A Chevron underground pipeline burst early on June 12th, gushing crude oil into a nearby stream for several hours. The spill, in the well-to-do neighborhood surrounding Salt Lake's largest park, was gushing 50 gallons of crude per minute when responders arrived in the morning.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports that residents 3 miles away smelled oil at 4am, the spill was officially reported at 6:45am, and the pipe was successfully shut-off by 8am. By then the oil had reached Liberty Pond (shown above) and was reported flowing into the Jordan River.
"In Liberty Pond the geese were brown - they're normally white - I've probably known those geese for years, because I've gone to that park all the time," said Ashley Anderson, a local climate activist.
Anderson gave me this account of the ground-zero-like scene at Liberty park during the press conference. "There were 25 firetrucks and hazmat suits everywhere. It smelled like the inside fo a garage with a diesiel truck running. The air was pretty bad."
Chevron officials told the media what had happened and promised to clean it up. "One resident had gathered up a bucket of rocks from the creek that were coated in oil. He brought them with him to the press conference and got in Chevron's face, saying 'you're going to pay for all this.' The Chevron spokesperson said 'of course we are'."
When I asked him if he believed Chevron, he wasn't optimistic. "Words are cheap, and corporations don't understand real costs, or they do and they're good at pretending like they don't." Anderson went on to explain that oil companies tend to be given free passes in Utah, which may soon be home to the United States first tar sands operation.
On Tuesday of this week, the Utah governor Gary Herbert released an energy plan where he asked: "Why are we drilling in the middle of the ocean where there is extreme environmental risk when we could be meeting the demand for domestic production from on‐shore development in areas with minimal environmental risk such as Utah?"
This year's string of coal mine disasters, natural gas explosions and oil spills are forcing American to answer the question: at what cost are we willing to continue using fossil fuels?
For more photos, visit the KSL oil spill slideshow.
Follow Morgan Goodwin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mogmaar
The abandonment of single payer and the public option will haunt American healthcare for a generation as the half-assed solution of Obamacare condemns millions of American citizens to an early grave.These are some of the questions addressed in Health Care in World Cities, a new book co-authored by Hastings Center scholar Michael Gusmano and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The book, which compares New York, Paris, and London, provides insights into the possible effects of different health care systems on access to health care and the health of the populations.
Some of the book's findings question widespread assumptions about health care here and abroad. For example, previous studies have shown that the rate of revascularization, a type of heart surgery, is four times higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries. But when the authors accounted for differences in the incidence of heart disease, they found that residents of New York (and the U.S. as a whole) had lower rates of revascularization than residents of Paris (and all of France). One reason is that large segments of the New York, and U.S., population do not have access to revascularization because they are uninsured.
Another conclusion in the book confirms earlier findings that disparities in access to health care are greater in the U.S. than in other counties. However, the authors found surprising disparities in Paris and London, too. Although each of these cities has a wealth of health care resources, "they have shocking - some would say embarrassing - health inequalities," the authors write.
The authors hope that their work stimulates policymakers in the cities studied, and in their nations, to consider the consequences of poor access to health care and the role played by the national health policies. "National policies that reduce financial barriers to health care and place greater emphasis on primary care improve access and reduce inequities, even in world cities that are marked by vast inequalities in wealth," says Gusmano. "The failure to address financial barriers to care in the U.S. has resulted in thousands of premature deaths and hospitalizations that could have been avoided."
The book grew out of the World Cities Project, a joint investigation of The Hastings Center, the International Longevity Center-USA, and New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service that is comparing the health, social services, long-term care, and quality of life in five of the world's largest metropolitan areas: Hong Kong and Tokyo, as well as the three cities compared in the book. Gusmano is co-director of the World Cities Project.
The book's co-authors are Victor G. Rodwin, a professor of health policy and management at New York University, and Daniel Weisz, a research associate at the World Cities Project, International Longevity Center.
Julian Assange Anxious that Wikileaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange. Philip Shenon reports.
Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.
The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.
“We’d like to know where he is; we’d like his cooperation in this,” one U.S. official said of Assange.
American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.
And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.
As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.
The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.
American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.
Assange, who first gained notoriety as a computer hacker, is as secretive as his website and has no permanent home.
He was in the United States as recently as several weeks ago, when he gave press interviews to promote the website’s release of an explosive 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters.
Wikileaks has not replied directly to email messages from The Daily Beast.
However, in cryptic posts this week on the website Twitter, Wikileaks referred to an earlier Daily Beast article on the investigation of Manning and said that it “looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the U.S. has.”
In one post, the site said that allegations that “we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”
Pentagon investigators say that particular post may have been an effort by Wikileaks to throw them—and news organizations—off the track as the site prepared the library of State Department cables for release, officials said.
“It looks like they’re playing some sort of semantic games,” one American official said of Wikileaks. “They may not have 260,000 cables, but they’ve probably got enough cables to make trouble.”
In another cryptic Twitter post, the site said that while the State Department might be alarmed about the prospect of the release of classified cables, “we have not been contacted.”
American officials were unwilling to say what would happen if Assange is tracked down, although they suggested they would have many more legal options available to them if he is still somewhere in the United States.
Our Foreign Policy has relied on too much two-facing for too long. Before we commit ourselves to another 50 years of Janus diplomacy give a chance for the light of day to all the kludge and drudge of anti-communist paranoia morphing into anti-terrorist paranoia.
I wish Julian luck.
