Friday night after a family birthday, we drove nonstop to Connecticut to spend time with a gravely ill relative. I will explain more when I get a chance, but for the moment, posting will be sporadic.
Thanks.
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld.
Have you ever held your breath for 35 minutes? In a manner of speaking, I am right now (Feb. 7) as I ride a Chicago bus so noxious with fumes, I vacillate between not inhaling at all and being forced to take a shallow breath to avoid passing out. I’m convinced the tailpipe is connected directly to the heating system.
I wish I could say this was an occasional occurrence, but alas at least once a month my fellow commuters join me to win the jackpot: most polluted bus in the Chicago Transit Authority fleet.
I find it quite ironic, therefore, that on today’s bus ride I finished reading How Everyday Products Make People Sick by Dr. Paul D. Blanc. While the book is largely a way-back trip through the horrors of the industrial workplace, it also is revelatory as to how toxic poisons became part of our daily lives.
Blanc reveals how perfectly safe products such as animal- and plant-derived glue became a toxic substance made from coal-tar and petroleum by-products. Bleach, used in the homes pf most Americans, originally killed workers by the score. Both of these products can be as health-damaging to the consumer as the workers who first discovered the side effects of these chemicals. Bleach when mixed with other common cleaning products can cause a form of asthma.
By sifting through the historical record, Blanc exposes how politicians and industrialists repeatedly fail to learn from the side effects – brain and nerve damage, impotence, chloracne, mill fever and of course death – that befell those who made household products such as plastic, glue, rubber, cotton, fuel additives and bleach.
One would think these problems are a thing of the past, but apparently not. Blanc makes clear that there is a cycle of forgetting safety lessons and letting businesses return to their bad ways. Or industry simple exports the side effects to poorer nations.
Are we heading back into one of those periods of forgetfulness? Consider that thousands of new untested products are hitting the market everyday.
Another book that reveals how unnatural chemicals and products are infiltrating our lives is The Hundred-Year Lie by Randall Fitzgerald, which I mentioned here.
The toxic bus is the least of our problems, according to Fitzgerald, who reveals that we’re poisoning our water, food and air with pharmaceuticals, home products and cosmetics. But scientists have little understanding of how these chemicals interact once they’re in our body. Just about every aspect of our lives polluted with chlorine, pharmaceuticals, synthetic chemicals, flame retardants and other chemicals, Fitzgerald says.
No need to persuade me that the dangers are real: I’ve thrown many products away – think bathroom cleaners, shampoos and dashboard conditioners for the car – after discovering they affect my breathing or irritate my skin. We’ve had to change diaper brands numerous times for both of our kids because of horrible skin reactions. (We think it might be the bleach used to make diapers white.) The list is endless.
I’ll warn you in advance: Reading these two books will be unnerving for some and a lesson in anger management for others. While there may be a touch of alarmism in The Hundred-Year Lie, Blanc takes a very sober approach in How Everyday Products Make People Sick. Both books, though, shed light on my contention that Something Odd Is Happening to US.
It’s morning now, 12 hours after the bus ride. All night long, I could taste the industrial fumes. The off-taste is slowly fading, but my lungs are clogged and my voice has dropped an octave, which happens when I talk too much or breath bad air. After reading these books, I can only imagine what those fumes are doing to mine and everyone else’s health.
While industrial society parents like me fret over the harm chemicals are causing our children, a reverse crisis is continuing in the Third World.
The lack of proper water treatment subsequently kills more than 2 million children around the world each year, reports The New York Times on a new United Nations report. A whopping 2.6 billion people around the globe pee and poop into rivers, plastic bags and topsoil rather than modern toilet facilities.
Five billion cases of childhood diarrhea, mostly caused by contaminated food and water, are reported each year, according the report, Human Development Report 2006 – Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (pdf). I’d love to read the entire thing, but it is 440 pages long. Let’s just say that a quick scroll through it reveals an ugly world that most of us don’t want to hear about:
“At the start of the 21st century unclean water is the world’s second biggest killer of children. Every day millions of women and young girls collect water for their families – a ritual that reinforces gender inequalities in employment and education. Meanwhile, the ill health associated with deficits in water and sanitation undermines productivity and economic growth, reinforcing the deep inequalities that characterize current patterns of globalization and trapping vulnerable households in cycles of poverty.”
It would cost about $10 billion a year to cut the problem in half by 2015, according to the Times story. That’s $500 million a year from 20 industrialized nations.
But few Westernized nations are allocating that much for water. The big exception is Japan, whose $850 million a year accounts for one-fifth of the global total.
I’ve said this before, but if the $341 billion dollars that were spent on the Iraqi war had been spent on the water problem, it simply wouldn’t exist! Then 2.6 billion people out there might be saying thank you rather than Go Home Yankee.
While we are in the throes of packing around here, I urge parents to read the Los Angeles Times’ series on Earth’s Altered Oceans written by Kenneth R. Weiss. I suspect many will find the stories absolutely horrifying.
As parents, we face enough issues – financial, health, safety, housing and education – to worry about. But what if we navigate our children successfully into a doomed world? What if the oceans revert back to their ancient past, filled with primordial goo, toxin-producing algae and enormous schools of jellyfish? What if clear-blue waters and dolphins become a thing of the past?
Maybe you will feel this series is overwrought. Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t. Please read it and see what you think.
I have good news to report: the friend of mine who lives near the Topanga fire west of Los Angeles reports everything is now okay. LAPDWife also has some great pictures of how close the blaze came to her neighborhood.
The Topanga blaze triggered memories of the two that danced north our house only to be brought under control just in time. While my wife and I turned the blaze of 2002 into our first date following the birth of Seth, the 2003 Grand Prix blaze turned into a nightmare.
It was the weekend before my 40th birthday, and we were going to celebrate at my mom’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona. The plan? To work from home on Friday and then drive six hours to Scottsdale. We had to leave before rush hour turned the freeway into a parking lot.
The Grand Prix Fire had been burning about 10-12 miles east of us for two days, but it seemed isolated and small – 3,500 acres. But Friday morning, I could see through Seth’s bedroom window flames dancing on the mountains. (Photo from Huntington Beach City website.)
The outdoor sky was filled with a thick, white-brown smoke. This Hot desert winds called the Santa Anas more than tripled the blaze overnight to 12,600 acres.
I called up my boss and told him we were getting out of there now. He understood and by noon we were driving out of town. So were a lot of other people.
One difficult decision was whether to take our cat, Nellie. We only had a Toyota Echo at the time, which had no room left over for a cat carrier once packed with mommy, daddy, baby and luggage. And Nellie did not travel well without drugs, which we didn’t have on hand.
My mom’s condo is even smaller than the Echo. Fortunately, our pet sitter promised to take Nellie home with her if the fire came too close.
The days in Scottsdale went quickly, though we kept an eye on the news. At one point, we learned the Grand Prix fire had merged with the Old fire in the east to create a conflagration reaching almost 100,000 acres.
We had difficulty reaching our pet sitters, who eventually told us Nellie was fine, though our neighborhood had been officially evacuated. Firefighters were letting pet sitters and other workers into the area. They did warn us everything inside and outside the house was covered in a fine layer of black soot. (Photo credit NASA.)
One irony: My wife had arranged a day at the spa as a 40th birthday present. Considering what was going on, it was good to have all the tensions rubbed out of my shoulders, back and legs.
We were pretty confident that by Monday night our house had been spared so I headed home alone Tuesday morning. I didn’t want Seth and Anne to breathe more soot that necessary.
It turned out to be a wise choice, because the smoke coming from the fires had turned the air gray and sometimes black. The “fog” lasted the 400 miles from the western edge of Phoenix until I reached Los Angeles. The smoke was so heavy in places I could only see 20-50 feet in from of me.
When I reached our home, I learned the fire had stayed north of our neighborhood and continued due west into Claremont. What I didn’t know until much later was that the fire sneaked down a wash and came much closer than I had thought. The X on the map illustrates the fire came within a quarter of a mile of our home.
Once in the house, I fed the Nellie – she was fine – and used the air blower to get the half inch-deep layer of soot off the sidewalk, patios and balcony. In the house, I had to sweep and mop the floors.
Because the house still smelled like a campfire, I drove down to Long Beach – the coastal town was far away from these fires – and stayed the night with my wife’s cousins. Amazingly, soot covered the cars in their neighborhood, too.
The next day, I borrowed a co-worker’s shampoo machine and took it home after work. I hoped that cleaning the carpets would reduce the smoky smell somewhat.
A few days later, Seth and the Empress flew back into town. They reported that the heavy smoke I drove through blanketed Phoenix for most of the days I was gone and forced them to stay indoors.
As it turns out, a house we nearly bought is now just a foundation. The Grand Prix Fire destroyed the beautifully wooded Palmer Canyon and left only two homes standing.
Thinking about it now, I am amazed how lucky we were. Had we bought the house in Palmer Canyon, we’d still be homeless or caught in bureaucratic hell. And if the winds had shifted just a tiny bit, our house in Upland might have burned.
One last thing: even two years later, we find black soot on the bottom of our shoes and the mountains looking starker than they did before the fires. It’s clear that it will be a long time for the wilderness to return to its former beauty.
Statistics
I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the huge Topanga wildfire ripping through parts of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Fortunately, that blaze has been brought mostly under control by firefighters across the region, reports the Los Angeles Times.
For those who aren’t familiar with just how big the Los Angeles area is, the western edge of the Topanga fire is about 70 miles from my home. (The first few photos I posted are from the Los Angeles Times.) There are some smaller fires burning closer to my family in the eastern suburbs of Upland, but nothing serious so far.
Despite the fires’ distance, the air smelled smoky most of the day yesterday and the soot-filled sky created fantastic sunsets the last couple days. A friend of mine who lives perilously close to this blaze, had to evacuate her family of four. I haven’t heard back from them in a couple days, though I’m sure they’re okay, because amazingly, this 20,000-acre fire has done little damage to homes so far.
That wasn’t the case during the Williams Fire in 2002, when Seth was only 3-months old. Although I knew there was a fire in the mountains north and west of our home, I didn’t realize the enormity until I was driving home from work that evening. I actually could see the orange-red blazes licking the night sky from 40 miles out.
I’m not sure I ever looked at the road the entire drive home, so surreal was the sight. By the time I got home, I was relieved to see that the fire was a good 10 miles away and moving west, away from our house.
Since my mom was in town, the Empress and I took our first date since Seth was born. We drove over to the town of Laverne, where gawkers lined the roads watching the beautiful, yet scary sight. The woefully inadequate 2 mega pixel camera I owned at the time was unable to really capture the scene. (That’s the last photo I posted.)
We went home feeling pretty comfortable that the fire was still far away. We decided if forced to evacuate, we would stay with friends or relatives in Long Beach.
The next morning, I went to work because the blaze, while huge, seemed relatively tame. During the afternoon, ocean winds reversed the direction of the fire and pushed it more decidedly in our direction. Experts were worried that if the fire jumped a road that served as a firebreak for our town, that it could become an inferno.
My wife informed me that the air had gotten much more smoky and I suggested she pack for Long Beach. But the Empress said it wasn’t that bad, but she happily agreed to go to Ontario Mills mall for a few hours, where the air and shopping would be better.
By night, firefighters became confident they could control the Williams Fire. I went out by myself to look at the scene again, and found that the road mentioned as a firebreak was closed. I drove over to Claremont, which is the town just west of where I live and found the fire had become much, much closer.
When I got home again, I realized the fire was visible through our bedroom window. That night, the wind began to push more southerly, and our home filled with smoke. It was as if we had forgotten to open the fireplace flue. All night long I kept getting up to look at the fire through the window and to monitor Seth’s breathing while he slept. The blaze was less than two miles away as the crow flies.
Even though we had two hepa filters cleaning the air in the house, they were completely overwhelmed. All night long we wondered if our 3-month-old boy was going to wake up with asthma. He didn’t. By the morning, the fire had settled down and the smoke lessened somewhat.
News reports said the worst was over – the fire was now headed due north into the back portions of the Angeles mountains. In the end, 62 homes and 14 outbuildings burned. It continued to smell smoky for days if not weeks, but we were out of the woods, so to speak.
But the Williams fire was nothing to the monster blaze that ripped through our mountains a year later. I’ll tell that story in a future post.
There are hundreds of stories by now of what went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but here’s one in the Los Angeles Times that actually has a happier ending.
In this story, seven children are separated from their parents after being air-evacuated from a flooded apartment building. So where do the rescuers drop the kids off? Alone, with no adult supervision at an evacuation point in New Orleans.
I don’t know about you, but if I handed off my kids to rescuers, I would have expected them to get down the names of the parents or at least take responsibility for my kids once landed. Fortunately, smarter people, who found the kids before something really bad happened, took them to safety in Baton Rouge. Later, the children were reunited with their parents in Texas.
I’m writing about this incident because I’m simply to angry to write about the complete failure of this country’s rescue operations. Sure, they’re working better now, but that doesn’t matter when so many people died since the hurricane struck.
What I find depressing is that this president may get off the hook, as reported by ABC News. How can 55 percent of Americans believe that Bush is not to blame for the rescue failures? If Bush was a Democrat, he’d been ripped to shreds by now by both parties. But why won’t Republicans hold their commander-in-chief responsible? If the American public can’t blame their leader when an event of such magnitude occurs, then sooner or later, this type of horror will happen again.
Additional: I highly recommend you read Kevin Drum’s post in The Washington Monthly about how a Bush photo op was allegedly staged, complete with a phony food distribution site. If true, then I agree with Drum who calls the whole thing “criminal.”
*Update: The incident I mention in the noted out text above turns out to be a mistranslation of a foreign-language broadcast, as explained in a respectfulofotters post.
The tragedy at Beslan School No. 1 in Russia is every parent’s worst nightmare. Journalists I know hardened by years of war and dead body photos couldn’t even look at the pictures of bleeding, charred children that were coming in over their computers.
There was one photo in particular where dead children were laid out in a row on a blood-stained tarp that haunted me. A mother cried over her dead daughter, whose face was still visible.
At least 340 hostages, 150 of them children, were killed in this disaster as of Saturday night, reports The Washington Post. About 700 more were wounded. With an estimated 1,200 hostages in the Russian school when the explosions and shooting began, more dead are expected to be found.
When all is said and done, it appears that the actual shooting started by accident, though stories still vary. In one account, one of the hostage-takers may have reacted to shooting by taking his foot off a pedal that was believed to be a bomb trigger.
“He let go of the pedal and tried to run away, but it blew up and killed him,” one young hostage told officials.
But it’s fairly clear the Russian commandos were caught off guard and unprepared when the final battle arrived. What’s crystal clear is that these hostage-takers have demonstrated a complete lack of conscience.
An acquaintance of mine suggested that it’s important to understand what would push people to commit such desperate acts. Although he refused to speculate on what might drive the hostage-takers to such insanity, the insinuation was that years of oppression by Russia was the underlying cause. He wasn’t arguing justification, just great enough understanding to stop this from ever happening again.
I suspect the families in Beslan don’t care a whit about understanding the gunmen’s motives. Indeed, the crowd ripped apart one of the fleeing hostage-takers; I doubt they paused for the gunman’s confessional or explanation.
And as much as I detest the oppression or brutalization of the Chechens or any other ethnic group, nothing can excuse using children as human shields. In the end, these terrorists have crossed a new line that may be repeated simply because the brutality seen in Beslan was so devastating. Indeed, the siege may become Russia’s 9/11.
And like in America, fear of another attack will be used as a tool to further erode freedoms in Russia and maybe elsewhere in the world. Already President Vladimir Putin is calling the tragedy “an attack against all of us,” reports The New York Times.
What will happen next is anyone’s guess, but none of this bodes well for a world of peace and prosperity. But I suspect a lot of parents out there are like us, thankful their children were home, healthy and safe.
Stumble It!
Recent Comments