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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).
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
We seem intent enough upon killing ourselves. Outside help need not apply!
Toxic chemicals leaching into the groundwater would go a long way towards explaining some of the things that go on in DC.
They're one of the very few things stopping "respectable businesses" (of any kind) from dumping such stuff wherever it's possible.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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
"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 problem is that we didn't just have a vote for the government to take over health care. If we did, there might be some hope.
Instead, what we have now is a government plan that mandates everyone (eventually) buy a government-designed plan from a few government-regulated finance companies. There is no "insurance" here - insurance implies some sort of risk and there is no risk possible in the system that has been set up. It isn't a fund you pay into and eventually get all your money back, either.
We would be far, far better off if everyone just put money into a savings account and used that money to pay medical bills. And hospitals and doctors were required to treat the people that didn't have the savings account and cost-shift it all over to the people that did.
Instead, we have a massive cost-shifting scheme whereby Medicaid and Medicare pays a fraction of what care costs and the "insured" pay cost-plus to make up for it. And the bills have to be whirlled around in a blender three or four times to try to hide the cost shifting that is going on. So they are going to take more money out of Medicare. Do you think the hospitals and doctors will just take less money? Do you think the MRI manufacturers will cut their prices? No? Really, you obviously have no faith in the system.
Evidently, Congress seems to think that if the government is paying less the hospitals will just get less. They seem to have had this idea since the 1960s with the very beginning of Medicare. Instead, the hospitals simply charge everyone else more. Part of it is the way Medicare reimbursement works - they pay some percentage of the real bill. Therefore, raising the bill means getting more realistic reimbursement. Yes, if you raise the price to 130% of what it was you get right about 100% of what you would have gotten if the government is only paying 70% of the bill. The government figured that out and cut the rate some more. The hospitals then raised the prices to counter this.
This has been going on since 1966 or so. And this "new plan" does nothing to change this at all.
All we have is a massive welfare program for finance companies that are underwriting medical care. The government isn't doing much other than making sure these finance companies have lots of customers. SO STOP CALLING IT GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE!
"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.
Naw, "contamination by abnormally high concentrations of money and power" is a simpler explanation.
I'd like to know, from a historical perspective, how this was just "misplaced" so close to the capital, even during war time. Unlike Europe, this is not an area where a war occurred - and the article states it was one of only a few "major" dumping sites. Classified or not, I would imagine this is something that the US Government took rather meticulous records of, even back in WWI - and something that a reasonable number of scientists, military officers, and technicians knew about. Was there some significant loss of records over the decades relating to these programs?
This was 95 years ago. The chemical sites were there first; the backyards came later.
Citation Needed.
"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").
Even if true (which I am not qualified to comment on), this represents about 1/100th of the story. If you haven't read The Threatening Storm, by Kenneth Pollack, you simply don't know what you're talking about.
The Threatening Storm is a comprehensive look at all the machinations Saddam's regime took to confound, mislead and stymie inspectors. Pollack has as good or better a grasp of the events of this period than anyone in the world, as he was Director for Persian Gulf Affairs on President Clinton's National Security Council while all this as going on. And needless to say, he was not part of and has no love for the Bush Administration.
Of course, this has all been rehashed a thousand times. Not that the facts make any difference. People simply chose to believe whatever version of events support their own pre-existing notions.
Conspiracy theorists need no citation!
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