History > 2013 > USA > Nature / Weather / Environment (III)

Poison Gas Kills Eight Left in Dark

After Storm

December 25, 2013
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

With downed power lines forcing hundreds of thousands to spend Christmas without electricity, ice storms that raged through the Northeast and the Midwest continued to have a deadly effect as carbon monoxide given off by gasoline-powered generators killed three Americans and five Canadians, officials said.

In Maine and Vermont, where state authorities described the ice storm as the worst since 1998, there were no deaths from falling tree limbs or fallen power lines. But each state reported one death from carbon monoxide from a generator run after power was lost.

The authorities reported a similar fatality in Michigan, and at least five people in eastern Canada were reported to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Many others in those places who used generators or grills to heat homes also fell ill from the toxic, but odorless, gas.

“It’s a real problem, a silent killer,” said Joe Flynn, Vermont’s director of emergency management and homeland security. The death in Vermont occurred on Monday after a man set up a generator outside his home but near a window that drew the gas inside, Mr. Flynn said. Four other Vermont residents who lost power also fell ill from what was believed to be carbon monoxide.

In Knox, Me., a 50-year-old man woke up early Tuesday morning, went to his garage to refuel a generator that had kept his family warm that night, and collapsed and died.

“He was overcome within minutes from the fumes that had built up overnight,” said Steve McCausland, the spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety. He and other officials urged people using generators to leave them outside their homes and garages and well away from windows.

Twenty-four deaths in the United States and Canada have been linked to the storms since last weekend, according to The Associated Press. Five people were killed in Canada in car crashes, while five died in Kentucky on Sunday after they were trapped by floodwaters, according to officials there.

The weather has complicated repairs to power lines. Freezing temperatures have persisted across much of the northern United States, and the National Weather Service said more snow would fall in Michigan and Maine on Thursday. Yet despite cold that kept a thick layer of ice on transmission lines, power companies reported progress in restoring electricity.

In Michigan, 18,000 customers of DTE Energy were without power on Wednesday, down from 49,000 on Tuesday evening. Another large Michigan utility, Consumers Energy, said 118,000 customers remained without power, down from 149,000 a day earlier. The region around Flint was hit especially hard.

At the worst point, 23,000 customers in Vermont were without power, but by Wednesday that was cut to about 1,600, Mr. Flynn said.

The Central Maine Power Company said 45,000 customers did not have electricity on Wednesday afternoon, but officials were working to lower that number to 30,000 by day’s end. At the worst point, 87,000 were without power. The utility, which has 850 employees, rushed in so many crews from outside the state that by Wednesday 1,800 people were working to fix damage, said John Carroll, a company spokesman.

Some towns in Maine lost nearly all their power, including Pittston, where Tim Marks, who serves in the State House of Representatives, said that when he looked out his window on Christmas morning, an inch of ice still coated everything he saw. Neighbors were looking after one another, checking up on people and swapping generators. But Mr. Marks, a deer hunter, worried how wildlife could survive a long period of coated ice on the ends of low-hanging trees and shrubs.

“I don’t know how they can eat anything,” he said. “They can’t paw the ground, and the buds are covered with ice.”

    Poison Gas Kills Eight Left in Dark After Storm, NYT, 25.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/us/
    carbon-monoxide-causes-fatalities-after-power-outage.html

Eastern States

Press Midwest to Improve Air

December 9, 2013
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — In a battle that pits the East Coast against the Midwest over the winds that carry dirty air from coal plants, the governors of eight Northeastern states plan to petition the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to force tighter air pollution regulations on nine Rust Belt and Appalachian states.

The East Coast states, including New York and Connecticut, have for more than 15 years been subject to stricter air pollution requirements than many other parts of the country. Their governors have long criticized the Appalachian and Rust Belt states, including Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan, for their more lenient rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, factories and tailpipes — allowing those economies to profit from cheap energy while their belched soot and smog are carried on the prevailing winds that blow across the United States.

All the governors on the petition are Democrats. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican and a potential presidential candidate in 2016, has not signed it.

The petition comes the day before the Supreme Court is to hear arguments to determine the fate of a related E.P.A. regulation known as the “good neighbor” rule. The regulation, officially called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, would force states with coal pollution that wafts across state lines to rein in soot and smog, either by installing costly pollution control technology or by shutting the power plants.

Even if the regulation is upheld, the Eastern governors are seeking stronger constraints on pollution from the Midwest and Rust Belt states.

The Obama administration issued the “good neighbor” rule, which would apply chiefly to power plants in 27 states east of Nebraska, half of the country, in 2011, but the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck it down, ruling that the E.P.A. had not followed the Clean Air Act when it calculated how to assign responsibility for cross-state air pollution. The rule is part of President Obama’s growing effort to use E.P.A. regulations to crack down on coal pollution.

In the case before the Supreme Court, the E.P.A. argues that the cross-state air rule, which it is required to issue under the Clean Air Act of 1990, is necessary to protect the health and environment of downwind states. The utilities and 15 states on the other side argue that the rule, as written by the Obama administration E.P.A., gives the agency too much regulatory authority and places an unfair economic burden on the states.

The Supreme Court is allowing 90 minutes to listen to arguments, rather than the traditional 60 minutes, signaling that the justices have a particularly keen interest in the case.

Like the petition from the Northeastern governors, the court case reflects the growing anger of East Coast officials against the Appalachian states that mine coal and the Rust Belt states that burn it to fuel their power plants and factories. Coal emissions are the chief cause of global warming and are linked to many health risks, including asthma and lung disease.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, who is leading the effort by East Coast governors to crack down on out-of-state pollution, called it a “front-burner issue” for his administration.

“I care about this because it’s put Connecticut at an economic disadvantage,” Mr. Malloy said in an interview. “We’re paying a lot of money to remove these compounds from the air. That money is reflected in higher energy costs. We’re more than willing to pay that, but the states we’re petitioning should have to follow the same rules.”

Mr. Malloy said that more than half the pollution in Connecticut was from outside the state and that it was lowering the life expectancy of Connecticut residents with heart disease or asthma. “They’re getting away with murder,” Mr. Malloy said of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Only it’s in our state, not theirs.”

Judging by history, environmental advocates said the governors’ petition had a good chance of success. In 2000, for example, the E.P.A. granted petitions from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania to require 12 states, including Ohio and Indiana, to control nitrogen emissions from nearly 400 large coal- and gas-fired power plants.

In the last three years, Republicans and the coal industry have campaigned aggressively against the E.P.A. regulations as they have accused Mr. Obama of waging a “war on coal.”

Across the Midwest, many lawmakers see the regulations as a serious economic threat. Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said that the cross-state air rule will force families to face “the threat of higher power bills, less reliability and job losses.”

Murray Energy Corporation, an Ohio-based coal company, is among the parties suing the E.P.A. in the Supreme Court. Gary Broadbent, a spokesman for the company, called the cross-state air rule “absolutely irrational, exorbitantly expensive,” and said it “would kill thousands of jobs, with no environmental benefit whatsoever.”

The Northeast has long had some of the nation’s dirtiest air. In the 1970s and 1980s, East Coast pollution was produced largely by dense cities and busy highways, particularly Interstate 95. A 1990 clean-air law placed tight regional restrictions on pollution from ozone, a primary contributor to smog, on the New England states as well as on New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and the metropolitan area of Washington.

But East Coast governors say that after a decade of cleaning up their air — by, for example, putting “scrubbers” on smokestacks and requiring vehicle emissions tests, which are not mandatory in many other parts of the country — they have squeezed all the pollution they can out of their economies. While Northeastern air is often still so polluted that it violates federal law, the governors say that is because of a problem they cannot control: the wind pattern across the continental United States that typically blows from west to east.

At the same time, Midwestern states enjoy the benefits of fresh air blown in from the Mountain West. E.P.A. data cited in briefs for the Supreme Court case shows that in many parts of Eastern states, half or more of the smog and toxic air pollution originates from out of state. The briefs say, for example, that 93 percent of the ozone pollution in New Haven, Conn., originates from out of state.

The soot, smog and toxic chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that spew from smokestacks and tailpipes are linked to severe health risks. The E.P.A. estimates that the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule would prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 19,000 cases of acute bronchitis, 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 1.8 million sick days a year.

The E.P.A. also estimates that the rule would cost businesses $800 million annually because of the expense of installing smokestack scrubber technology and shutting the dirtiest coal plants. That burden would be borne disproportionately by the Rust Belt states, which would have to modify their coal plants. Ohio, for example, gets 78 percent of its electricity from burning coal. Coal is responsible for 83 percent of the electricity in Indiana and 93 percent of the electricity in Kentucky.

Coal industry advocates say that adding new regulations to those states would not make a difference to air quality on the East Coast.

“It’s been very convenient for Northeastern states to blame their ozone problem on Midwestern power plants, but they’re a very small part of the problem,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an assistant administrator for the E.P.A. during the administration of George W. Bush who now lobbies on behalf of coal companies. “It mostly comes from all those vehicles and businesses along the Eastern Seaboard.”

    Eastern States Press Midwest to Improve Air, NYT, 9.12.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/us/
    politics/eastern-states-press-midwest-to-improve-air.html

Scores of Tornadoes Slam Midwest States

November 17, 2013
The New York Times
By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

Severe storms moved through the Midwest on Sunday, leveling towns, killing at least five people in Illinois and injuring dozens more, and causing thousands of power failures across the region.

Officials warned of a fast-moving, deadly storm system on Sunday morning and issued tornado watches throughout the day for wide areas of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. By the time the storm had passed on Sunday evening, tornadoes — scores of them, according to the National Weather Service — had left paths of destruction.

Homes were leveled and trees shredded in Washington, Ill., and nearby farms were turned upside down, with farm equipment dotting the landscape.

Weather officials were uncertain just how many confirmed tornadoes might have hit the region. But as of Sunday evening, the National Weather Service website listed reports of at least 77 — most of them in Illinois — although officials cautioned that in some cases there may have been multiple reports on the same storm.

At least five deaths were reported by Sunday evening. An 80-year-old man and his 78-year-old sister were killed when a tornado struck their farm outside New Minden, Ill., about 50 miles east of St. Louis. The man was found in a field about 100 yards from the home, and the woman was found under a pile of rubble, according to the Washington County coroner’s office.

A third person was killed in Washington, Ill., one of the hardest-hit towns, and two others were killed in Massac County in Southern Illinois, according to Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. The details of the deaths were not available late Sunday.

Dozens of people were also injured in the town, which has 15,000 residents and is about halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. At least 35 people were taken to a hospital with injuries, according to a statement from OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria. There was also extensive damage in the nearby city of Pekin, which has about 34,000 people.

In Indiana, tornadoes and storm damage were reported in 12 counties, according to Gov. Mike Pence. In Missouri, the utility company Ameren reported that more than 35,000 customers had lost power, mostly in the St. Louis area.

Officials said a tornado also struck Coal City, Ill., about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. At least 100 buildings there were damaged and at least four people were injured, according to local media reports.

Storms also caused extensive damage in East Peoria, officials said.

Members of the Illinois National Guard and other emergency rescue teams were sent to the towns to help with search and recovery operations. Whole neighborhoods in Washington were destroyed, according to Tyler Gee, an alderman on the City Council.

“I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn’t even tell what street I was on,” Mr. Gee told the radio station WBBM in Chicago. “It just completely flattened some of the neighborhoods here in town, hundreds of homes.”

Photographs from the town showed overturned cars and piles of debris where homes once stood. The National Guard also sent 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington, and the American Red Cross in central Illinois sent volunteers to set up shelters and distribute water and food.

Washington town officials implemented an overnight curfew on Sunday starting at 6 p.m., said Ms. Arnold of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. Officials were worried about safety because of the debris and downed power lines, she said.

There were several shelters for evacuees, she said, including one at the Crossroads United Methodist Church in Washington.

In Roanoke, Ill., about 15 miles east of Washington, one family was at church on Sunday when a tornado hit their farm. Tony Johnson of Germantown Hills said he arrived at his niece’s farm about 30 minutes after the tornado passed and found that it had destroyed everything in its path. His niece and her husband and three children were not home when the storm hit, he said.

“The house is gone, everything is leveled,” Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview. “There is nothing that is usable. Their trucks were tossed around like toys.”

Soon, neighbors started arriving to help the family sift through the rubble, he said.

“You get that in the heartland for sure,” he said. “There were probably 100 people there to help — it was just amazing.”

On Sunday evening, officials were still trying to assess the damage. Telephone lines in the most devastated towns were not working, making it difficult to get more information, said Patti Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.

Thunderstorms and strong winds also caused problems in Chicago, disrupting power and hundreds of flights and delaying a National Football League game.

Fans attending the afternoon football game at Soldier Field were asked to leave the stands and take shelter during the first quarter of the Bears’ game against the Baltimore Ravens. The game was suspended for almost two hours before play resumed, and the Bears finished with a victory.

More than 230 flights were canceled at O’Hare International Airport because of the weather, and many other flights were delayed. Flights were also delayed at Midway Airport in Chicago.

Wind gusts reached as high as 75 miles per hour in the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service.

The storm caused widespread power failures in Chicago and nearby suburbs. There were at least 89,000 reported losses of power in Northern Illinois, according to ComEd, the utility company that serves the city.

    Scores of Tornadoes Slam Midwest States, NYT, 17.1.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/us/severe-storms-batter-central-illinois.html

Arizona Utility

Tries Storing Solar Energy

for Use in the Dark

October 17, 2013
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

When it snowed in Flagstaff, Ariz., recently, thousands of people woke up and turned up their electric heating, and Arizona Public Service saw electricity demand reach a morning peak. To meet the demand, the company used the previous afternoon’s sunshine.

In a closely watched new solar project called Solana, the energy is gathered in a three-square-mile patch of desert bulldozed flat near Gila Bend, about 50 miles southwest of Phoenix. A sprawling network of parabolic mirrors focuses the sun’s energy on black-painted pipes, which carry the heat to huge tanks of molten salt. When the sun has set, the plant can draw heat back out of the molten salt to continue making steam and electricity.

The emerging technology is one way that the utility industry is trying to make electricity from the sun available even when it is not shining, overcoming one of the major shortcomings of solar power.

“We’re going to care more and more about that as time goes on,” said Brad Albert the utility’s general manager of resource management, in a telephone interview.

The issue has also caught the attention of regulators. In California, the Public Utilities Commission approved a rule on Thursday that will require the state’s three big investor-owned utilities and other electric industry players to install storage by 2024.

“The impetus to require storage is definitely inspired by the success of solar,” said Robert Gibson, vice president of the Solar Electric Power Association, a nonprofit educational group. “Hopefully the California initiative is going to kick-start this and bring down costs,” he said. Battery makers have predicted progress, he said, adding that cost-effective storage “has always been a few years out.”

Like other utilities, Arizona Public Service faces its biggest challenge in the early morning, before the sun is high enough to hit conventional solar panels, the kind installed on rooftops to turn sunlight into electric current. Arizona and, increasingly, California see the same problem in the evening, when the sun is too low for the panels to work, just as thousands of people are returning home and workplaces are still humming. Solar panels can help utilities meet afternoon peaks, but not morning or evening ones; by 6 p.m., panels are producing only about half their maximum, even if they are installed on tracking devices that tilt the panels to follow the sun across the sky.

Solana is a $2-billion project built with a $1.45 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. Close behind is the Ivanpah project in California. It uses a field of mirrors the size of garage doors, mounted on thousands of pillars, to focus the sun’s light on a tower with a tank painted black. Engineers say that design could incorporate storage efficiently, because the tank reaches very high temperatures. That plant will enter commercial operation by the end of October.

Solana can gather heat roughly 1.75 times as fast as its steam turbines can use it, so on a sunny day the plant is turning out power steadily even if clouds obscure the sun. Its capacity is about six hours. Its production, up to 280 megawatts, can be throttled back at hours when photovoltaic cells are churning out current, or at night when demand is low.

“There will be a trend towards storage as we see more variable renewables like photovoltaics and wind being added to the grid,” said Cara S. Libby, the project manager for solar research at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility organization in Palo Alto, Calif. The flexibility of such a system gets more important as a utility adds higher volumes of inflexible renewables, she said.

Thermal storage does not have to be storing heat. Calmac, based in Fair Lawn, N.J., installs systems that use off-peak electricity to make ice, and then uses the ice to run air-conditioners. Mark MacCracken, the chief executive, said he installed a system in Rockefeller Center that could reduce the center’s energy demand by one megawatt for six hours. Some California companies will meet the new storage requirement with ice systems, he said.

Solana is not the first renewable energy plant with storage; several have added banks of electric batteries. But battery storage is so expensive that these have been used mostly to smooth the output of the plant, not to store huge amounts overnight.

Batteries are expensive and have a limited lifetime. They are more economical in a car, where they help electricity substitute for something more expensive, like gasoline. But for utilities, they are nowhere near cheap enough to justify using them to avoid buying high-priced, late-afternoon electricity.

Storing energy as heat, instead of as electricity, is substantially cheaper. But it adds mechanical inefficiency, because the heat has to be transferred from oil to salt to water, losing a bit each time, and adding cost.

Arizona has set a goal of 15 percent renewable energy by 2025, said Steven Gotfried, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service, and Solana will produce about 3 percent of what the utility sells.

In California, BrightSource Energy, the company behind Ivanpah, is planning to install storage on future projects, said Joseph F. Desmond, senior vice president of marketing.

“As you add more photovoltaic to the grid, it’s shifting the net peak to later in the day,” he said. And that improves the value of “projects that can deliver energy in those later hours.”

This article has been revised

to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled

the surname of a spokesman for Arizona Public Service.

His name is Steven Gotfried, not Steven Gotried.

    Arizona Utility Tries Storing Solar Energy for Use in the Dark, NYT, 17.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/business/
    energy-environment/arizona-utility-tries-storing-solar-energy-for-use-in-the-dark.html

By 2047,

Coldest Years May Be

Warmer Than Hottest in Past,

Scientists Say

October 9, 2013
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

If greenhouse emissions continue their steady escalation, temperatures across most of the earth will rise to levels with no recorded precedent by the middle of this century, researchers said Wednesday.

Scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa calculated that by 2047, plus or minus five years, the average temperatures in each year will be hotter across most parts of the planet than they had been at those locations in any year between 1860 and 2005.

To put it another way, for a given geographic area, “the coldest year in the future will be warmer than the hottest year in the past,” said Camilo Mora, the lead scientist on a paper published in the journal Nature.

Unprecedented climates will arrive even sooner in the tropics, Dr. Mora’s group predicts, putting increasing stress on human societies there, on the coral reefs that supply millions of people with fish, and on the world’s greatest forests.

“Go back in your life to think about the hottest, most traumatic event you have experienced,” Dr. Mora said in an interview. “What we’re saying is that very soon, that event is going to become the norm.”

The research comes with caveats. It is based on climate models, huge computer programs that attempt to reproduce the physics of the climate system and forecast the future response to greenhouse gases. Though they are the best tools available, these models contain acknowledged problems, and no one is sure how accurate they will prove to be at peering many decades ahead.

The models show that unprecedented temperatures could be delayed by 20 to 25 years if there is a vigorous global effort to bring emissions under control. While that may not sound like many years, the scientists said the emissions cuts would buy critical time for nature and for human society to adapt, as well as for development of technologies that might help further reduce emissions.

Other scientists not involved in the research said that slowing emissions would have a bigger effect in the long run, lowering the risk that the climate would reach a point that triggers catastrophic changes. They praised the paper as a fresh way of presenting information that is known to specialists in the field, but not by the larger public.

“If current trends in carbon dioxide emissions continue, we will be pushing most of the ecosystems of the world into climatic conditions that they have not experienced for many millions of years,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif.

The Mora paper is a rarity: a class project that turned into a high-profile article in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

Dr. Mora is not a climate scientist; rather he is a specialist in using large sets of data to illuminate environmental issues. He assigned a class of graduate students to analyze forecasts produced by 39 of the world’s foremost climate models. The models, whose results are publicly available, are operated by 21 research centers in 12 countries, and financed largely by governments.

Thousands of scientific papers have been published about the model results, but the students identified one area of analysis that was missing. The results are usually reported as average temperature changes across the planet. But that gives little sense of how the temperature changes in specific places might compare with historical norms. “We wanted to give people a really relatable way to understand climate,” said Abby G. Frazier, a doctoral candidate in geography.

So Dr. Mora and his students divided the earth into a grid, with each cell representing 386 square miles. Averaging the results from the 39 climate models, they calculated a date they called “climate departure” for each location — the date after which all future years were predicted to be warmer than any year in the historical record for that spot on the globe.

The results suggest that if emissions of greenhouse gases remain high, then after 2047, more than half the earth’s surface will experience annual climates hotter than anything that occurred between 1860 and 2005, the years for which historical temperature data and reconstructions are available. If assiduous efforts were made to bring emissions down, that date could be pushed back to 2069, the analysis found.

With the technique the Mora group used, it is possible to specify climate departure dates for individual cities. Under high emissions, climate departure for New York City will come in 2047, the paper found, plus or minus the five-year margin of error. But lower emissions would push that to 2072.

For Beijing, climate departure would come in 2046 under high emissions, or 2078 under lower emissions. The dates for Moscow are 2063 and 2092; for Washington, 2047 and 2071.

Perhaps the most striking findings are in the tropics. Climate variability there is much smaller than in high latitudes, and the extra heat being trapped by greenhouse gases will push the temperature beyond historical bounds much sooner, the research found. Under high emissions, the paper found a climate departure date of 2031 for Mexico City, 2029 for Jakarta and for Lagos, Nigeria, and 2033 for Bogotá, Colombia.

Many people perceive climate change to be most serious at the poles, and the largest absolute changes in temperature are already occurring in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica. But the Mora paper dovetails with previous research suggesting that the biggest risks to nature and to human society, at least in the near term, may actually be in the tropics.

People living in the tropics are generally poor, with less money to adapt to climate change than people in the mid-latitude rich countries that are burning the most carbon-based fuels and contributing most of the emissions. Plants and animals in the tropics also are accustomed to a narrow temperature range. Organisms that do not have the genetic capacity to adapt to rapid climatic changes will be forced to move, or will be driven to extinction, climate scientists say.

“I am certain there will be massive biological and social consequences,” Dr. Mora said. “The specifics, I cannot tell you.”

    By 2047, Coldest Years May Be Warmer Than Hottest in Past, Scientists Say,
    NYT, 9.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/science/earth/
    by-2047-coldest-years-will-be-warmer-than-hottest-in-past.html

A Fracking Rorschach Test

October 4, 2013
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

A few weeks ago, a group of scientists led by David T. Allen of the University of Texas published an important, peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The subject was our old friend hydraulic fracturing — a k a fracking — that infamous process that allows companies to drill for natural gas trapped in shale formations deep below the earth’s surface.

Thanks to the fracking boom, America is on the verge of overtaking Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out a few days ago. Supporters of fracking (like me) tend to focus on the economic and foreign policy blessings that come with being able to supply so much more of our energy needs in-house, as it were. Critics, however, fear that fracking could have grave environmental consequences. And they worry that the abundance of natural gas will keep America hooked on fossil fuels.

Ever since April 2011, when Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University published a study that purported to “evaluate the greenhouse gas footprint” of fracking, there has been an additional fear: that the process of extracting all that gas from the ground was creating an emissions problem that made coal look good by comparison.

The primary problem, according to Howarth and his colleagues, was the amount of methane — somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of the natural gas produced, they estimated — that escaped into the atmosphere. Methane turns out to be a powerful greenhouse gas, “72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20 year period,” according to the Environmental Defense Fund, which instigated the University of Texas study.

Howarth’s study, however, was purely an estimate. Because there was very little hard data, Howarth, who is openly anti-fracking, had taken no actual measurements himself but had pieced together his numbers from the existing literature. What was needed was somebody who could put instruments directly on the wells themselves and come up with hard figures that couldn’t be second-guessed. That’s where David Allen and his team came in. Enlisting the cooperation of nine companies that in many cases were using the best available well-completion technology — technology that will be mandated by the federal government by 2015 — they concluded that the methane leakage during the production of natural gas was a mere 0.42 percent. In some parts of the process the emissions were lower than government estimates, but in other parts they were considerably higher.

The study soon became a kind of fracking Rorschach test. Jack Gerard, the head of the American Petroleum Institute, sent a blast e-mail to Capitol Hill claiming that the study proved that “hydraulic fracturing is safe for the environment,” when it did nothing of the sort. (Indeed, the scientists are planning 15 more studies that will cover every stage of natural gas development.)

The anti-frackers, meanwhile, quickly dismissed the validity of the study because the nine companies involved had both cooperated and helped pay for it. Steve Horn, a climate change blogger, dismissed the study as “ ‘frackademia’ — industry-funded ‘science’ dressed up to looked like objective academic analysis.” The question of why a study that necessitated industry cooperation and money is inherently less valid than a study produced by scientists who are openly opposed to fracking was left unanswered.

No matter who backs which study, the studies with the most valid, replicable data will win out. That’s how science works. The reason the Environmental Defense Fund wanted this study done is precisely so that unassailable data, rather than mere estimates, could become part of the debate over fracking. You can’t have sound regulation without good data.

“This study is one of the more important things I’ve done in my career,” Allen told me, “because what we do with the shale gas resource is one of the more critically important environmental and economic decisions the country is going to make.”

As it turns out, the one anti-fracker who didn’t scoff at the University of Texas study was Howarth himself. “Allen et. al. have done a fine job of characterizing emissions in the sites they have studied,” he wrote in a news release. He described Allen and his team to me as “quality scientists” who had produced “valuable information.”

The E.D.F.’s goal is to get overall methane leakage to 1 percent or lower, using a combination of technology and regulation. That would make natural gas unarguably better than coal for the climate. When I spoke to Howarth, he expressed skepticism that a leakage rate under 1 percent was possible. But he also said that if methane leakage could “reliably” be brought under 1 percent, “I would be much less worried about developing shale gas.”

“Really?” I asked

Yes, he replied. “I’m a scientist. I really am.”

    A Fracking Rorschach Test, NYT, 4.10.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/opinion/a-fracking-rorschach-test.html

New York’s Air Is Cleanest in 50 Years,

Survey Finds

September 26, 2013
The New York Times
By KATE TAYLOR

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Thursday that his administration’s efforts at reducing air pollution had resulted in New York City’s having the best air quality in more than 50 years.

Sulfur dioxide levels have dropped by 69 percent since 2008, and the level of soot pollution has dropped by more than 23 percent since 2007, according to a new city survey.

The mayor said the reduction was largely the result of the city’s effort to get buildings that used the most polluting kinds of heating oil to convert to cleaner fuels.

Since pollution exacerbates lung and cardiovascular disease, the mayor said, the city estimates that the reduction in pollution is preventing 800 deaths and 2,000 emergency room visits and hospitalizations each year.

“The continued health benefits of this conversion to cleaner heating fuels will make it the single biggest step to save lives since we began our comprehensive smoking control program,” Mr. Bloomberg said, at a news conference at Chelsea Piers.

“City government’s number one responsibility, I’ve always thought, is protecting the health and safety of our people,” he added. “And when you look at the results like that, at the lives being saved and the illnesses being prevented, it tells you that we’re definitely doing something right.”

Three years ago, the mayor said, the 10,000 buildings — 1 percent of city buildings — that burned the two most polluting kinds of heating oil put more soot into the air than all the cars and trucks on the city’s streets and highways.

Since then, more than 2,700 of those buildings have converted to cleaner fuels, the city said, and an additional 2,500 buildings are pursuing conversions. Under regulations issued in 2011, use of the dirtier heating oils will become illegal in 2030.

The reductions in pollution were found through the New York City Community Air Survey, based on results from about 100 monitoring sites around the city.

The mayor displayed the results of the survey in two maps of wintertime sulfur concentrations, with pale yellow signifying low concentrations and brown signifying high concentrations.

In the first map, based on 2008-9 results, a dark brown blob engulfed much of Manhattan and the southwest Bronx, and other brown splotches were scattered through Brooklyn and Queens.

In the second map, the brown was greatly reduced to a handful of spots in areas including Harlem, Inwood and the Bronx.

    New York’s Air Is Cleanest in 50 Years, Survey Finds, NYT, 26.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/nyregion/
    new-yorks-air-is-cleanest-in-50-years-survey-finds.html

Ruth Patrick, 105,

a Pioneer in Science

And Pollution Control Efforts,

Is Dead

September 23, 2013
The New York Times
By WILLIAM DICKE

Ruth Patrick, a pioneer in studying the health of freshwater streams and rivers who laid the scientific groundwork for modern pollution control efforts, died on Monday in Lafayette Hill, Pa. She was 105.

Her death, at the Hill at Whitemarsh retirement community, was announced by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. She had been associated with the academy for more than 70 years.

Dr. Patrick was one of the country’s leading experts in the study of freshwater ecosystems, or limnology. She achieved that renown after entering science in the 1930s, when few women were able to do so, and working for the academy for eight years without pay.

“She was worried about and addressing water pollution before the rest of us even thought of focusing on it,” James Gustave Speth, a former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, said in an e-mail message.

Dr. Patrick built her career around research on thousands of species of single-cell algae called diatoms, which float at the bottom of the food chain. She showed that measuring the kinds and numbers of diatoms revealed the type and extent of pollution in a body of water. Her method of measurement has been used around the world to help determine water quality.

Dr. Patrick’s studies led to the insight that the number and kinds of species in a body of water — its biological diversity — reflected environmental stresses. That idea became known as the Patrick Principle, a term coined by the conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy. In an interview, Dr. Lovejoy, of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington, said the principle can be applied to bigger settings, like an entire ecosystem, and lies at the heart of environmental science.

The eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has called Dr. Patrick the foremost authority on America’s river systems and “a pioneer environmental activist.”

Ruth Patrick was born in Topeka, Kan., on Nov. 26, 1907. Her father, Frank, a lawyer, had an abiding interest in the natural world and encouraged her interest in science from an early age, taking her and her sister on walks in the woods to collect pieces of nature and putting them in a can, she recalled. He gave her a microscope when she was 7.

“I collected everything: worms, mushrooms, plants, rocks,” Dr. Patrick was quoted by the academy as telling an interviewer in 2004. “I remember the feeling I got when my father would roll back the top of his big desk in the library and roll out the microscope. He would make slides with drops of the water samples we had collected, and I would climb up on his knee and peer in. It was miraculous, looking through a window at a whole other world.”

After graduating from the Sunset Hill School for girls in Kansas City, Mo. (now Pembroke Hill School), Ms. Patrick resisted her mother’s wishes that she marry and learn the social graces and decided to study botany instead. Enrolling at Coker College in Hartsville, S.C., she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in the subject in 1929 and then a master’s and a doctorate in the same field at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in 1934.

She began her association with the Academy of Natural Sciences, which had the best collection of diatoms in America, as a graduate student in 1933. In 1937, she became an assistant curator of microscopy, an unpaid position. Only in 1945 was she put on the payroll, and two years later she established the limnology department, now called the Patrick Center for Environmental Research. She was its chairwoman until 1973, when she was named to the Francis Boyer chair of limnology. From 1973 to 1976 she was chairwoman of the academy’s board.

Her breakthrough came in 1948, when she led a study of Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, Pa., to obtain data on the relationship between diatoms and water quality. The creek was chosen because it suffered from many types of pollution, including sewage, fertilizer runoff, toxic substances and metals from industry.

Her team, including a chemist, a bacteriologist, and animal and plant experts, determined the types of pollutants in sections of the river and then identified the plant and animal species. Dr. Patrick found that some species of diatoms thrived in water that was heavily contaminated with organic material like human sewage, while other flourished among chemical pollution.

Refining this finding, she was able to examine a sample of stream water under a microscope, determine the type and numbers of diatoms present, and tell what kind of pollution was present and how severe it was.

To check the number and types of diatoms, Dr. Patrick invented a device called the diatometer, a plastic box containing microscope slides that when strategically placed in a stream collects the maximum number of the organisms.

More broadly, her results showed that under healthy conditions, many species of organisms representing different groups should be present.

Dr. Patrick taught at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 35 years. She wrote more than 200 scientific articles and was the author or co-author of a number of books, including “Diatoms of the United States,” “Groundwater Contamination in the United States” and “Rivers of the United States.”

Dr. Patrick believed it essential that government and industry collaborate in curbing pollution and was a consultant to both in developing environmental policy. In 1975, she became the first woman and the first environmentalist to serve on the DuPont Company board of directors; she was also on the board of the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company. She advised President Lyndon B. Johnson on water pollution and President Ronald Reagan on acid rain and served on pollution and water-quality panels at the National Academy of Sciences and the Interior Department, among others.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1970 and received the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1996. In 1975, she received the $150,000 John and Alice Tyler Ecology Award, then the world’s richest prize for scientific achievement.

Dr. Patrick lived for many years in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. Her first husband, Charles Hodge IV, whom she married in 1931, died in 1985. Her second husband, Lewis H. Van Dusen Jr., died in 2004. She is survived by a son, Charles Hodge V, and several stepchildren and grandchildren.

This article has been revised

to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 23, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary contained

an outdated job title for the conservation biologist

Thomas Lovejoy.

He is still with the H. John Heinz III Center for Science,

Economics and the Environment,

but he is no longer the center’s president.

    Ruth Patrick, 105, a Pioneer in Science And Pollution Control Efforts,
    Is Dead, NYT, 23.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/
    ruth-patrick-a-pioneer-in-pollution-control-dies-at-105.html

Administration Presses Ahead

With Limits on Emissions

From Power Plants

September 19, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — A year after a plan by President Obama to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants set off angry opposition, the administration will announce on Friday that it is not backing down from a confrontation with the coal industry and will press ahead with enacting the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies.

The proposed regulations, to be announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year. The regulations are certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s “war on coal.”

In her speech, Ms. McCarthy will unveil the agency’s proposal to limit new gas-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt hour and new coal plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to administration officials who were briefed on the agency’s plans. Industry officials say the average advanced coal plant currently emits about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour.

“New power plants, both natural gas and coal-fired, can minimize their carbon emissions by taking advantage of modern technologies,” Ms. McCarthy will say Friday, according to her prepared remarks. “Simply put, these standards represent the cleanest standards we’ve put forth for new natural gas plants and new coal plants.”

Aides said Ms. McCarthy would also announce a yearlong schedule for an environmental listening tour — a series of meetings across the country with the public, the industry and environmental groups as the agency works to establish emissions limits on existing power plants — a far more costly and controversial step. Mr. Obama has told officials he wants to see greenhouse gas limits on both existing and new power plants by the time he leaves office in 2017.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said in January. But he acknowledged that “the path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.”

The limits to be unveiled Friday are a slightly more relaxed standard for coal plants than the administration first proposed in April 2012. Officials said the new plan, which came after the E.P.A. received more than 2.5 million comments from the public and industry, will give coal plant operators more flexibility to meet the limits over several years.

Still, environmental groups are likely to hail the announcement as an important step in targeting the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Forty percent of all energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases in 2012 came from power plants, and most of that came from coal-burning power plants, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“We are thrilled that the E.P.A. is taking this major step forward in implementing President Obama’s climate action plan,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, in anticipation of Ms. McCarthy’s announcement. “It’s a great day for public heath and a clean energy future.”

But Republican lawmakers and industry officials have already attacked the expected proposal. Opponents of the new rules argue that the technology to affordably reduce carbon emissions at power plants is not yet available and will drastically increase the cost of electricity.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader and a fierce advocate for coal in a coal-dependent state, said in an interview Thursday that he expected “the worst.” Although he had not seen the administration’s latest proposal, Mr. McConnell said it was likely to alarm people in his state.

“It’s a devastating blow to our state, and we’re going to fight it in every way we can,” Mr. McConnell said.

Scott Segal, the director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which represents power companies, said the details he had heard about the rules suggested that the administration would drive investment away from a plentiful source of power.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be illegal, counterproductive from an environmental perspective and contrary to our long-range interest in creating jobs, holding down costs and producing reliable energy,” Mr. Segal said.

The rules on new power plants will soon face a 60-day public comment period, likely to be followed by intensive industry and environmental lobbying and possible court challenges. Officials said the rules could be finalized by the fall of 2014.

Once the rules are in place, coal power plants would be required to limit their emissions, likely by installing technology called “carbon capture and sequestration,” which scrubs carbon dioxide from their emissions before they reach the plant smokestacks. The technology then pumps it into permanent storage underground.

Industry representatives argue that such technology has not been proven on a large scale and would be extraordinarily expensive — and therefore in violation of provisions in the Clean Air Act that require the regulations to be adequately demonstrated and not exorbitant in cost.

“I think the agency has real problems” meeting both of those standards, Mr. Segal said.

But E.P.A. officials argue that the carbon capture technology has been used in several locations and that a review of the industry over the past year proves that owners of new coal-fired power plants can meet the new standards as required by the act.

Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement that the proposed rules would begin a new era in which the United States began real efforts to control “climate-altering pollution” from the nation’s power plants.

“These rules are reasonable,” Mr. Markey said. “They are feasible. And they should soon be expanded to include standards for existing power plants.”

In one concession to the industry, officials said the agency would provide some flexibility. Plants that could install the technology within 12 months would be required to meet the 1,100-pound limit, officials said. Owners of coal plants would also have the option of phasing in the limits over a seven-year period, officials said. But those plants would be required to meet a stricter standard of 1,000 to 1,050 pounds per megawatt hours, averaged over the seven years.

    Administration Presses Ahead With Limits on Emissions From Power Plants,
    NYT, 20.9.2103,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/us/politics/
    obama-administration-announces-limits-on-emissions-from-power-plants.html

Colorado Floodwaters

Force Thousands to Flee

September 13, 2013
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH and JACK HEALY

LONGMONT, Colo. — “Get up!” Abe Mares was jolted awake. It was 2:30 a.m., a swollen river was pouring into his home in the mountains of Colorado’s Front Range, and his roommate was scrambling.

Seeking higher ground, they retreated with their dogs to the second floor as Colorado’s worst flood in years crested around them.

Elsewhere, thousands more people ran for shelter, or just ran for their lives as record-breaking rains swamped fields and tore apart roads, heaping more pain on a state that has been tested by several years of drought and devastating wildfires.

Ranch families had to choose which animals to save and which to abandon. Neighbors camped on one another’s floors and waited for rescue. Cars were swept away like bath toys. Two experienced mountaineers huddled together at 13,000 feet on a treacherous peak, stranded by ice storms.

“This one is awful,” said Linda Stacy, 57, as she sat outside an evacuation center here.

Four people have died in the floods, and the authorities said Friday that 80 people had been reported as unreachable or missing. With cellphone service down and the power out, some of the missing may simply be unable to communicate with friends or family.

On Friday, thousands more Colorado residents were forced to evacuate their homes in the face of rivers and streams choked by heavy rains, dirt and debris.

In scenes that have become hauntingly familiar, families packed their cars with pets and suitcases and made their way to the nearest church or school that was offering shelter, left to wonder about the fate of their homes and neighbors. Some made it on their own, or in a neighbor’s car. Others fled on foot.

Up in the mountains, helicopters flown by the National Guard skimmed over ravaged roads to pluck scores of stranded residents from the flooded town of Jamestown.

Here in Longmont, several miles east of the worst-hit corners of Boulder County, a caravan of yellow school buses arrived at the LifeBridge Christian Church on Friday morning, carrying hundreds of evacuees from Lyons.

They milled quietly in front of the church, waiting to be registered by volunteers, and hoping for a break in the weather.

Many marveled at how swiftly the pounding rains had swamped their homes and carved up the mountainsides, transforming picturesque towns and vacation communities into scenes of waterlogged devastation.

“We’ve been through floods there before, but this one had a little different taste to it,” said William Martin, 88, who has lived in his home since 1955.

Here in the Mountain West, it is a cliché — but often true — that people come for the winters and stay for the summers. As the snows melt, the valleys echo with bluegrass concerts and summer festivals, and car roofs bloom with mountain bikes, road bikes, kayaks and camper shells.

As gateways to Rocky Mountain National Park, the towns of Lyons and Estes Park, in particular, bustle with summertime traffic. Campers and minivans full of tourists and day trippers meander through town, using it as a base camp for adventures, or just stopping for coffee at the Barking Dog Cafe, or for roadside pies at the Colorado Cherry Company.

“The street during this time of year is still bustling with people,” said Sarah Lewis, 22, who works at a hotel in Estes Park. “Now, it’s filled with water.”

Video shot by The Estes Park News showed muddy water churning through downtown. Residents said that the floods had ripped apart asphalt roads as if they were strands of black licorice.

Like others who did not leave before the deluge, Ms. Lewis was stranded in her duplex in Estes Park on Friday, the road at the bottom of her neighborhood impassable.

Two seasoned mountaineers, Connie Yang and Suzanne Turell, visiting Colorado from their home in Maine, were marooned by the storm for nearly two days on Longs Peak, a popular but sometimes dangerous mountain that is the tallest in Rocky Mountain National Park.

On Thursday morning, Ms. Yang’s sister received a text message from the women saying, “We need help” and “Whiteout snow storm,” and providing their coordinates. After several frantic hours, the families learned that the women had made it down on their own.

On Friday, the storms that had soaked a 150-mile swath of Colorado began to ease, giving some residents their first peek of blue sky in days. Kari Bowen, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Boulder, said the rains were expected to continue intermittently through the weekend before tapering off on Monday.

But the authorities cautioned that any new rain would fall on ground already saturated by nearly a foot of precipitation. Recent wildfires that have burned trees and underbrush have made some hillsides especially vulnerable to landslides and floods, meteorologists said.

“There’s nothing to capture that water,” Ms. Bowen said. “When you have a lot of rain, it just wants to flow right off.”

Mr. Mares, who was jolted awake at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday by the sound of the St. Vrain River hurtling into his house, described how he, his roommate and their two dogs, Bentley and Buddy, had forded the rapids and scrambled for safety.

“It was up to our hips and moving really, really fast,” Mr. Mares said. “It was very intense and very scary. The whole town was flooded.”

    Colorado Floodwaters Force Thousands to Flee, NYT, 13.9.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/colorado-flooding.html

Amid Pipeline Debate,

Two Costly Cleanups

Forever Change Towns

August 10, 2013
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

MARSHALL, Mich. — As the Obama administration inches closer to a decision on whether to approve construction of the much-debated Keystone XL pipeline, costly cleanup efforts in two communities stricken by oil spills portend the potential hazards of transporting heavy Canadian crude.

It has been three years since an Enbridge Energy pipeline ruptured beneath this small western Michigan town, spewing more than 840,000 gallons of thick oil sands crude into the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek, the largest oil pipeline failure in the country’s history. Last March, an Exxon Mobil pipeline burst in Mayflower, Ark., releasing thousands of gallons of oil and forcing the evacuation of 22 homes.

Both pipeline companies have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to recover the heavy crude, similar to the product Keystone XL would carry. River and floodplain ecosystems have had to be restored, and neighborhoods are still being refurbished. Legal battles are being waged, and residents’ lives have been forever changed.

“All oil spills are pretty ugly and not easy to clean up,” said Stephen K. Hamilton, a professor of aquatic ecology at Michigan State University who is advising the Environmental Protection Agency and the state on the cleanup in Marshall. “But this kind of an oil is even harder to clean up because of its tendency to stick to surfaces and its tendency to become submerged.”

Before July 26, 2010, hardly anyone in Marshall had heard of Enbridge Energy Partners, a Houston firm whose parent company is based in Calgary, Alberta.

On a recent midsummer morning, the Kalamazoo looked almost the way it once did. Towering oak trees draped over the water in the heat. Hawks patrolled the deep green riverbanks. An elderly couple lugged fishing tackle toward a shady area. If not for two motorboats whirring downstream and three men probing the water with poles, there would have been no sign that anything had gone wrong.

Much of Kalamazoo’s plant and animal life has returned. But ridding the water of all the oil — some of which sank to the river floor and continues to generate a kaleidoscopic sheen — has proved elusive. Though a 40-mile stretch of the river has reopened after being closed for two years and most of the oil has been recovered or has evaporated, vestiges of the spill are everywhere. “For Sale” signs dot the rolling cornfields and soy farms. Once-coveted riverfront homes sit vacant.

Matt Davis, a real estate agent here, said he had struggled to sell homes since the spill. “Enbridge hopes people forget,” Mr. Davis said. “But this is my town. This is where I grew up. Enbridge isn’t from around here.

“We didn’t ask for them to have their pipeline burst in our backyard. Make it right. Take care of the mess you made.”

In May, the E.P.A. found that Enbridge had drastically underestimated the amount of oil still in the river. The agency estimated that 180,000 gallons had most likely drifted to the bottom, more than 100 times Enbridge’s projection. It has ordered Enbridge to dredge sections of the river where stubborn beads of oil remain submerged.

The dredging started on July 30, and stretches of the river are being closed again. Construction crews have rumbled onto the riverfront in nearby Comstock Township, angering residents and business owners who remain fearful of another accident.

Jason Manshum, an Enbridge spokesman, said the company was working to address the township’s concerns as it followed the orders of the E.P.A. “This is the single-largest incident in the history of our organization,” he said. “From the beginning, in July 2010, we said that we would be committed to this community and the natural environment, for as long as it would take to right the rupture that happened. About three years later to the day, we’re still here.”

Larry Bell, who owns Bell’s Brewery, one of the country’s largest craft beer makers, was shocked earlier this summer to see workers clear a staging area next to his brewery near Marshall. “We’re going to be downwind of this thing,” said Mr. Bell, who filed a lawsuit last month asserting that Enbridge did not get permission from the local condominium association to build its dredge pad.

“If those airborne contaminants come in, it’s going to get into our ingredients,” Mr. Bell said. “We see that as irreparable. They can’t compensate me for taking away my business.”

Since the spill, Enbridge has become one of the largest landowners in the area — buying out 154 residential properties within a 200-foot swath that the company determined was most affected. By many accounts, Enbridge paid a fair price and has begun to put some properties up for sale.

The company has also donated millions of dollars to build roads and parks along the river. Still, the emotional scars of losing property run deep.

For nearly 30 years, Deb Miller and her husband owned a carpet store along the Kalamazoo. After the spill, Enbridge offered to buy the property but not the store, Ms. Miller said. Nearing retirement and worried that the land’s value would plummet, the Millers liquidated their business and sold the land.

“We could have worked that store for another 10 years,” said Ms. Miller, 59, who now has two part-time jobs. “For us to physically move our business at our age was more than we could fathom. It was an agonizing decision.”

The same sentiment echoes in Mayflower, Ark., a quiet, working-class town of about 2,200 tucked among the wetlands and dogwood thickets near Little Rock.

On March 29, an Exxon Mobil pipeline burst near the Northwoods subdivision, spilling an estimated 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian crude, coating a residential street with oil. Twenty-two homes were evacuated.

Now, four months later, the neighborhood of low-slung brick homes is largely deserted, a ghostly column of empty driveways and darkened windows, the silence broken only by the groan of heavy machinery pawing at the ground as remediation continues.

After E.P.A. monitoring found air quality to be safe, residents of 17 of the homes were allowed back. But only a few have returned.

“People here are still unsure about whether it’s safe for their families,” said April Lane of the Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group, a community organization working with residents.

Exxon has offered to buy the 22 evacuated homes, or to compensate owners for diminished property value. The company also said it would buy 40 additional properties if the owners could not sell them within four months.

So far, Exxon has spent $2 million on temporary housing for residents and more than $44 million on the cleanup, said Aaron Stryk, an Exxon spokesman.

“We can’t say it enough: We are so, so sorry this incident took place and for the disruption and for the inconvenience that has taken place,” Mr. Stryk said. “We are staying in Mayflower until the job is done.”

For some, the money cannot replace the lives they once led.

Jimmy Arguello and his wife, Tiffany, lived in Northwoods for six years, in the first home they owned, built by Mr. Arguello, a plumber, and his friends.

The day the pipeline broke, the Arguellos were told by the police to pack for a few days. But for three months, the couple and their two young sons stayed at hotels — six in all — before settling into an apartment in nearby Conway.

Exxon has paid their living expenses, but the impact on the family has been “heartbreaking,” Mr. Arguello said. Worried about raising his children near an oil spill, he has decided to sell his home to Exxon. “It’s hard not to know where your family is going to go and where we’re going to end up,” he said. “I built that house six years ago. And now I’m not going back.”

Ryan Senia, a 29-year-old engineer, is also selling to Exxon. Mr. Senia, who has stayed at a friend’s house since being evacuated, said he worried he would never be able to put his home on the market otherwise. “Everyone you know is gone,” he said.

During the last few months, several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of dozens of residents who live both in and near the subdivision.

The State of Arkansas and the Justice Department have also filed a claim, saying that the spill polluted waterways and that Exxon did not immediately repair the pipeline.

Exxon would not comment on pending litigation, Mr. Stryk said, adding that it had been transparent in its clean up efforts.

There is no sense of how long those efforts will continue. A protective boom has been strung across Lake Conway; so far, no oil has reached it. Workers were still searching for residual oil in a nearby marsh.

And crews in Northwoods continue to monitor for oil that seeped into the foundations of several homes. “We’re tired of it,” Mr. Arguello said. “We’re ready for it to be over.”

Here in Marshall, Enbridge projects that its total cleanup cost will run to nearly $1 billion.

An E.P.A. spokeswoman, Anne Rowan, said that even after the company dredges the Kalamazoo, about 162,000 gallons of oil will remain. It cannot be recovered immediately without causing a significant adverse impact to the river, Ms. Rowan said.

Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, meanwhile, has undertaken a huge study to examine soil and sediment.

Since the spills, the pipeline industry has emphasized that oil lines remain safe and reliable, and that major spills are rare.

“Are we satisfied? No,” said Peter T. Lidiak, the American Petroleum Institute’s pipeline director. “We are trying to not have any releases and not have properties damaged and people impacted. Because that’s not the business we’re in.”

For Deb Miller, the spill will forever haunt Marshall.

“They can try and beautify along the river, but they can never give us back all of our neighbors who have moved out,” Ms. Miller said. “There are not enough zeros to pay us for what we’ve been through.”

    Amid Pipeline Debate, Two Costly Cleanups Forever Change Towns,
    NYT, 10.8.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/us/
    amid-pipeline-debate-two-costly-cleanups-forever-change-towns.html

Dry Brush and Winds

Feed Blazes in California

August 9, 2013
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — Fueled by dry brush, shifting winds and droughtlike conditions, several wildfires continued to burn across Southern California on Friday as thousands of firefighters worked to quell the flames and protect homes.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Riverside County as one blaze about 90 miles east of Los Angeles in the San Jacinto Mountains, known as the Silver Fire, swelled to 17,500 acres. Officials said the fire was 25 percent contained by Friday evening as more than 1,600 firefighters worked in steep terrain to keep the flames out of the tiny community of Snow Creek, about 10 miles north of Palm Springs.

Some of the 1,500 people who had been evacuated began returning to their homes on Friday afternoon. But 26 homes had been destroyed and six people had been injured — five firefighters and one civilian — since the blaze began on Wednesday.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Capt. Steve Kaufmann, a spokesman for the fire departments fighting the blaze.

He said the gusty, shifting winds and steep terrain, and the extreme dryness of the trees and brush in the area, had made the fires difficult and dangerous for the crews on the ground.

“We’ve been talking since April about how dry the fuels are all over the state,” he said. “Dry fuels, low humidity, high temperatures and wind make for a volatile combination. It increases our danger and the public’s danger when you have a fire of this nature.”

Nearby, in the Angeles National Forest, another fire had engulfed 100 acres since Thursday. Nearly 400 firefighters were working to keep it away from the community of Wrightwood. About 75 people had been evacuated, and the fire was 5 percent contained on Friday, officials said.

The Silver Fire is the second this year in the San Jacinto Mountains. In July, another blaze ate up more than 40 square miles, forcing 6,000 people from their homes in the area around Idyllwild, an artist community and hiking destination.

The current fire has burned an area that was consumed by the Esperanza Fire, a deadly blaze in 2006 that killed five members of the United States Forest Service. Raymond Lee Oyler was convicted of setting the fire and sentenced to death in 2009.

Over the last several years, dry conditions have led not only to more frequent fires, but also to more volatiles ones, Captain Kaufmann said. In June, while fighting another fire, he said, he saw an 80-foot pine tree combust so quickly that it was unrecognizable within 30 seconds.

“We’ve seen an increase in fires over the last few years,” he said. “We have been seeing fire behavior we haven’t seen in years.”

After touring some of the burned area on Thursday, Senator Barbara Boxer blamed climate change for this year’s destructive fire season, and warned that wildfires would only get worse unless more was done to combat rising global temperatures.

“Climate change is taking a toll,” she said. “No matter what we do on climate, we’re very late to the game. We’re going to still see more of these fires.”

Dry Brush and Winds Feed Blazes in California,
NYT,
9.8.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/
us/dry-brush-and-winds-feed-blazes-in-california.html