Will the nerve gas reach Atlanta tomorrow? Will CNN cover it then?

Nobody really knows. They've never burned 2000 and change tons of nerve gas in a populated area before.

If you haven't heard about this, you're not alone. It hasn't gotten a lot of press. Anniston, Albama doesn't have a lot of rich folks, famous folks, glamor.

Whatever happens to the residents of Anniston, you probably won't hear much about it.

Whether CNN goes into frenzy over it is really up to the wind.

=================
A federal judge cleared the way Friday for the Army to begin incinerating Cold War-era chemical weapons at a military facility in Alabama, rejecting environmentalists' claims that the process will endanger nearby residents.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson denied a request from an environmental group for a temporary restraining order to block the startup of the incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot.

The incinerator, located about 50 miles east of Birmingham, would be the nation's first in a populated area. Emergency planners say about 35,000 people live within nine miles of the plant, which under the Army's plan would destroy some 2,254 tons of nerve agents and mustard gas over seven years.

Prior to the hearing, Army spokesman Mike Abrams said that if Jackson sided with the military, trial burns could begin as soon as Saturday.

About 19,000 people who live near the depot have yet to pick up protective hoods, air filters and other gear being distributed in case of an accidental release of nerve agent, and officials still are installing safety equipment at some schools.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-08-08-chemweapons-destroy_x.htm


edit to add more background here
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uschem043402921aug05,0,7548216.story

She never knows when the seizures will come. Perhaps in mid-sentence, as she is describing the warm, windy morning eight years ago when the first one struck, turning her lively face into a twisted, frozen mask...

Neutralization is favored by environmentalists and is used at some U.S. sites, but Abrams said it was unthinkable for Anniston, whose incinerator was completed in 2001. "It's a matter of what's been spent and a matter of what would have to be spent,"...

The entire incineration is expected to last at least seven years.

"What kind of life are we going to have, sitting in our homes from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.? We should be able to live our lives the way we want," Porter said before another seizure - the third in 45 minutes - rendered her speechless....

wow.

I wonder why nobody is covering this?

This is quite amazing and scary!

:scared:

the story. No story, no problem, no threat, no big deal, no news coverage.

And no danger to California, or New York.

About 19,000 people who live near the depot have yet to pick up protective hoods, air filters and other gear being distributed in case of an accidental release of nerve agent, and officials still are installing safety equipment at some schools.

Why the fucking precautions then?!?!?!

that's a good one :toast:

peace

You're extremely trusting of our nation media.

If it was, I guarantee you, every media outlet on the planet would be covering it. Good grief you people . . . get a grip.

It's gotten some news coverage, but the problem still isn't resolved. Care to comment?

Are any of the public going to test the air and not believe the plants testing?

Easterly winds blow toward Atlanta

And the winds usually come from the West.

I'm right between Anniston and Atlanta, and I'm not happy about this.

Eloriel

Damn, I knew I should have taken that meteorology class. And I'm in Duluth, so I feel your pain.

Westerlys blow FROM the west.
The general weather pattern in the U.S. is west to east.

I hope you're joking.

you know, to blow it into crawford....mama earth needs to remind a few people who's in charge.

nothing better that you can do to protect your loved ones than to leave town...take a long vacation, move somewhere UPWIND...protect your family...GO NOW !!!

a message from the Chemist...

This sounds unbelievably crazy - they are burning 20000 tons of chemical weapons in a populated area? Is this some kind of experiment, to see how many people die?

Just when you though it couldn't get any worse. I'd sure as hell get out of town.

In the wind path from all the nuclear testing sites in Nevada. They have an inordinate number of cancer cases and birth defects.
This can't be good for the people of Anniston AL. It also makes me wonder what all is buried under the metro Detroit area, where I live. We already have the lead in the soil and the fecal coliform that has ruined Lake St. Clair (thank you John Engler for the last one). When I was a prevention worker, I had a bunch of kids with asthma and cerebral palsy, all of whom's mothers lived in the area around the Jefferson Chrysler plant when they were pregnant. Nobody wants to look seriously at this stuff. Jennifer Granholm has approved a big lead removal program, which is a good start. The only reason she got it through was because Grand Rapids was as affected by lead as Detroit.

This is the judge who went out bragging on national television about how rotten Microsoft was before he issued his order splitting Microsoft in two...an order which was reversed by the appellate court primarily because Jackson was being a dumb-ass.

No wonder the Army wanted him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A46648-2001Dec31¬Found=true

On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it "Alabama clay" and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn't know their dirt and yards and bass and kids -- along with the acrid air they breathed -- were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn't know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.



Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents -- many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" -- show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic."

And now here comes the Army to burn nerve gas in the same small town! Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "military-industrial complex", doesn't it?

As noted above, no one -- at least no one who matters -- gives a rip about Anniston. <sarcasm> Anniston needs to come up with a plan to keep the polluters away, sort of like the Bosnians' (apocryphal) last-ditch peace plan of drilling for oil. :-) Perhaps they could convince Rocco's Restaurant to open a location in Anniston, with all the reality TV coverage that implies. Or perhaps a movie premiere would do the trick, as long as the film wasn't a documentary of Anniston's pollution woes, or anything starring Ahh-nuld. :-)

Oh, I've got it! A great big huge days-long altie-rock festival! They could call it...

"Lolla-pollute-za"!!!!!

</sarcasm>

I'm in line after Atlanta. I wonder how much diluted burned nerve gas is bad for you? cough, cough, urk....

The people of Anniston, AL, entered my thoughts the first time I heard about this little incineration. These people could get hurt terribly, and, unless they just leave for a while, there is very little they can do about it.

I hope for their sake the people of Alabama wake up and realize that conservative environmental policy produces such results, and that voting for conservatives produces this kind of insane result.

It is so hard to believe that this would be allowed. I lived in Anniston for about a year one time and really liked it. I think the Army base there made it better since they came from different parts of the country.

I hate to bring up Iraq in this thread, but hear me out. 2254 Tons of weapons destroyed over 7 years is 322 tons per year. The most technologically advanced country on the planet can only throw 322 tons in a fire in one year but a borderline third world country (see Iraq) was able to hide or move to another country over 500 tons of the same in the span of a few months. When will someone point out to or Commander In Chimp and the Mercan people that the logistics involved in the supposed disappearance of Iraq's CBN weapons programs was beyond even the USA to pull off.

Jay