Comments on: Wasilla’s Toxic Cloud and Why We Need ‘the Feds.’

By: Marie

Marie — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:43:51 +0000

http://www.paltelegraph.com/entertainment/health/1435-experts-depleted-uranium-creates-problems-for-years-after-initial-impact

Try to clean up this mess or is this an operation of world depopulation: uk, usa, and Israel. World War 3 will be arriving in the air soon.

Know anyone coming back from Irag, or any middle east country have them tested, asap.

By: Anne

Anne — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:23:57 +0000

Growing up, I thought all environmentalist were bad.
After a laundry list of environmental disasters, I realized they could be right…rarely right.
When unable to look away from the coverage of environmental, economic and social disaster in our own back yard, I realized we were living through the “impossibly unlikely & ultimately completly underestimated” disaster the environmentists had predicted.
The medical specialist who diagnosed me with an incurable degenerative illness, dismissed my claim I lived my life in “ecologically pristine Alaska.” He advised me drinking well water (arsenic) or playing near the train tracks(herbicides), or the over zealous application of pesticides were potential sources of neurotoxin exposure.

By: 22 miles

22 miles — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:03:34 +0000

Elaine Says:
How many children born with Down syndrome and other birth defects in this area? How many cases of leukemia and other kinds of cancer?

Good questions. I noticed from a few contacts that alcohol and drugs are accepted rights of passage and integral to large parts of the underage community of the area. They have babies and many marry young. I’ve tried to find obituiaries about babies and young adults that suddenly die. It looks like the record keepers of the area are slackers. I have no way to tell if more babies suddenly die there or why. It is questionable why so many do die. If the community does not want to have accurate and open record keeping it looks like we will never know. I live in a larger area and know many teens and young adults. I don’t know of any babies that die like I’ve read about in the Wasilla area. Since these are teens that look like they have serious alchol and drug abuse, I’ve guessed that was what poisons them.
P.S.: Wanted to add great post!

By: 22 miles

22 miles — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:56:05 +0000

Elaine Says:
How many children born with Down syndrome and other birth defects in this area? How many cases of leukemia and other kinds of cancer?

By: lysistrata

lysistrata — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:03:42 +0000

@99 – Very interesting experience. Sometimes I think all laws should include “sunset” provisions, meaning that they expire after a certain length of time. Ideally, it forces the lawmakers to take a second look at the issue, consider what’s worked and what needs changing, and refine the process. Especially environmental laws, where the science and technology are constantly developing. But the downside is that it just provides more opportunity for special interest money to distort the process, and we’ve all seen how special interests can infect our environmental protection systems over the last eight years.

By: Alaska Pi

Alaska Pi — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:48:55 +0000

9 different folks) = (different folks )
when sticky shift key and poor proofreading are corrected for…

By: Alaska Pi

Alaska Pi — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:47:04 +0000

@97 lysistrata
” It’s like we started from a very simple idea (”Don’t mess in other peoples’ backyards”), but this idea has metastasized into volumes of rules and regulations defining exactly what “messing” is, whose backyard counts, and precisely what amounts of what pollutants are ok before you’ve created a mess”
————–
I was a water treatment operator for 11 ‘non- community’ systems when the Clean Drinking Water Act became law. The early days after the legislation were marked by lots of education from and co-operative collaboration and real assistance to help get those systems in compliance with health officials.
Within a few short years the general tenor of that relationship shifted to the stasis which affects far too many sensible ideas a few years into a project.

Several attempts on my part to do an end-run around those who held the purse strings on the water systems and were dragging their feet on addressing some last lingering serious problems resulted in less than satisfactory answers from officials 9 different folks than the original brigade) on the order of- “do you realize YOU could lose YOUR license for these continued violations? ”
Of course I realized that! Duh.
And found a law which focussed more and more on the status of my license WITHOUT regard to the people who made the decisions I had to work within was certainly flawed.

I spent months,somewhere along the way, on and off, reading the testimony to Congress by water industry folks which was used to develop the Act and you are ENTIRELY correct about the definition, rules making thingy! While it would be foolish to expect Congress or our own Legs to become experts on everything they are called on to regulate, I think we are way overdue for a better way of vetting industry info used in developing laws, quicker returns to issues to see if we are doing what we said we wanted to, AND leaving options open for court remedy at the everyday person level.
IF we are truly a nation of laws, we need to be ready to fix em when they don’t work!
And- I agree with AKM, that everyday folks need to step up to the plate and be part of the solution…wasting and throwing around perfectly good tea bags doesn’t elect better Legs…

By: scout

scout — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:03:11 +0000

AKM, I think it is James (not John) and Nancy Oliver.

By: lysistrata

lysistrata — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:45:34 +0000

@94 – Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you’ve illustrated the madness that is the administrative state. “Tangled mess” is exactly right. It’s like we started from a very simple idea (”Don’t mess in other peoples’ backyards”), but this idea has metastasized into volumes of rules and regulations defining exactly what “messing” is, whose backyard counts, and precisely what amounts of what pollutants are ok before you’ve created a mess. Which is what makes me think that we’re much further from the goal of actually protecting our environment than we were when the idea was simple.

By: lysistrata

lysistrata — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:37:30 +0000

@93 – It’s a minor distinction. Lawyers know anybody can sue for anything; winning is a different matter. As long as EPA follows the rules Congress sets up, it is acting legally and a lawsuit will go nowhere. If Congress sets up lousy rules that don’t protect us, our only recourse is to elect new legislators and demand that they change the rules. Talk about a slow way to combat pollution …