Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey pose a threat not only to human lives but also to telecommunication systems. When they go down, entire cities and communities are cut off from each other. But mesh networks can get people connected again and, during emergencies, be a crucial link to information. VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
…
Day: September 2, 2017
Floodwaters have inundated at least five highly contaminated toxic waste sites near Houston, raising concerns that the pollution there might spread.
The Associated Press visited the sites this past week, some of them still only accessible by boat.
Long a center of the American petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen such Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among the most intensely contaminated places in the country.
No immediate response
EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham could not immediately provide details on when agency experts would inspect the Houston-area sites. She said Friday that staff had checked on two other Superfund sites in Corpus Christi and found no significant damage.
“We will begin to assess other sites after flood waters recede in those areas,” Graham said.
Near the Highlands Acid Pit, across the swollen San Jacinto River from Houston, Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home. He worried whether Harvey’s floodwaters had also washed in pollution from the Superfund site just a couple blocks away.
In the 1950s, the pit was filled with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and EPA maintains monitoring wells there.
When he was growing up in Highlands, Chandler, now 62, said he and his friends used to swim in the by-then abandoned pit.
“My daddy talks about having bird dogs down there and to run and the acid would eat the pads off their feet,” he recounted Thursday. “We didn’t know any better.”
Superfund sites a priority
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has said cleaning up Superfund sites are a priority, even as he has taken steps to roll back or delay rules aimed at preventing air and water pollution. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget seeks to cut money for the Superfund program by 30 percent, though congressional Republicans are likely to approve less severe reductions.
Like Trump, Pruitt has expressed skepticism about the predictions of climate scientists that warmer air and warmer seas will produce stronger, more drenching storms.
Under the Obama administration, the EPA conducted a nationwide assessment of the increased threat to Superfund sites posed by climate change, including rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. Of the more than 1,600 sites reviewed as part of the 2012 study, 521 were determined to be in 1-in-100 year and 1-in-500 year flood zones. Nearly 50 sites in coastal areas could also be vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The threats to human health and wildlife posed by rising waters inundating Superfund sites varies widely depending on the specific contaminants and concentrations involved. But the EPA report specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area.
In Crosby, across the San Jacinto River from Houston, a small working-class neighborhood sits between two Superfund sites, French LTD and the Sikes Disposal Pits. The area was wrecked by Harvey’s floods, with only a single house from among the roughly dozen lining Hickory Lane still standing.
After the flood water receded on Friday, a sinkhole the size of a swimming pool had opened up and swallowed two cars. The acrid smell of creosote filled the air.
At the Brio Refining Inc. in Friendswood, the floodwaters had receded by Saturday. There was a layer of silt on the road leading to the Superfund site. The company operated a chemical reprocessing and refining facility there until the 1980s, leaving behind polluted soil and groundwater.
Completely underwater
The San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site was completely covered by water when an AP reporter saw it Thursday. According to its website, the EPA was set to make a final decision this year about a proposed $97 million cleanup effort to remove toxic waste from a paper mill that operated there in the 1960s.
The flow from the raging river washing over the toxic site was so intense it damaged an adjacent section of the Interstate 10 bridge, which has been closed to traffic due to concerns it might collapse.
There was no way to immediately access how much contaminated soil from the site might have been washed away. According to an EPA survey from last year, soil from the former waste pits contains dioxins and other long-lasting toxins linked to birth defects and cancer.
Kara Cook-Schultz, who studies Superfund sites for the advocacy group TexPIRG, said environmentalists have warned for years about the potential for flooding to inundate Texas Superfund sites, particularly the San Jacinto Waste Pits.
“If floodwaters have spread the chemicals in the waste pits, then dangerous chemicals like dioxin could be spread around the wider Houston area,” Cook-Schultz said. “Superfund sites are known to be the most dangerous places in the country, and they should have been properly protected against flooding.”
…
Sah Phon can live with some grief from his ancestral spirits.
The elderly villager abandoned them in Cambodia’s Stung Treng province in favor of a relocation package after learning his homeland would be swallowed by an enormous dam. But he’s confident they will forgive him.
“If we do something wrong, we pray in accordance with our traditions; for example [sacrificing] pigs and chickens for praying. And we pray so that we can be recovered,” he reasons.
Once a fisherman from Sre Kor village near the confluence of the Sre Pok and Se San rivers, Phon has watched as fish stocks have dwindled over the past few years.
Some blame the dam construction, others destructive techniques such as electro-fishing but all agree the population of fish is rapidly shrinking.
Relocation offer
So with his village set to be flooded and his primary source of income dead, Phon took a relocation offer early. He says he was the first.
The swift decision paid off. Phon struck out in a relocation lottery with a house right next to the entrance road of Kbal Romeas Thmey (New Kbal Romeas).
He built up a business selling household wares in the prime location and says he’s doing fine.
“It’s different because it has a highway — an ASEAN highway,” he boasted as his grandson hooks bait to a line — practicing the skills of his grandfather’s dying profession. “Before I could not transport any goods. Now I can. The truck can get into our home to transport goods. Whatever I need, they can reach my home.”
Phon has been lucky, but there are only so many general stores one village can support and not many others are as enthusiastic about relocation.
That includes his brother, Sah Voeurn, who like thousands of ethnic minority villagers facing eviction, is pained by the prospect of abandoning a fundamentally different way of life.
“I really don’t want to live there. The situation is difficult, there’s not enough water. It’s mountain land and it’s rocky and sandy and very difficult to do agriculture,” he said.
Behind the rows of shiny blue new roofs at the relocation villages each family has a small plot of land. On the surface, the village looks quite nice.
Inadequate compensation
Away from the prying eyes of company representatives and local officials monitoring the area, many quietly complain that opportunities to generate income are scarce, the soil is poor and personal movements are heavily restricted.
Voeurn feels so strongly against relocation that he has traveled the long journey from Sre Kor to Kbal Romeas to join a community protest — a trip made harder by multiple police checkpoints attempting to restrict access to the area.
“The government is building the dam to get more income for the government, not for the villagers,” he said on the eve on a pig sacrifice with 50 Bunong families that are holding out and trying to stop the dam
The 400-megawatt Lower Se San II, which is Cambodia’s largest dam so far with a flood plain of 335 square kilometers, hasn’t just stirred controversy because of the roughly 4,000 families it will forcibly displace.
It has far wider implications for fish stocks, conservationists argue.
More than 9 percent of the fisheries for the entire Mekong river would be lost because of the Lower Se San II, according to a report in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Science.
Even an environmental impact assessment commissioned by the dam’s developers and approved by the Cambodian government in 2010 found the impacts on fish would be severe, as it would block migratory species.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy did not respond to multiple request to comment on the impact of the project.
With Cambodian’s energy demands predicted by some estimates to triple between 2012 and 2020 and supply already heavily reliant on imports, the government argues the more than $800-million project will supply much needed power to five provinces.
Debates rage about how this benefit stacks up economically against the loss of fish and impacts on water flow and quality.
What none of the arguments over figures can appreciate though is the value of a fundamentally different way of life, or whether affected villagers will attain a better standard of life by being dragged into the formal economy rather than living effectively off grid.
“The native people have a way of life opposite to mainstream people, native people consider nature as friend and don’t have a passion to own,” says Loek Sreyneang, a project officer at Cambodia Indigenous Youth Association.
The scores of families holding out want an audience with the government, but that has not been forthcoming.
So instead they have taken their case to the provincial court, arguing the development amounts to a systematic attack on indigenous people and thus a crime against humanity under Cambodian law.
That desperate final act will almost certainly have no impact and in weeks their houses will be underwater.
“I can feel their misery to leave from home, a fatherland which they have lived in for ages,” Loek Sreyneang lamented.
…
The smoke from massive wildfires hangs like fog over large parts of the U.S. West, an irritating haze causing health concerns, forcing sports teams to change schedules and disrupting life from Seattle to tiny Seeley Lake, Montana.
Air quality has been rated unhealthy across the region because of blazes that show no signs of abating. Officials said Friday that one of the worst U.S. wildfire seasons in terms of land burned is likely to keep scorching Western states and blanketing them with smoke until later this fall.
Headaches, raspy voices
People who live in small towns to the populous San Francisco Bay Area have had enough.
“Last night, I went to sleep with the windows open and woke up with a stomachache and a headache,” said Tresa Snow, who owns a hair salon in Brookings, Oregon, near a large wildfire. “I knew before I could even smell it that the fire was back. And you can hear my voice, kind of raspy. We’re all kind of like that.”
She said business has been down in the town near the California border.
“Businesses are closing because they don’t have their help,” Snow said. “People have been evacuating.”
As the long Labor Day weekend approached, several high school football teams changed their season-opening games to avoid the smoke, and other athletic events have been postponed.
Fleeing homes in Burbank
In Southern California, an erratic wildfire just north of Los Angeles forced the closure of Interstate 210, an essential link to routes in and out of town just as Labor Day weekend travel was starting.
Firefighters had reduced the raging flames, but the freeway was expected to be shut down all night.
The fire also spurred mandatory evacuations. Residents in the Brace Canyon Park area of Burbank were ordered to leave their homes as the fire got dangerously close. About 50 homes were being threatened late Friday.
Air hazardous, events canceled
The poor air quality has caused the cancellation of some performances at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Cycle Oregon Classic Ride, a 400-mile bicycle event this month.
Smoke from wildfires in British Columbia pushed down into western Washington in August, choking the region and prompting health officials to warn the Seattle area that children, the elderly and people with respiratory problems should stay inside.
Smoke has affected the Montana town of Seeley Lake to such a degree that health officials urged people to escape the pollution weeks before an order Tuesday to evacuate part of town because of the encroaching fire.
The town’s air quality had hourly pollution readings classified as hazardous in 26 days in August, topping out the ability of the monitor to measure the pollution in many cases. It was considered hazardous Friday, too.
“There aren’t even the correct health categories to describe what they’re seeing,” air quality specialist Saran Coefield said.
Most of the smoke entering Washington state this year is coming from neighboring states and British Columbia, said Joye Redfield-Wilder of the state Department of Ecology.
“I’m smelling smoke in my office right now,” she said.
Long, destructive season
The National Interagency Fire Center said more than 25,000 firefighters and personnel are spread out across the Western U.S. fighting 56 large uncontained wildfires, 21 of them in Montana and 17 in Oregon.
Fire center spokesman Jessica Gardetto said Friday that besides one of the most destructive wildfire seasons, 2017 is turning into one of the longest, starting in the spring in Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico.
“Some of these firefighters have been working on fires for six months now,” she said.
The 10,600 square miles (27,500 square kilometers) that have burned rank this season as the third-worst in the last decade. The area burned is about 2,600 square miles (6,700 square kilometers) above the 10-year average.
In Northern California, a wildfire burning near the town of Oroville has destroyed 20 homes. The blaze about 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Sacramento had consumed nearly 6 square miles (15 square kilometers) and was threatening 500 homes, officials said.
Besides poor air quality, Montana lost a historic backcountry chalet in Glacier National Park this week to a wildfire. Firefighters tried to protect two-story Sperry Chalet, which was built in 1913 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
…
Serena Williams has given birth to a baby girl, the first child for the former world’s No. 1 tennis player, her coach Patrick Mouratoglou said via Twitter Friday.
The 35-year-old American, who is engaged to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, has not competed since winning the Australian Open in January but has posted several videos to social media showing her hitting balls during her pregnancy.
“Congratulations @SerenaWilliams for your baby girl. I am so happy for you and I feel your emotion,” Mouratoglou wrote.
“Btw … I wish you a speedy recovery … we have a lot of work ahead of us,” he added.
Williams has dominated the sport for the past decade and is one grand slam short of Australian Margaret Court’s record of 24 major titles.
She confirmed her pregnancy in April hours after triggering frenzied speculation when she accidentally posted a short-lived selfie on social media with the caption: “20 weeks.”
Williams, the world’s highest-paid female athlete, was about two months pregnant when she captured her 23rd grand slam singles title at the Australian Open.
She told Vogue magazine last month about her “outrageous plan” to defend her title in Australia, where the year’s first grand slam will be played from Jan. 15-28.
Other women have left the tour to have children and returned at a high level, although none has done so at Williams’ age.
Kim Clijsters of Belgium retired and had a child before coming back at age 26 and winning three grand slam titles.
Australians Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Court also won grand slam titles after having children.
…
American musician Eric Alabaster loves Pakistani food, culture, speaks Urdu, and plays “Desi” music. His music studio in Brooklyn, New York, is known as “Little Pakistan.” VOA Deewaa’s Samin Ahsan has his story.
…
Homelessness is a serious problem, and there are a variety of approaches to combating it. Faith Lapidus has the story of one effort to tackle the problem in Los Angeles, one tiny house at a time.
…
U.S. home builders created more than a million units of housing in 2016. Often, older homes are demolished to make way for the new buildings, and things like doors, floors, windows and more are thrown away. Arash Arabasadi reports from Washington on one nonprofit that reclaims old materials and gives back to the community.
…
Hurricane Harvey may temporarily slow U.S. consumer spending, hurt national economic growth and boost unemployment for a while. Experts say it is very hard to accurately predict just how seriously Harvey will hurt Houston and the U.S. economy. But, as VOA’s Jim Randle reports, one expert on the Texas economy is bullish on Houston’s recovery.
…
Floodwaters are beginning to recede around Houston, and although the rain in Houston has stopped, VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, assessing its impact on the health of Houston’s residents is only just beginning.
…