The Last Honest Politician?

Old School - Chlorine Gas

The Chemical Facility Security News Blog has an interesting post of the Homeland security issues with chlorine gas rail cars. An interesting read for those familiar with Chlorine.

Reader Comment 06-19-10 Chlorine Gas

Fred Millar replied to my complaints about his use of the term ‘midnight rules’ in a comment to that blog post. Just one of the typical problems with the use of political terms, they have meanings and they have connotations. In the current environment of political discourse we all have a tendency to hear the connotations that fit out pre-conceived picture of the political scene. I withdraw my complaint.
Catastrophic Leaks
Fred does close his comment with something certainly worth discussing. He wrote:

“Some homeland security experts talk about "The next BOOM?" that will compell attention to lack of effective regulation, whereas I tend to focus on the the next screaming "WHOOSH!" of toxic gas, which the best US gas modelers assume will mostly all blast out of a 90-ton chlorine railcar , e.g., within 2 minutes. Leaving local emergency responders no effective response except to run with everybody else.”

Fred is absolutely correct, the catastrophic failure of a chlorine (or anhydrous ammonia, or hydrogen fluoride, or whatever TIH of your particular fear) railcar is just about the most horrible consequence that can be reasonably imagined as a consequence of a terrorist attack or even just a plain old accident. Forget the overblown fears of a rogue nuke or a jihadist bio-attack; those are just Hollywood scenarios.

Having said that, I don’t spend much time worrying about a catastrophic failure of a railcar. That takes too much skill, practice and patience to execute. You can’t just slap an explosive charge on one of the essentially armored tanks and get a catastrophic failure (and I have been assured by some people that would know that such testing has been done). I know the techniques that would have to be used, on a theoretical basis, and they are painstaking and require extensive practice and precise execution. In my opinion this puts them beyond the skill set of our recent attackers. So, I am concerned, but not worried.
Less than Catastrophic Leaks
No, what I am more afraid of happening is that an adequately trained and experienced attacker manages to put a relatively small hole in the side of one of these tankers. The huge toxic cloud that Fred fears from a catastrophic failure would not result and quite frankly no one would know to run from the much smaller toxic cloud that would form along the right-of-way of the train.

The deaths would be relatively few, probably measured in the low hundreds (I know hundreds of dead civilians is unthinkable, but much less terrible than the tens of thousands that Fred is concerned with). The concentration would be low enough and the gas irritating enough to cause most people to get out of the cloud before they were exposed to a fatal dose.

As the train continued to motor unaware through a large urban area at 10 to 15 miles per hour it would spread a cloud of chlorine gas that would permeate the areas on either side of the tracks, as the urban wind currents spread the cloud in unpredictable local eddies. Determining what areas to evacuate, and in which to order residents to shelter-in-place would take so much time as to be totally ineffective.

Large numbers (thousands?) of people would be seriously injured before anyone realized the source of the release and could do something to stop the train and mitigate the release.

For most of those injured people, if they were treated properly and promptly, the effects would be unpleasant, but certainly survivable. Unfortunately, our medical services are not set up to handle truly mass casualty type events over a large area of an urban center. The lung damage alone will require large numbers of ventilators and specialized therapies that are just not available on that scale.

This would lead to subsequent deaths that would not be laid at the feet of the attackers, but would be blamed, with more than some justification, on the government for not adequately addressing the emergency needs of the populous.
Prevention

Which ever of us is more probably correct in predicting the more likely attack, I don’t think either of us really expects such an attack to happen (I know I don’t; I fear it, but don’t expect it). If that’s the case why worry? If I’m wrong about the attack not happening, the results just don’t bear considering. We call this low probability, high consequence event; you know like a well blow-out a mile down in the Gulf.

With events like this you know that you have to take some action to prevent the unlikely. The question is how many resources can you afford to expend to prevent an unlikely event like this? This is what we need to decide.

Both Fred and I would like to see all through-shipments of TIH chemicals moved outside of major urban areas. This would effectively eliminate the risk of these cars being targeted by terrorist, reducing the risk to ‘just’ the normal (very low) accident rate associated with the shipment of these chemicals. Fred believes that re-routing can accomplish this in most instances, I think that it is going to require some significant infrastructure changes (I know Fred, I oversimplified both of our positions, completely overlooking the elimination of some number of shipments).

But, in any case, no matter how much Fred and I argue this between ourselves, it is readily apparent that no one is really willing to address this issue in a meaningful way. The costs are just too high it seems. Hopefully we will have time to change that calculation before such an attack actually occurs.

The Oil Drum

For those who like to know  what is really going on in the gulf, I suggest following the posting on The Oil Drum.  It can sometimes get a little technical - but hey - that never stopped us before.

BP Spill Update

A First Job Story, by JF

Recovery Boiler…Part 1… My first Pulp & Paper  job (1953-1954).

The Extra Board was a group of unemployed men meeting shifts to hopefully obtain work .It was formed as a way of filling vacancies in paper and pulp mills many years ago. If a person was out for a shift at any level in the line of progression, the vacancy would be filled by “setting up” to the vacancy; the extra board guy would fill the job at the bottom, usually the labor job.  This job could and did occur in any department in the plant.  It saved a lot of overtime and other monies because the extra board guys only got paid for the night or two they worked and with no benefits.  The jobs were not permanent.  Usually some person would say “we need a body” and we’d flip for it or the department would request a particular person.

My first job as a member of the extra board was “punching spouts” in the recovery area; I won the flip.  There were four small boilers (built in 1939) with many spouts to punch (clean off).  Each one inadvertently collected green liquor crystals and/or “slag” from the molten chemicals on the tubes or spouts and the build-up had to be periodically knocked off through small holes that ringed each boiler.  In addition, all of the molten chemicals poured out of the boiler through a spout which dumped into the green liquor tank.  The spout was enclosed in  a “doghouse”, not that any of the information was conveyed to me.  I punched away not knowing what I was doing. 

I was given a short metal rod (five feet) and told to have at it.  Each punch, made by moving aside a small round window, brought a spatter of molten slag.  At 2,000+ degrees, it will burn nearly anything, not to mention it is highly caustic and will chemically burn your skin.  They did give me a pair of safety glasses.  In addition, the noise made from the molten chemicals hitting the water in the green liquor tank was horrendous and continuous.  It was like thousands of stones,and maybe a car or two, being thrown from a great height and landing just above your head on a tin roof.  That’s right, no hearing protection.  Maybe that’s why I can’t hear now 50 plus years later.

A guy came around (he had to shout in my ear) and said I didn’t need to punch the doghouse spouts.  This was fine with me as it looked awfully dangerous.  About an hour later, the foreman (or said he was) came and asked why I hadn’t punched the doghouse spouts.  I positioned myself beside a doghouse and punched with my 5-foot metal rod and jumped aside.  Fire shot out and hit the wall on the other side of the room…no kidding!  This was repeated on each side of all the doghouse spouts.  Several days later, I found out from a friend that there was a 15-foot rod that was used for the doghouses.

When the evening was over my face had many small burns as did my shirt which was too burned to ever use again.  I couldn’t hear for a couple of days but my take home pay was $9.50 which got me through the next week at college.  That money was a huge amount for 8-hours pay in 1953.  Funny, I never won the coin toss again to work on the recovery boilers.

JF

What Business Are Paper Companies Really In?

The above chart is difficult to read, but what it shows is a steady decline in advertising dollars for newspapers - and - even though newspapers like to blame the internet for lost business (after all, news is not the primary motive for papers - it's delivering advertising to the homes) - it is mostly going to TV & Cable. The problem is newspapers still think their job is news - when clearly they cannot compete with TV, Cable, and the internet when it comes to news (state and national). They have lost the under 40 customer and will probably never get them back.

So, what does this have to do with paper companies that make newsprint? Well, if they had realized they were in the ad/news delivering business, they'd have invested in TV/Cable/internet servers and would still be going strong - posed for the future. However, they thought they were in the newsprint making business and sold off all their woodlands to preserve a business that is in decline and not coming back.

They should have kept their woodlands, sold their mills and used the revenue from mill sales to become lang management companies and specialists in media delivery. That is - if they had wanted to stay true to their customers.

On a different subject, I've posted a link to Dead Tree Edition. This anonymous blogger has some interesting insight on the publishing side (and paper purchasing) of the business.

Atlas Today?