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Another WW-I Chemical Site In Washington, DC
WrongSizeGlass writes "The AP is reporting that the US Army Corps of Engineers has uncovered what appears to be the fourth major disposal area for World War I-era munitions and chemical weapons in the nation's capital. Digging was suspended at a construction site after 'workers pulled smoking glassware from the pit — preliminary tests show the glassware was contaminated with the toxic chemical arsenic trichloride. ... Workers also discovered a jar about three-quarters full of a dark liquid that turned out to be the chemical agent mustard.' Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY."
There is quite a difference between http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustard_(condiment) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_mustard (or mustard gas).
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LOL not sure if I am sad about this or happy! This is the stuff we used to destroy god knows whom... and like Agent Orange - it is now coming back to haunt us! Almost like the taliban we created...!
We seem intent enough upon killing ourselves. Outside help need not apply!
None of their 'disposal' methods were remotely safe and by the time the facilities get shut down, there's no documentation.
Pretty much anything that used to be a military testing facility or base should be treated as a superfund site.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Toxic chemicals leaching into the groundwater would go a long way towards explaining some of the things that go on in DC.
This is really not that newsworthy anymore. I mean, your campus is already on and next to the stuff, so finding more isn't really going to change things. Note to other schools... in times of war, don't let the government take over the campus.
Let's put them in charge of health care.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Do you have any Grey Poupon?
Maybe they're really Saddam's WMDs that Bush and Cheney were searching for all those years! Those sneaky Iraqis!
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Maybe with the government in charge of health care, he can finally afford the operation that makes that possible.
"His name was James Damore."
Seems more appropriate to store it in their own back yard rather than someone else's..... makes it easier to re-use for the next war. It's a government project, though, so they simply misplaced the paperwork on where they put it.
Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY.
I know, that's what I've always said. I've always said we should have buried that stuff in Germany. Or at least England.
Qxe4
they have a sterling track record in dealing with waste disposal, and they always have your well-being as their paramount concern
</sarcasm>
nobody in the healthcare debate believes government will handle healthcare super-efficiently and without bureaucracy or waste. it will simply be BETTER than what we had beforehand. at least the government has a mandate to take care of YOU rather than some shareholders
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ah, so that comment was so threatening to your world view and ideas that you could only attack the messenger anonymously. Are you that threatened and weak?
He does have a point. But, we'll pull it closer than WWI and post era civil servants deciding to bury the stuff in major metro area (back then, it was already big); Government run Medicare is broken, vastly broken. Government run Social Security is broke and broken. There is so much red tape in the military that non-warfighting tasks truly cost 3 to 4 times more, and take 3 times longer than if they were accomplished in the civilian world. Now, you want our medical care and expenses to be run by the U.S. Government?
There, I've probably threatened your fragile little world view again.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY."
HUH! I can think of no more appropriate place than in our government's backyard. Where else should they be dumping this? City folk like them want to dump it out in my back yard. I don't want it. Let them keep it.
Aye-aye, Captain! The time travel vessel is being readied in the launch bay, and your message will be delivered to those 1914 morons in just a few minutes!
Brilliant advice, Sir!
To what end? So they don't travel a century back in time to bury their weapons ever again?
Maybe they should also have some military official today apologize for someone else burying weapons in the distant past.
I believe this is a case of personifying the government as a 200-year-old, which leads to ridiculous statements, and worse, ridiculous policy.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
The summary gives the impression like the U.S. Government has has been willfully ignoring the problem. The fact is there were so many munitions created for WWI and they were used in such a concentrated area that it's no surprise that there are stockpiles of the stuff still around. For example, 16 million acres of northern France had to be cordoned off at the end of the war. They are still pulling chemical weapons out of the ground in some places too, like a site off of a beach resort or this stockpile where farmers to this day plow up unexploded rounds in Belgium. The fact is, there are massive amount of chemical weapons scattered around still from that era and there isn't a hell of a lot that anyone can do about it so quit trying to pin this on the current government. In fact, if you read those links, you'll find the army corps of engineers is responding in a pretty responsible way compared with what they're going through in Houthulst (the last link).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
There are number of cases of spent nuclear fuel going missing as well. It may end up surprising us the way these munitions have.
"They've created a hazardous waste site in the neighborhood," Wells said.
Actually, the neighborhood was created in the hazardous waste site.
further from TFA: the leftover munitions and chemicals were buried behind the school in what was then rural farmland
The article makes it sound like the chems found their way there after the housing development. How much of this is the army's fault... and how much of it is the housing developers fault? Surely they did a little research on the history of the land before they tried to start a housing development there? Probably not, or maybe that's why they got the land so cheap? I know someone personally that had a very close call with some land he almost bought, (got stuck with) that he found out just in time used to be where line transformers were rebuilt. (can you say "ground and buildings saturated with PCBs?) When you buy something like that, it doesn't become exclusively your problem, but you now share a portion of the responsibility for its cleanup once it's deemed necessary.
Basically, if there's a toxic problem and you own it and you don't clean it up or get it cleaned up, you're on the hook for it even years down the road after it's changed hands several times. Of course, the more hands its passed through before someone forces the cleanup, the more diluted your share of the blame becomes. Unfortunately, for this reason, it's on their best interest to NOT clean it up, and to do everything they can to hide the problem, for as long as possible.
Someone's probably doing some research right now trying to figure out how well this chemical disposal was documented, who if anyone was negligent for not factoring it in or disclosing it, and who all is now on the list of people that will be footing the cleanup bill.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What, Obama is pro-cloning?
Ezekiel 23:20
Naw, "contamination by abnormally high concentrations of money and power" is a simpler explanation.
Sure, I'll go remind them. Lemme just set my time machine to 1918 and I'll be off!
The area was the Government's back-yard at the time, and the actual home where the munitions were found is Federal property today, so I think the NIMBY tag is misapplied.
There was a chemical weapons lab at American University during the first world war, and they apparently also were testing the weapons delivery systems, and fired all kinds of nasty stuff into what was then vacant land.
Which is not to say that it's OK, of course, only that it's a documentation and clean-up FAIL, and not really a NIMBY FAIL.
Also, I was surprised to see the article actually did refer to "smoking glassware", I had assumed that was an alarmist mis-interpretation of "smoked glass", but apparently they did find "smoking and fuming glassware".
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
...that the nuclear waste dumps we're planning will remain secure - not just for a few generations but for the millenia promised. What could ever happen in the future that we can't anticipate today?
I thought the meaning of NIMBY was, "Yes, I agree that our town needs a new trash dump/electrical plant/sewage plant/prison, but Not In My Back Yard.
Put it on the Black/Poor side of town.
That is, historically, the meaning of NIMBY.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cows grazed near Georgetown until the WW TWO era.
I bet the munitions were dumped far from the monumental core, in an area the locals thought of as "the sticks". That doesn't excuse it of course, it just explains it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This was 95 years ago. The chemical sites were there first; the backyards came later.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens."
-- Adam Smith
You want to appeal to authority? Fine. I'll see your Adam Smith quote and raise you another. Here's what he has to say about the corporations you'd rather see in charge of things:
"[T]he greater part of [general shareholders] seldom pretend to understand any thing of the business of the company; and when the spirit of faction happens not to prevail among them, give themselves no trouble about it, but receive contentedly such halfyearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to make to them. This total exemption front trouble and front risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in [corporations], who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private [partnership]. ... The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private [partnership] frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master's honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 506 (some archaic terms substituted with modern ones.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"What's the matter, haven't you ever lost something, your purse, your car keys? Well it's rather like that..." . ~Dr. Robert Campbell (Medicine Man) (When you read thish, remembar, it's a Shaawn Caawnary, quote, sho you have to shay it jusht... like... thish.)
Just think of the news story in a few hundred years when they halt the Yucca Mountain shopping center project.
Have gnu, will travel.
While I am at it, I'll remind Hitler to not slaughter all of the Jews in Europe.
I once accidentally breathed in a very small amount of chlorine gas.
I was coughing my lungs up for weeks.
This gave some very intimate appreciation of the horrors of the gas attacks in the trenches.
I once had the same effect after accidentally inhaling a face-full of balsamic vinegar steam. Not fun. Worst thing I've ever had in my lungs (even worse than pepper spray). Was coughing and short of breath for weeks.
Knowledge != Intelligence
From where I'm sitting (Europe) I'm perfectly fine with the fact that the US army waste products are polluting the USA. Certainly we've had enough of your weapons crap over here. Keep it to yourself, and enjoy the many fine diseases it brings.
Thanks
You do realize we are in a/recovering from a corporate banking collapse right? You want the same type of business accumen that caused this recession to cater to the (let's say..) less affluent among us?
Government is definitely broken, but at least we have a chance at these things with the gubment calling the shots. Big corp has no motive other than profit. Why help people when it can just wait us out?
That collapse was caused by the government. They created the situation where they could be called in to save the day while denying they had any role in the event happening in the first place.
...Government run Medicare is broken, vastly broken. Government run Social Security is broke and broken. There is so much red tape in the military that non-warfighting tasks truly cost 3 to 4 times more, and take 3 times longer than if they were accomplished in the civilian world. Now, you want our medical care and expenses to be run by the U.S. Government?...
Do you have any statistical evidence for any of this or are you just spouting off opinions and expecting everyone to accept them as fact?
And you can be sure that leaders of the US in WW II knew that as well, which is why they took a completely different approach to Germany after victory. Instead of making them wallow in suffering, rebuild the country to democratic standards and market prosperity. Because the communists were waiting for their opportunity of we did not.
The commies got what they wanted: DDR (and I don't mean Dance Dance Revolution) and the Berlin Wall.
We would be far, far better off if everyone just put money into a savings account and used that money to pay medical bills.
So I have $10,000 in a savings account, but the bill for the procedure is $20,000. Now what? You still need insurance. But some individual health insurers have integrated the benefits of your suggestion into high-deductible plans. Expenses up to $3,000 are paid out of the insured's tax-advantaged health savings account, but the insurer starts paying once the plan hits the deductible after, for example, a catastrophic incident requiring hospitalization.
"Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY"
The nimby acronym didn't show up until the 1980's...
wwi occured between 1914 and 1918...
Are you planning to travel 90 years into the past to tell President Wilson Not In My Back Yard?
That plan would be retarded...
It was the turn of the century and no one gave a shit about toxic waste, government or citizens.
Even if you did scare up some support they would just be like "Lets bury this crap" or "Its ok we'll dump it into the ocean."
Why even add your opinion to this otherwise interesting article?
because the conservatives in the usa have denied us an ability to do so
if the liberals truly were in charge, rather than hamstrung by the conservative obstructionist party, then we could have a first rate european style healthcare sysytem
but thank you, at least we have you to:
1. claim we don't have the best,
2. point to liberals as the reason why we don't (when the liberals clearly want the best),
3. then obstruct any ability for us to have the best (assuming you are a conservative)
the usa will improve when all the fundamentalist believers in the free market fairy shut the fuck up in shame at what their moronic ideology has reaped
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You've missed the bit where US healthcare is the most expensive in the world due to various insurance scams etc. Removing a lot of the middlemen between the sick and the health care workers actually saves money.
I'd bet McCain would have tried something similar if he thought he could convince his party - Nixon certainly tried.
That sick kid from a family that can't afford private healthcare could infect yours, it's only common sense to do something about that.
I see lots of comments trying to shift the blame from the administration that originally dumped the chemicals in what was at the time countryside.
Funnily not a lot of them highlighting the fact that dumping toxic waste, wherever it might be, is just plain BAD. And this is a textbook case: you might never know what will happen there in 50 years, let alone 500.
Food for thought for nuclear waste dumps...
Was it the american indians that encouraged to think about the consequences of one's actions for seven generations?
http://gao.gov/
Do you own research, start there. What he said is true and common knowledge to anyone who follows economics at all, that's why he doesn't need to provide any links to you. The US government right now, all agencies, is acting as a giant ponzi scheme. They are broke, and are desperately trying to get funding by rebuying exported dollars and issuing more promises to pay more in the future against them, and are running a scam where they buy more of their own debt to keep the numbers up. Go look it up. Taking money from one pocket and sticking it another is not how you pay your debts. Also take any of those topics and fine tune google searches, add "fraud" to all queries.
There isn't anything about the federal government that is sustainable for much longer, the debt is tremendous. Heck, just look at mandated pensions for governmental workers, or estimated costs for retired veterans and medical care.
I am not the GP, but you are asking him to do your homework.
the usa will improve when all the fundamentalist believers in the free market fairy shut the fuck up in shame at what their moronic ideology has reaped
Those of us who truly understand the free market and how to use them have no fear of the current healthcare system, because we don't need to rely on the charity and goodwill of others. Sorry you seem to have trouble with that.
Qxe4
we could have a first rate european style healthcare system
I think my wife has a bottle of 'european style hair conditioner.'
If you count the blood sucking, ambulance chasing trial lawyers as part of the insurance scam (the connection there is very strong) you have a point.
That sick kid from a family that can't afford private healthcare could infect yours, it's only common sense to do something about that.
There's a word to use. It's not a new, innovative technique. Quarantine.
So then the two of you are in agreement. Adam Smith opposed the imposition of government rules (which lead to things like government sanctioned monopolies, also known as corporations) on the Free Enterprise system.
You have a very, very strange interpretation of the text I quoted. Adam Smith was talking about the way the director/shareholder divide resulted in investors who don't know (and often don't care) about the internal operations of the company and in directors who are often negligent with other people's money. He was talking about principal-agent conflicts of interest.
Also, corporations are not inherently government-sanctioned monopolies. (That has to be the most bizarre attempt at a definition I've ever seen.) A corporation is just a liability shield for investors to encourage people to put up money on projects that carry too much financial risk. That's all.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I suggest reading "The Plague" by Camus - short, entertaining, and gets the point across better than simply reading about different vectors of infection.
Gated communities will not save you from sick poor people just as their equivalents didn't in the past.
Right. LTCM collapsed because of the US government, not because they had over 100 billion dollars in off balance sheet risk, and only 5 billion dollars capital. That risk did not ripple through our banking system. It just disappeared. (Yeah, right. Call it conservation of consequence: risk does not evaporate. It turns into debt or profit)
You might as well blame Keynes as the cause of the crash, merely because he prescribed a certain course of action in the event of a systemic market failure.
Those of us who truly understand the free market and how to use them have no fear of the current healthcare system, because we don't need to rely on the charity and goodwill of others. Sorry you seem to have trouble with that.
Hurray, the current system works great for rich people. However, what we really want is a system that works for everyone. (yes, even poor people deserve access to health care)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
How could the government FORGET where they had buried their own arsenal from a previous war....OMG are you serious...this is what I am getting from this story, that no one knew to be careful around there let alone discover a new found stash....should they not all have been documented to avoid being dug up....or is that only for the presidents eyes only? Come on, for a body that governs this whole nation, you would expect more diligence on their part.
but at least its job description is to take care of you
corporations meanwhile, their job description is to take care of the shareholder, not you, explicitly
so you choose:
1. an entity whose job is to take care of you, even if it does a bad job of that
2. an entity whose job is to NOT take care of you, and in fact, when they don't take care of you, they make more money
to me, both #1 and #2 suck. but #1 sounds better than #2
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the death panels have been in existence for years: their called healthcare corporations
they make more money when they deny you care. you do understand that, right?
this is in explicit comparison to the govt, where transparency and accountability can be mandated, investigated, and adhered to. which do you think is better at keeping secrets? the govt where the other party is always looking for secrets to embarrass their opponents? or a corporation, accountable to no one except the almighty buck, who profits when they keep secrets?
the government will waste money and screw up due to incompetence, of course, absolutely do i agree believe and understand that. but do you honestly trust a corporation whose job is to take care of its shareholders over such a government? and do you honestly believe that dealing with a healthcare company isn't bureaucratic and incompetent?
both govt and corporations suck when it comes to healthcare. but the govt sucks LESS. corporations EXPLICITLY consider their #1 priority to be making a profit, and #2 priority is taking care of you. when push comes to shove, which is more important to a corporation? your health or your money?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have no problem with charity or helping the poor. Fortunately, in America we already do that.
I also have no problem with making the healthcare system better. Unfortunately, the bill recently passed by congress only builds on the messed up system we already have.
Qxe4
And that's because the conservatives wouldn't pass it otherwise. Whether that's due to ideology (hating the poor) or corruption (being paid off by industry) I don't know.
Obama shouldn't have gone with it if it couldn't be done properly. Doing nothing would have been better than doing it half-assed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
' Someone needs to remind our government of the meaning of NIMBY." Yes, lets go back in time and do that. Completely ignoring the changes that have happend.
kdawson really keeps /. down..OTOH he never spoiled the ending of a show.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on