Natural Disaster Does EPA's Job

Tornadoes went a bit north of here on Friday and Saturday, and hit especially hard in Picher, Oklahoma. Who knew the long-suffering residents of Pilcher were planning a Gay Parade?

Ironically, the town was a Superfund disaster site and the winds blew away what was scheduled for the wrecking ball. EPA dodged a bullet.

Mining for lead had left wastes that someone was going to have to clean up eventually. The down side is that the winds stirred up dust that is dangerous to breathe.

The Environmental Protection Agency planned to check for high lead levels Monday after a deadly tornado blew through a heavily polluted former mining town where lead-filled waste is piled into giant mounds.

The tornado was one of several that combined to kill 22 people in the Midwest and the South over the weekend, raising the nation's 2008 total to about 100, the worst toll in a decade.

This year is on pace to see the most deaths since 130 people were killed in 1998, the eighth highest total since 1950, according to the National Weather Service. The record is 519 tornado-related deaths in 1953.

In Picher, the devastation was complicated by the town's status as one of the most polluted Superfund sites in the nation. But Miles Tolbert, the Oklahoma secretary of the environment, said he did not think there was an immediate public health hazard to the 800 residents. He did say more testing is needed to be certain.

In Picher, the devastation was complicated by the town's mining history, though Miles Tolbert, the Oklahoma secretary of the environment, said he did not think there was an immediate public health hazard to the 800 residents. He did say more testing is needed to be certain.

Long-term exposure to lead dust poses a health risk, particularly to young children.

On Saturday, a tornado with the second-strongest rating killed six people, destroyed a 20-block area and blew dust off mountains of mining waste, or chat piles.
(snip)
Because of Picher's Superfund status, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is unlikely to grant assistance to homeowners to rebuild in the town, said Oklahoma Emergency Management Director Albert Ashwood. But he echoed Henry's assurances about the federal buyout program, which is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hopefully, the residents who have lived with disaster for this long won't be harmed any further.

This is one of the ideal ways to clean up a hazardous waste site, so I expect one of the tv evangelists in the area is about to inform us that his Flying Spaghetti Monster has shown that his noodley heart was warmed by the good hearts in FEMA.

It's a chance for the usually bumfuzzled FEMA folks to get out of rebuilding. Maybe the Spaghetti King has watched them - and the folks that have to depend on them - suffer enough. Something tells me that the already stricken Picherians are not going to have an easy time getting the worth out of their condemned town.

(The Kenosha Kid shared this brilliant idea.)

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All I got here was a few limbs blown down and hail. This time the hail wasn't very large and didn't make holes in the roof. If anything worse comes down tornado alley I'm not optimistic about emergency services. Maybe this would be a good time to review my insurance.

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More atrocities from the voluntary regulation field, drugs that cure you and kill you being sold you by GlaxoSmithKline. It's a game of chance, taking drugs that have been declared 'safe' - a rating that seems to be applied not to the patient but to the following court date.

The multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) downplayed an early warning about the rising number of people who have suffered heart attacks after using one of its drugs, abacavir. An anti-Aids medication, abacavir is taken by tens of thousands of people worldwide.

GSK was officially told of the possible risk in May 2005, three years before it issued a statement to its investors saying that the findings of an even stronger potential link between heart attacks and abacavir are "unexpected" and "unconfirmed". The company also said that it could find no association between abacavir use and heart attacks following a trawl through its internal data. However, it failed to mention that its own summary of product characteristics issued when the drug was launched in the late 1990s had described "mild myocardial degeneration" in mice and rats given the drug for two years.

Some scientists moni-toring the safety of Aids drugs are privately furious with GSK for downplaying the significance of one of the biggest safety trials of abacavir – one of several anti-virals taken by Aids patients in combined HIV therapy – when the findings were published last month.

The government continues to make the world safe for depredations by business.