the South and the Midwest, had not yet reached the city.

AccuWeather said it expected 6 to 12 inches here. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was preparing for as much as 14 inches.

Hours before the declaration, Mr. Bloomberg promised a better-coordinated response than the laggardly one that followed the blizzard. The mayor said the city had made significant changes to emergency procedures since then.

“We recognize that we did not do the job that New Yorkers rightly expect of us in the last storm,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall. “We intend to make sure that does not happen again.”

The mayor said the decision about whether to close the city’s public schools on Wednesday would not be made until 5 a.m.

The city lined up the same street-clearing force that was left standing by on Friday, when less than two inches of snow fell in Central Park. Officials said 365 salt spreaders and 1,700 plows were ready to go. Some were to wait out the storm not at their depots but in the neighborhoods they were to clear.

There were signs that the Sanitation Department started fending off the snow before it arrived, at least where plows were slow to show last month. Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz, a Democrat from Queens, said that by 2 p.m. Tuesday, the city had salted many streets in her district, which includes Forest Hills, Rego Park and Kew Gardens,

The city also announced plans to send workers to shovel snow at intersections as soon as streets were plowed, and it began using social networking sites to advertise for more help. The New York City Housing Authority sent a message on Twitter that said: “Turn a snow day into a payday. The city is looking for snow removal help. Apply now.” It contained a link to a page that said the city would pay $12 an hour, which would increase to $18 an hour after 40 hours.

The city’s subway, bus and rail networks pledged to run regular service on Wednesday morning, but all prepared for service changes. Officials made plans to halt express service on some subway lines on Tuesday night to move trains into tunnels and out of the snow for the night.

Mr. Bloomberg faced criticism for not declaring an emergency as the blizzard bore down last month. His top aides have since apologized, saying a snow emergency declaration probably would have improved the response. On Tuesday, officials said the mayor had declared a weather emergency because it would give them more flexibility than a snow emergency.

Last-minute shoppers jammed the aisles at some markets. Sandy Miller, who ventured into Citarella, a market on Third Avenue near 75th Street in Manhattan, said, “People were buying as if this storm is going to prevent them from eating for the next four days.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Michael M. Grynbaum, Javier C. Hernandez and Liz Robbins.

    Snowfall Blankets Region and Snarls Flights, NYT, 11.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/nyregion/12snow.html

The Verdict on the Spill

January 11, 2011
The New York Times

The most important new message contained in the final report of the presidential commission investigating the gulf oil spill is aimed squarely at Congress: If lawmakers hope to win popular support for ramped-up oil drilling in America’s coastal waters then they must make sure that every possible precaution is taken to reduce the chances of another catastrophe like the spill.

The question is whether the newly constituted Congress is in a mood to listen. What the commission is asking for are tough new rules and money to strengthen federal oversight at a time when the House is controlled by politicians who broadly oppose new spending and seem hostile to regulation of any sort.

Yet Congress must act, and President Obama should use some of what leverage he has in this new political alignment to see that it does. As the commission co-chairman, Bob Graham, noted, without dramatic action another deep-water disaster will inevitably occur, leaving the public to “wonder why Congress, the administration and industry stood by and did nothing.”

The commission’s 380-page report is the most exhaustive accounting so far of what happened on the Deepwater Horizon. As it forecast in a preliminary summary, the commission blames the accident largely on poor decisions and other “management failures” by three companies involved: BP, Transocean and Halliburton.

It also strongly reinforces its earlier indictments of industry for failing to prepare adequate response plans and of government regulators for allowing themselves to be captured by an industry they were meant to oversee.

What’s new are the recommendations. All are sound, and most will require Congressional help.

SAFETY The commission recommended much tougher rules governing basic drilling issues like well design and vital equipment like blowout preventers. Some of these have already been put in place by the Interior Department. More broadly, it urged Congress to create an independent safety agency within the department free of any political influence and with enforcement authority to oversee all aspects of offshore drilling.

FINANCING Though it did not specify a figure, the commission implored Congress to provide “adequate and predictable” financing for regulatory oversight. It noted that money for federal regulators had remained static for 20 years while the risks associated with drilling increased dramatically as rigs moved into deeper and deeper waters.

LIABILITY The commission noted that the present $75 million liability cap for individual accidents is hardly enough to deter sloppy behavior. It recommended a much higher figure, without identifying one.

SCIENCE The Deepwater Horizon explosion revealed that both industry and federal regulators had given environmental reviews short shrift. The commission recommends that Congress amend the various laws governing offshore drilling to make sure that government scientists and fish and wildlife experts are consulted at every step of the process — from the leasing of areas for exploration to the actual drilling of individual wells.

RESTORATION Congress is urged to dedicate 80 percent of the penalties assessed under the Clean Water Act — they could be as high as $20 billion — to restoring the fragile Mississippi Delta ecosystem. The commission’s other co-chairman, William Reilly, noted that the delta had been badly degraded over the years and “is likely to continue silently washing away unless decisive action is taken.”

This by no means exhausts the commission’s list of useful ideas. The House of Representatives endorsed several of them in an oil bill it passed last year (the Senate did nothing). Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said that he would hold hearings and introduce an even stronger bill this year. We wish him well — and urge Mr. Obama to support him.

    The Verdict on the Spill, NYT, 11.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/opinion/12wed1.html

Failure in the Gulf

January 6, 2011
The New York Times

The document released Wednesday by the presidential commission investigating last spring’s oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is a riveting and chilling indictment of “systemic failures” throughout the oil business and of the federal agencies that allowed themselves to be captured by the people they were supposed to regulate.

The commission will offer specific recommendations for reform in its full report next Tuesday. But the chapter it decided to release early is, by itself, a powerful summons to the Obama administration to press rapidly forward with stronger regulations, and to the industry as a whole to behave far more responsibly than it has.

Another tragedy like the one in the Gulf of Mexico could well occur, the report suggests, unless there is “significant reform in both industry practices and government policies.”

The panel traced the blowout to three main factors:

MANAGERIAL FOUL-UPS: The most significant failure and “root cause” of the blowout was a seemingly endless series of fateful missteps and oversights by BP and its partners — Transocean and Halliburton — that, in retrospect, could have been avoided. These decisions included not installing enough devices to stabilize the well, not waiting for the results of tests on the foam used to seal the well, and ignoring the results of an important pressure test. Taken together, these and other blunders allowed gases to enter the well and rise with explosive and ultimately disastrous force to the drilling rig.

SYSTEMIC FAILURE: Though BP in particular has been accused of putting profit before safety, the report avoided linking any individual decision to cost considerations. Even so, BP and its partners repeatedly chose the riskier, speedier course instead of a slower and safer alternative. As Bob Graham, the commission co-chairman, noted in a separate statement, “This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first.”

The report further asserted that this risk-taking was not unique to BP or its partners in the well, that the blowout was “not the product of a series of aberrational decisions” made by a rogue company, but, instead, reflected an industrywide proclivity for risky behavior. “Do we have a single company, BP, that blundered with fatal consequences,” asked the other co-chairman, William Reilly, “or a more pervasive problem of a complacent industry?” Sadly, Mr. Reilly said, it is the latter.

REGULATORY WEAKNESS: As expected, the panel took federal regulators in the old Minerals Management Service to task for a range of mistakes, like rubber-stamping drilling permits and failing to oversee operations on the rig. These failures are hardly new. For years, the service has had neither the will nor the resources to police the industry.

Since the blowout, the Obama administration has reorganized the regulatory apparatus to give it greater independence. It has also issued and is now enforcing specific safety regulations and increased surveillance on individual rigs. All this is welcome, but the administration has a long way to go. What is at issue here is nothing less than remaking the culture of an entire industry.

    Failure in the Gulf, NT, 6.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/opinion/07fri1.html