Lessons of Hurricane Sandy

What an ordeal the people of a good part of the United States have been through because of Hurricane Sandy—and many are still going through! As I write this on Sunday, November 11, electricity is still out to a huge number of homes and businesses on Long Island, in New York City and New Jersey as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

Long Island, where I live, has been especially hard-hit. And the Long Island Power Authority is being blasted. There were demonstrations yesterday of outraged Long Islanders protesting LIPA’s Sandy performance. At one, in Hicksville, a placard read: “Shame on LIPA. Shame on its Board of Directors. No Lights, No Heat, No End in Sight.” Another declared: “We Want Power Now!”

Steve Bellone, county executive of Suffolk which comprises the eastern 60 percent of Long Island, held a press conference yesterday to announce that Suffolk “has cut ties with LIPA headquarters and has begun directing local assets to expedite restoring power.” Bellone said that “people are desperate out there. After two weeks they need their power restored.”

Other public officials lambasting LIPA were calling for greatly expanded federal assistance in view of LIPA’s failure to restore power in view of LIPA’s failure to restore power to all of Long Island since the hurricane hit on October 29. Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano said yesterday that LIPA “cannot continue under its present structure.” Earlier in the week, he proposed that the U.S. military and Department of Energy take over the “managerial structure” of LIPA during the restoration of power.

What, at this stage, might be considered some of the “lessons learned” from “Frankenstorm” Sandy—in addition to how Long Islanders can’t count on LIPA to get power back fully even more than 10 days after a major storm, a LIPA record?

Beyond everything else, Sandy has provided a big lesson on the awesome power of nature in its fury. In this regard, it has demonstrated the folly of spending billions of taxpayer dollars to dump sand along ocean beaches to supposedly “fortify” them, so-called “beach replenishment.” In one fell swoop, sand dumped on the affected coastline in these Army Corps of Engineers’ endeavors up and down the Mid-Atlantic has been washed away.

Yesterday, the Ponquogue Bridge in Hampton Bays in Suffolk was finally opened and I was able to look at some Sandy impacts along this barrier beach fronting Hampton Bays and extending toward Westhampton Beach. The highway that runs along the barrier beach, Dune Road, was still closed. Dune Road in many spots was washed over. But viewing what could be seen from the ocean beach just south of the Ponquogue Bridge, one could see the shoreline as far as the eye could see in either direction was now flat all th way to the water. Once it curved upward towards the line of grass-covered dunes. Not any longer. Now it’s low and flat.

Then there’s the important connection to climate change and global warming.

Bloomberg Businessweek in its cover story on Sandy ran a photo of the storm in its full wrath with the headline, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

Sandy brought climate change and global warming home violently.

Bellone was asked at a press conference three days after the hurricane struck whether, in view of global warming and the greater frequency of major storms, Suffolk County needs to change land-use policies. “I think what you say is correct. It’s something to think about when power is restored,” he responded to the reporter. It is, indeed, something to “think about”—and, more importantly, nations taking action to significantly reduce the burning of fossil fuels which is heating up this planet.

As Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of physics at City University of New York, commented on his blog: “Hurricane Sandy's the hurricane from hell. It broke all records…Is this related to global warming? First, there is no smoking gun, no conclusive evidence…However, the signs are not good. Second, global warming is heating up the…waters, and warm water is the basic energy source driving a hurricane….So global warming is actually the weather on steroids. This is consistent with the 100 year floods, 100 year forest fires, 100 year droughts that we seem to have every few years. So is this the new normal? We cannot say with certainty, but a case can be made that this wacky weather is, in part, driven by global warming.”

And, yes, land-use policies on the coast need to change—especially the use of tax dollars “encouraging people to live in harm’s way,” as the R Street Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, put it in a statement.

“The storm should heighten awareness about the dangers of federal policies that encourage development in risk-prone areas,” said R Street. “Key among these is the National Flood Insurance Program which is expected to pick up as much as half of the $20 billion in economic losses Sandy is projected to produce. The 44-year-old NFIP is the federal government’s second largest fiscal liability, behind only Social Security, with taxpayers on the hook for the program’s $1.25 trillion of coverage.”

Private insurance companies are reluctant to insure houses built on shifting sands in the teeth of the ocean, so the U.S. government—under enormous pressure of the beachfront homeowner lobby—has filled in with our tax dollars.

Then there’s the Army Corps of Engineers and beachfront homeowners forever pushing for sand-dumping or “beach replenishment.” As Eli Lehrer, R Street’s president, said in a media conference call in which I participated, “I would say the ideal federal percentage for ‘beach replenishment’ is zero.”

Barrier beaches need to move with nature—for reasons including protecting the mainland—and not be tailored to suit real estate interests. A pioneer in the science of beaches is Dr. Orrin Pilkey, long-time professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University and founder and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

As Pilkey and Wallace Kaufman wrote in their 1979 book, The Beaches Are Moving, The Drowning of America’s Shoreline, “The beach is land which has given itself up to wind and wave. Every day throughout the life of the earth, the wind and the waves have been at work shaping and reshaping the beach, pushing and pulling almost microscopic grains of sand and sometimes boulders larger than cars.....We ignore this when we built motels, pavilions, boardwalks, and even whole towns on the edge of the ocean….Beaches are not stable, but they are in dynamic equilibrium.”

And as Pilkey and Katharine L. Dixon wrote in their 1994 book, The Corps and the Shore, neither “hard stabilization” or “soft stabilization” of beaches make sense. “Armoring” a beach with stone “groins…destroys the beach. A “groin” will catch some sand and for a time protect a piece of beach, but it does that by blocking sand moving in the ocean’s littoral drift to another beach. As to “soft stabilization”—dumping sand or “beach replenishment”—it is “always expensive and always temporary.”

Then there’s undergrounding of electric lines.

In 1991, East Hampton Natural Resources Director Larry Penny called for putting underground the electric lines running along the eight-mile Napeague stretch between Amagansett and Montauk at the eastern tip of the South Fork of Long Island. Many of the poles holding them had gone down that year in Hurricane Bob and the “Perfect Storm.” The Long Island Lighting Company agreed to his request. Although the Napeague stretch was severely battered by Sandy, electricity in most of Montauk stayed on. “They say undergrounding is expensive,” said Penny. “But in the long run, you save a lot of money in tree-trimming, repairs after a storm and economic disruption—the power doesn’t go out.”

And most critically, Sandy underscored a lethal threat involving nuclear power plants on the coast. It impacted several including Oyster Creek in New Jersey where the storm surge from Sandy nearly overwhelmed critical cooling systems, including one maintaining its pool of thousands of hotly radioactive spent fuel rods. Oyster Creek is 70 miles south of New York City. Could a future “superstorm” set off an American Fukushima-like disaster?

As for the Long Island Power Authority, it was created in 1985 to replace LILCO as a democratically-based public power entity. LILCO also failed miserably to restore electricity after Hurricane Bob of that year. Moreover, it was moving to build between seven to 11 nuclear power plants on Long Island with Shoreham, virtually completed at that point, the first. LIPA was seen as a way to stop the push by LILCO and the federal government for this nuclear program by utilizing state power to eliminate the utility if it persisted in its program of trying to turn Long Island into a “nuclear park.”

The members of the LIPA board were to be elected and this, it was seen, would provide for accountability, with Long Islanders determining, democratically, how their utility functioned, and would provide, too, for Long Island’s energy future to be planned democratically.

Instead, then New York Governor Mario Cuomo, after LIPA was established, postponed elections to its board and his successor, Governor George Pataki, formally eliminated having LIPA elections.

LIPA board members ended up being selected by New York State government’s heralded “three-men-in-a-room”—the governor, State Assembly speaker and State Senate leader. (The three-men-in-a-room appellation relates how many decisions are made by New York State government.) LIPA’s current chairman and most of its members have no background in energy issues.

Sandy and the way LIPA has handled it cry out for LIPA returning to its original democratic vision—so it can truly be the peoples’ utility. “Shame on LIPA. Shame on its Board of Directors. No Lights, No Heat. No End in Sight,” said the placard yesterday. Through a democratic process, far more could be done than simply declaring, “Shame on LIPA. Shame on its Board of Directors”—although this must now be said. If, as originally envisioned, the trustee positions at LIPA were subject to a vote by Long Islanders, people could take decisive action and make changes so clearly necessary at LIPA in the wake of Sandy.

Radioactivity and Fracking

Fracking for gas not only uses toxic chemicals that can contaminate drinking and groundwater—it also releases substantial quantities of radioactive poison from the ground that will remain hot and deadly for thousands of years.

Issuing a report yesterday exposing major radioactive impacts of hydraulic fracturing—known as fracking—was Grassroots Environmental Education, an organization in New York, where extensive fracking is proposed.

The Marcellus Shale region which covers much of upstate New York is seen as loaded with gas that can be released through the fracking process. It involves injecting fluid and chemicals under high pressure to fracture shale formations and release the gas captured in them.

But also released, notes the report, is radioactive material in the shale—including Radium-226 with a half-life of 1,600 years. A half-life is how long it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its radiation. It is multiplied by between 10 and 20 to determine the “hazardous lifetime” of a radioactive material, how long it takes for it to lose its radioactivity. Thus Radium-226 remains radioactive for between 16,000 and 32,000 years.

“Horizontal hydrofracking for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale region of New York State has the potential to result in the production of large amounts of waste materials containing Radium-226 and Radium-228 in both solid and liquid mediums,” states the report by E. Ivan White. For 30 years he was a staff scientist for the Congressionally-chartered National Council on Radiation Protection.

“Importantly, the type of radioactive material found in the Marcellus Shale and brought to the surface by horizontal hydrofracking is the type that is particularly long-lived, and could easily bio-accumulate over time and deliver a dangerous radiation dose to potentially millions of people long after the drilling is over,” the report goes on.

“Radioactivity in the environment, especially the presence of the known carcinogen radium, poses a potentially significant threat to human health,” it says. “Therefore, any activity that has the potential to increase that exposure must be carefully analyzed prior to its commencement so that the risks can be fully understood.”

The report lays out “potential pathways of the radiation” through the air, water and soil. Through soil it would get into crops and animals eaten by people.

Examined in the report are a 1999 study done by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation “assisted by representatives from 16 oil and gas companies” on hydrofracking and radioactivity and a 2011 Environmental Impact Statement the agency did on the issue. It says both present a “cavalier attitude toward human exposure to radioactive material.”

Radium causes cancer in people largely because it is treated as calcium by the body and becomes deposited in bones. It can mutate bones cells causing cancer and also impact on bone marrow. It can cause aplastic anemia—an inability of bone marrow to produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells. Marie Curie, who discovered radium in 1893 and felt comfortable physically handling it, died of aplastic anemia.

Once radium was used in self-luminous paint for watch dials and even as an additive in products such as toothpaste and hair creams for purported “curative powers.”

There are “no specific treatments for radium poisoning,” advises the Delaware Health and Social Services Division of Public Health in its information sheet on radium. When first discovered, “no one knew that it was dangerous,” it mentions.

White’s report, entitled “Consideration of Radiation in Hazardous Waste Produced from Horizontal Hydrofracking,” notes that “radioactive materials and chemical wastes do not just go away when they are released into the environment. They remain active and potentially lethal, and can show up years later in unexpected places. They bio-accumulate in the food chain, eventually reaching humans.”

Under the fracking plan for New York State, “there are insufficient precautions for monitoring potential pathways or to even know what is being released into the environment,” it states.

The Department of Environmental Conservation “has not proposed sufficient regulations for tracking radioactive waste from horizontal hydrofracking,” it says. “Neither New York State nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would permit a nuclear power plant to handle radioactive material in this manner.”

Doug Wood, associate director of Grassroots Environmental Education, which is based in Port Washington, New York, and also editor of the report, commented as it was issued: “Once radioactive material comes out of the ground along with the gas, the problem is what to do with it. The radioactivity lasts for thousands of years, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate or mitigate. Sooner or later, it’s going to end up in our environment and eventually our food chain. It’s a problem with no good solution—and the DEC is unequipped to handle it.”

As for “various disposal methods…contemplated” by the agency “for the thousands of tons of radioactive waste expected to be produced by fracking,” Wood said that “none…adequately protect New Yorkers from eventual exposure to this radioactive material. Spread it on the ground and it will become airborne with dust or wash off into surface waters; dilute it before discharge into rivers and it will raise radiation levels in those rivers for everyone downstream; bury it underground and it will eventually find its way into someone’s drinking water. No matter how hard you try, you can’t put the radioactive genie back into the bottle.”

Furthermore, said Wood in an interview, in releasing radioactive radium from the ground, “a terrible burden would be placed on everybody that comes after us. As a moral issue, we must not burden future generations with this. We must say no to fracking—and implement the use of sustainable forms of energy that don’t kill.”

The prospects of unleashing, through fracking, radium, a silvery-white metal, has a parallel in the mining of uranium on the Navajo Nation.

The mining began on the Navajo Nation, which encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, during World War II as the Manhattan Project, the American crash program to build atomic weapons, sought uranium to fuel them. The Navajos weren’t told that mining the uranium, yellow in color, could lead to lung cancer. And lung cancer became epidemic among the miners and then spread across the Navajo Nation from piles of contaminated uranium tailings and other remnants of the mining.

The Navajos gave the uranium a name: Leetso or yellow monster.

Left in the ground, it would do no harm. But taken from the earth, it has caused disease. That is why the Navajo Nation outlawed uranium mining in 2005. “This legislation just chopped the legs off the uranium monster,” said Norman Brown, a Navajo leader.

Similarly, radium, a silvery-white monster, must be left in the earth, not unleashed, with fracking, to inflict disease on people today and many, many generations into the future.