Multiple highly contaminated sites in Houston, TX have not been checked by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the wake of Hurricane Harvey to see if they pose a risk to human health and safety.
The Associated Press said Saturday that it is aware of more than a dozen so-called "Superfund" sites -- the most highly contaminated places in the United States -- in the region hit by Harvey that could be spreading toxic chemicals and highly poisonous industrial byproducts into the air and water unchecked.
"The Highlands Acid Pit site near Chandler’s home was filled in the 1950s with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated from the acid pits in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and EPA maintains monitoring wells there," wrote the AP's Jason Dearon.
"The Associated Press visited seven Superfund sites in and around Houston during the flooding. All had been inundated with water; some were only accessible only by boat," he said.
EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham could not provide details about when inspectors would be able to reach the sites and check them for spills or spreading contamination. She did say that inspectors checked two Superfund sites in Corpus Christi, TX and found that they were safe.
Arkema is allowed to ignore requests for disclosure under a law created by Republican legislators after the explosion at the chemical plant in West, TX. The legislation allows companies to operate in secrecy regarding what specific dangers nearby residents could face.
The AP said that the dangers posed to residents in the area of toxic sites can vary.
"The threats to human health and wildlife from rising waters that inundate Superfund sites vary widely depending on the specific contaminants and the concentrations involved," wrote Dearon. "The EPA report specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area."
Now's the perfect time to get up close and personal with the Northern Lights.
The Northern Lights, also known as Aurora Borealis, are a natural phenomenon that light up the night sky most notably in the Arctic region.
The dazzling spectacle – akin to a free laser show – is a hypnotic dance of colours which can be seen in a range of places from northern parts of Canada and Alaska to Scandinavia and Iceland.
So what is this phenomenon and how exactly does it take shape in the skies above?
In short, they are in effect collisions between electrically charged particles from the sun entering the earth’s atmosphere, and come in an array of colours: red, yellow, green, blue and violet.
It also visually adds as the perfect backdrop for a photoshoot, as Christophe Tack found out ahead of Red Bull Ragnarok, the toughest snowkite event in the world in 2015.
An array of cyclists used it for a night-time photoshoot the previous year in Norway while Horacio Llorens last year created a dazzling array of images as he flew through the Aurora Borealis in Tromsø, also in Norway the following year.
On July 21, 365 AD the pearl-city of Alexandria, Egypt was devastated by a massive tsunami which was triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Greece. Though the ancients couldn't measure earthquakes at the time, contemporary scientists estimated from the historical records that the largest of the two tremors had a magnitude of 8.0.
Forget McGregor-Mayweather. The biotech world has been waiting for months to hear about Novartis' pricing decision for Kymriah, its just-approved CAR-T therapy for cancer. That interest turned into anxiety days earlier when Gilead announced its purchase of Kite, given that Kite is expected to be the next company to market its own CAR-T treatment and Gilead…
For Donald Ewen Cameron – a Scottish-born psychiatrist, the president of numerous medical societies, and the director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal between 1943 and 1965 – technology was a passion bordering on an obsession. While his tattered tweed suits and mismatched socks lent him the air of an absent-minded university don, Cameron was fixated on the future, from his collection of high-powered cars, to his constant use of Dictaphones, to the science-fiction novels that littered his bedside table. As this ‘technophilia’ deepened and began to shape his psychiatric thinking in the 1950s, Cameron was set on a collision course with Cold War conspiracy.
Beyond its capacity to simplify everyday life, Cameron believed that technology could be the handmaiden of a psychiatric revolution. Denouncing conventional therapy – with all its talking, listening, and trust-building – as slow and ineffective, Cameron instead subjected his patients to a radical new treatment that promised to accelerate the process of psychological healing. Termed ‘psychic driving’, this treatment utilised a brand-new technological saviour: the reel-to-reel tape machine.
Psychic driving was a two-stage process. Firstly, distressing memories and pathological behaviours were ‘annihilated’ from the patient’s mind through an unrelenting regime of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). While most of his peers conservatively limited ECT to 12 shocks per month to avoid damaging short-term memories, Cameron increased this to 12 shocks per day to capitalise on this usually unwanted side-effect. Then, patients were placed in front of tape machines emitting endlessly looping messages designed to push them towards particular psychiatric epiphanies. ‘Peggy, you have discovered that your mother never wanted you,’ one such tape proclaimed. ‘Can you see now why you have given affection in such lavish degree to your children and why you became so desperately anxious when your daughter decided to enter a convent?’
Messages were repeated for days, weeks, and even months on end, in order to overwhelm the patient’s conscious defences. When patients became distressed by the relentless repetitions, they were restrained using a variety of crude and bizarre methods, from securing their headphones with tape to immobilising them with hallucinogenic substances. The results were devastating: rather than overcoming their conditions, patients often emerged with severe memory loss, unable even to recognise their own families.
Cameron’s research attracted a number of patrons, none more surprising than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Following the return of seemingly ‘brainwashed’ prisoners from the Korean War in 1953, the CIA had begun funding universities and hospitals engaged in research concerning behavioural modification. The project, codenamed MK-ULTRA, was designed to produce interrogation techniques for Cold War espionage. As such, Cameron’s proclaimed ability to deconstruct and remake minds at will seemed too good an opportunity to pass up, and nearly $60,000 was funnelled into psychic driving between 1957 and 1960. However, as the treatment’s destructive effects became apparent, the CIA realised psychic driving would have little operational use, and ties were swiftly broken. The CIA’s involvement in Cameron’s work would lay hidden until an explosion of class-action lawsuits in the 1980s.
Cameron’s faith in psychic driving, sustained by the fantasy of a futuristic, mechanised psychiatry, outweighed the mounting evidence of its total failure. Rather than emerging out of a comprehensive psychological theory, Cameron’s tape-machine treatments were largely inspired by novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and adverts for ‘sleep-teaching’ records that dubiously claimed to impart fluency in foreign languages overnight. Doggedly pursuing an ‘automated’ psychiatry that moved beyond the discussions of the chaise longue and towards an assembly line of mass-produced wellbeing, Cameron seemed oblivious to the harm being caused.
Through its ‘stranger-than-fiction’ quality, psychic driving pushes us towards a more critical history of psychiatry in the 20th century. Far from psychiatry being a neutral, and purely objective endeavour, set apart from the messy reality of politics and culture, psychic driving reveals how knowledge about the human mind is profoundly shaped by the concerns and priorities of the societies that produce it. This is far from a new perspective, with similar arguments persuasively made more than half a century ago in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and in Madness and Civilization (1964) by Michel Foucault. The history of psychic driving extends these critiques, revealing how the political pressures and moral panics of the Cold War shaped perceptions of mental illness and its treatment.
Psychic driving might also tell us something about the future, not just the past, of psychological therapy. Few present-day psychiatrists find themselves preoccupied with issues of communism and brainwashing, but Cameron’s core belief in the inevitable merging of technology and psychiatry has proven remarkably resilient. This is perhaps seen most dramatically in the recent explosion of smartphone applications concerned with mental health, with some 10,000 apps on the market offering everything from mood trackers to mindfulness programmes, ambient noise generators to automated hypnosis. Enthusiastic advocates have been quick to praise these pocket-sized therapies as a timely solution to the budgetary pressures and long waiting lists of overstretched mental health services.
However, psychic driving introduces a note of caution to these celebrations. While exotic conspiracies of international espionage are unlikely to be uncovered, Cameron’s work reminds us that we ought to question whose interests, beyond benevolent ‘healing’, are at play. Beneath the optimistic rhetoric of this new wave of ‘techno-therapy’ there is plenty to worry about: applications frequently lack expert medical oversight, few are supported by reliable studies gauging their effectiveness or even basic safety, and many have been found to leak or actively sell users’ sensitive health data to third parties. Clearly such issues must be interrogated further, and the history of psychic driving can bolster the necessary scepticism – and dissent – to do so.
Sam Hatchwell and David Saunders’ Psychic Driving Installation at the Museum of the Normal
Irma has strengthened over the eastern Atlantic to become the fourth hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its latest advisory on Thursday.
Irma is forecast to become a major hurricane by Thursday night and is expected to be an extremely dangerous hurricane for the next several days, it said.
Irma is located about 1,845 miles (2,975 km) east of the Leeward Islands with maximum sustained winds of 100 mph (155 km/h), the Miami-based weather forecaster said.
(Reporting by Vijaykumar Vedala in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
The ticking time bomb of a plant is reportedly flooded by six feet of water in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, making some of the more sensitive chemicals it houses into a threat for explosion.
"[The Harris County fire marshall] said that they don't expect like a shock wave kind of explosion," Matt Dempsey, a data reporter for the Houston Chronicle, told Maddow. "That's in contradiction to the expert said who said we're sitting on a powder keg type of situation here."
"Experts on one side are saying it's a huge thing, and I have the government officials and the company saying it might not be that big," Dempsey continued. "It's hard to tell for sure."
Dempsey went on to detail a back-and-forth he'd had with Arkema's CEO, who refused to make the plant's inventory public and who hasn't answered questions about whether the plant has industry standard fail-safes that deplete the stock in case of disasters like Hurricane Harvey.
"It would have been standard operating procedure for a facility like this to have some sort of compound to quelch the organic peroxide, essentially to make sure the explosion risk, the fire risk was not there," Dempsey said. "It would eliminate that stock so they wouldn't have it for product going forward."
Dempsey said he's unsure if Arkema followed that procedure.
"I don't know why they didn't do that, I haven't gotten a good answer from Arkema about that at this point," he continued. "Maybe they weren't following procedure according to the experts. But I find it troubling that they said they planned for a worst case scenario. and the storm just ripped right through that."
Due to Texas laws preventing people from being forced from their homes, the 1.5 mile radius around the plant considered to be at risk of explosion has not been evacuated, though Dempsey said most people have left their homes in preparation for the impending explosion.
The largest asteroid in more than a century will whiz safely past Earth on September 1 at a safe but unusually close distance of about 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers), NASA said. The asteroid was discovered in 1981, and is named Florence after the famed 19th century founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. "Florence is…
What made the rain in Hurricane Harvey so extreme?
By Russ Schumacher, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University. The rainfall from Harvey has now exceeded the amount from the previous record-bearer, Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Fifty inches of rain. Nine trillion gallons of water. The Gulf Coast of Texas, and especially the Houston metropolitan area, has been inundated by…
It's a big step forward for a controversial treatment. 'Molly' tablets often don't contain much MDMA, because they're packed with fillers. The purest way to get MDMA is in crystal form. Depositphotos Ecstasy doesn’t sound like something you do in a doctor’s office. But the Food and Drug Administration wants that to change. The FDA just…
In the early years of my career as an oncologist, I'm learning that you really remember the patients you can't save. Those with essentially curable cancers who refused the right treatment stand out the most. One of those is a patient I'll call Ruth. She was only 30 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, as…
Catastrophic flooding in Houston from Hurricane Harvey is the latest reminder that floods kill more people in the United States than any other type of natural disaster and are the most common natural disaster worldwide. Many communities along U.S. coastlines have begun to take heed and have slowed development in coastal flood zones. The bad news, as Harvey shows, is that inland communities are also at risk – and in some, development in flood zones is increasing.
With post-doctoral research associate Yi Qiang and graduate students, I recently studied development patterns in the United States from 2001 to 2011. We found that while new urban development in flood zones near coasts has generally declined, it has grown in inland counties. This is a worrisome trend. It implies that people who have experienced flooding on the coast migrate inland, but may not realize that they are still vulnerable if they relocate to an inland flood zone.
That’s what we have seen firsthand here in Louisiana. Thousands of people fled New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and settled 80 miles inland in Baton Rouge. A decade later, many of these same people lost everything again when a 500-year flood event struck Baton Rouge in August 2016.
Climate change effects, such as sea level rise and potentially more extreme weather, are increasing the risk of flooding, hurricanes and storm surges in coastal areas. Some communities are considering moving coastal populations inland to protect them. However, our research shows that people should be very careful about moving inland. They can still face flood hazards if their property is located in a high-risk flood zone.
Not just a coastal issue
Flooding can happen wherever large rainstorms stall over an area, as we have seen in Boulder, Colorado in 2013; in Texas and Louisiana in 2016; and over Houston now. However, if communities take steps to reduce flood risk, they can mitigate the danger to people and property.
When we assess flood risk in a given location, we consider three questions.
Hazard: How likely is a flood event?
Exposure: How many people and physical assets are located there?
Vulnerability: Do people have the capacity to deal with the event?
Flood risk is the product of these three elements.
We can decrease flood risk by reducing any of the three elements. For example, communities can reduce hazard by building flood control structures, such as dams and levees. They can use laws and policies, such as land use controls, to reduce exposure by steering housing development away from flood zones. And they can make people and property less vulnerable through other measures, such as elevating houses and developing better flood warning systems and emergency preparedness plans.
How can people learn about flood risks where they live? The Federal Emergency Management Agency has created flood zone maps for most parts of the United States. The maps are based on models that consider factors such as elevation, average rainfall and whether a location is near a river or lake that could overflow.
FEMA maps classify flood zones into three categories: high-risk, moderate-low risk and undetermined. High-risk zones have at least a 1 percent chance of being inundated by flood in any given year. These areas are also called base flood or 100-year flood zones.
To obtain a federally insured mortgage on property in a 100-year flood zone, buyers are required to have flood insurance. This policy is designed to make people less vulnerable in the event of a flood, but it increases the cost of home ownership. As a result, flood zone designations can be very contentious.
100-year flood zones are based on a combination of statistics, hydrogeology and society’s tolerance for risk.
Moving into harm’s way
We undertook this study because we wanted to develop a clear baseline showing how Americans’ exposure to flood hazards has changed over the past decade. To assess levels of exposure to flood hazards nationwide, we compiled urban development, flood zone and census data and overlaid them on a county map of the nation.
Overall, we estimated that as of 2011, more than 25 million Americans lived in flood zones. We also found that inland communities were less responsive to flood hazards than coastal communities and were doing a poorer job of steering development out of flood-prone areas.
The three U.S. counties with the largest concentrations of people living in flood zones are located on the Gulf of Mexico. They are Cameron Parish, Louisiana (population 6,401, with 93.6 percent in flood zones); Monroe County, Florida (population 66,804, with 91.4 percent in flood zones); and Galveston County, Texas (population 241,204, with 82.8 percent in flood zones).
These are all coastal communities, where flood risks should be well-known to all residents. But we also found inland counties where the share of the total population living in flood zones increased over the decade we examined. A number of those with the largest increases are bordered by rivers, such as Marshall County in western Kentucky, which sits between Kentucky Lake and the Ohio River. We also identified several hot spots where urban development has increased in coastal flood zones, including New York City and Miami.
Heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Harvey is forecast to reach hundreds of miles inland.
This alarming trend points to a need for more awareness, education and communication about flood risk, especially in inland counties. More affordable housing in nonflood zones and strategies to mitigate floods are also needed, especially inland.
Why would people move to inland flood zone areas? Some may be unaware of the risk. Others may plan to adapt through steps such as elevating their houses or buying flood insurance. Still other may accept the risk because they want to be closer to relatives or workplaces, or for other cultural, political or institutional reasons.
Our analysis has pinpointed a number of regions of concern. The next step is to produce in-depth analyses of these regions, in order to understand why people are locating in flood zones there, and to devise local strategies to reduce overall U.S. flood risks. Climate change, land subsidence or sinking, and construction of new levees and dams will change long-term flood exposure in these areas over time. Therefore, local governments, mortgage lenders and homeowners should review current FEMA flood hazard maps for accuracy.
This research provides national context for a detailed study that we are carrying out examining resilience and sustainability in the Mississippi River Delta. Our goal is to understand how human actions combined with natural environmental conditions may have caused land to sink in the Mississippi Delta. Our research on development in flood zones reminds us that flooding problems in low-lying coastal regions are not unique and also affect areas well away from the shore.
WASHINGTON - Defying U.S. safety protections for human trials, an American university and a group of wealthy libertarians, including a prominent Donald Trump supporter, are backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine. The American businessmen, including Trump adviser Peter Thiel, invested $7 million in the ongoing vaccine research, according to the U.S. company behind…
This research provides national context for a detailed study that we are carrying out examining resilience and sustainability in the Mississippi River Delta. Our goal is to understand how human actions combined with natural environmental conditions may have 