Get Ready for a Rare Solar Eclipse

May 18, 2012 By Michael D. Lemonick, Climate Central Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of anonymonk

The moon is endlessly creative in finding ways to amuse us. Just two weeks ago, the Earth’s only natural satellite was unusually close to us, and looked bigger and brighter than normal. The result was a Supermoon, which dazzled skywatchers across the U.S.

Now its orbit has taken the moon farther away than average, just in time it to pass directly in front of the sun on Sunday, fittingly enough. Ordinarily, that would cause a total solar eclipse, with the moon blotting out the sun entirely for a few minutes. But the moon appears smaller than normal — small enough, in fact, that it can’t block the entire sun, even when they’re lined up perfectly.

The good folks over at Climate Central graciously allow Oak Ridge Now to republish their content.. This article comes courtesy of their team.

So instead, the lucky folks who live in a swath of the country from Northern California into Nevada will see what’s known as an annular eclipse on Sunday, late in the afternoon, the first visible in the U.S. in 18 years — weather permitting, of course. What it means is that when the moon is dead-center in front of the sun, a fiery ring of sunlight will surround the moon’s silhouette (“annulus” is Latin for “ring”).

“I like to compare different types of eclipses on a scale of 1 to 10 as visual spectacles,” said NASA’s Fred Espenak of the Goddard Space Flight Center on the agency’s eclipse website. “If a partial eclipse [where the moon crosses the sun off-center] is a 5 then an annular eclipse is a 9.” (His ranking for a total solar eclipse on that same 1-10 scale: “A million! It’s completely off the charts.”

One note of caution: even though the moon will cover 94 percent of the sun on Sunday, there’s still enough light to blind you. Use an approved solar filter if you want to take a look, or, suggests Espenak, “A #14 welder’s glass is a good choice.” If you’ve got one lying around, that is.

Filed Under: News, US and World News Tagged With: Climate Central, Earth, Fred Espenak, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA, Nevada, Northern California, Solar Eclipse, Sun

Drought Still A Concern This Year in Much of U.S.

May 17, 2012 By Andrew Freedman, Climate Central Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of QQ Li

Last year at this time, all eyes were on Texas, where drought conditions were intensifying into what became that state’s worst single year drought on record, causing nearly $8 billion in economic losses. Recently, though, Texas has gone from famine to feast in the precipitation department, and drought concerns for the upcoming summer are focused farther to the west, as drought tightens its grip across a broad swath of the interior West and Southwest

In addition to the West, drought conditions are also prevalent in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and parts of the Northeast as well, along with a small pocket in the Upper Midwest. In all, 56 percent of the Lower 48 states were experiencing drought conditions as of May 8, almost twice the area compared to last year at this time, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Fortunately, much of the West had such bountiful winter precipitation last year that the risk of water supply disruptions are rather low in most areas, but that could change if the current weather pattern lasts much longer. Water officials in Colorado, for example, have begun urging residents to start conserving water in case the dry spell continues.

Take a look at the streamflow forecast for the West this summer compared to last year at this time. The orange and red hues this year indicate well below average streamflow conditions are likely, as unusually thin and dry snow cover yields less water than usual. Last year at this time, the same map showed above average streamflow conditions for most of the West.

Western streamflow outlook for spring/summer 2012. Credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service. Click on image for a larger version.

In addition to heightened water supply concerns, the dry conditions may provide favorable conditions for a busier wildfire season, including in California, as Climate Central reported on May 11.

Heavy rains and severe weather have dominated weather headlines in Texas recently — a stark contrast from last spring — and the rainfall has eroded what was a widespread area of severe-to-exceptional drought conditions. As can be seen in this Drought Monitor map, the severe drought conditions are now confined to northern and western Texas, with dramatic improvement in southern and southeastern areas.

Drought monitor image and statistics showing improved conditions in Texas. Credit: NOAA/USDA. Click on image for a larger version.

Parts of Texas picked up nearly a foot of rainfall during in a seven-day period ending on May 14, eating away at the large precipitation deficit the state had been facing.

In the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, though, meaningful drought relief has been wanting. In Georgia and South Carolina, for example, pop-up thunderstorms have provided some rainfall recently, but nowhere near the widespread rains needed to put a solid dent in the drought conditions that intensified during the winter.

The Southeast drought is very likely related to the La Niña conditions that existed in the Pacific Ocean last winter. La Niña events, which feature cooler-than-average waters in the equatorial Tropical Pacific, tend to influence weather patterns in such a way that it leads to drier-than-average winter conditions in the southern tier of the U.S. Fortunately, La Niña has diminished, with neither La Niña or El Niño conditions likely for the next few months, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and forecasters affiliated with Columbia University (some researchers refer to the absence of La Niña and El Niño as “La Nada”).

Texas rainfall during the seven-day period ending May 14, 2012. Credit: NOAA. Click on image for a larger version.

The latest drought outlook issued by the Climate Prediction Center shows the likelihood of some improvement in drought conditions for Florida and North Carolina, but Georgia and South Carolina aren’t looking quite as good for some reason.

In the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, forecasts favor improving drought conditions. Maryland and Delaware had their driest January to April period on record.

Drought conditions are also expected to improve in parts of the Upper Midwest.

U.S. Drought Monitor issued May 8, 2012. Click on image for a larger version.

Of course, these forecasts aren’t set in stone. If a tropical storm or hurricane were to make landfall in northern Florida or coastal Georgia, for example, it could end the southeastern drought. But as Texas learned last year, whenTropical Storm Don essentially evaporated as it made landfall, it’s probably best not to hold your breath for such relief.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: Climate Central, Climate Prediction Center, drought, La Niña, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Pacific Ocean, Texas, Upper Midwest

War On Smoking Offers Some Lessons For Obesity Fight

May 16, 2012 By Judith Graham, Kaiser Health News Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Tony Alter

Since first lady Michelle Obama made childhood obesity her signature project almost two years ago, the issue has had the kind of highly visible national leadership that it previously lacked.

But that isn’t enough, say public health leaders frustrated with the slow progress in stemming America’s obesity epidemic.

Something more ambitious is needed, they argue — something more like the anti-tobacco movement.
The similarities between the two public health challenges are compelling. Tobacco use is the nation’s No. 1 cause of preventable deaths in the U.S., killing 467,000 people in 2005, according to a landmark study by Harvard University researchers. Being obese or overweight caused an estimated 216,000 deaths from heart disease, diabetes and other conditions, researchers estimated, while another 191,000 deaths resulted from being physically inactive – another key contributor to expanding waistlines.

In terms of health care costs, obesity is now the larger concern, accounting for $147 billion to $190 billion in yearly expenditures, compared to $96 billion for tobacco.

After decades of lawsuits, damning reports about industry practices, and stop-smoking campaigns, smoking rates have plummeted, from a high of 42 percent of adults in 1965 — a year after the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health — to just over 19 percent today. Meanwhile, obesity has been soaring since the 1980s and only last year reached a plateau, which experts say may be only temporary. Currently, 45 million American adults are smokers, while 78 million adults and almost 13 million youngsters are counted as obese.

Some public health advocates see other parallels.

“When I look at what’s going on with obesity, it reminds me of what was going on with tobacco in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, when there was a lot of emphasis on personal responsibility, voluntary self-regulation, and trying to make safe cigarettes,” said Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco.

That approach didn’t work, and efforts to reduce smoking didn’t really have much success until advocates shifted their emphasis from changing individual behavior to community-based activism and holding cigarette manufacturers accountable for harmful products, Glantz said.

A similar shift is needed today in the fight against America’s expanding waistlines, many experts believe. Instead of approaching obesity as a personal issue, it needs to be redefined as a community challenge that calls for collective action and wide-ranging policy changes such as more informative food labels, limits on marketing to children, and taxes on unhealthy products, they argue.

But there are many hurdles. The scope of the obesity problem is much larger than tobacco ever was: it touches on the food we eat, the beverages we drink, the amount of television we watch, how much we exercise, the way our cities are designed, and more. While the variety of policy changes proposed are therefore broader, the political will to enact them has not materialized, in part because “people don’t yet perceive a significant personal threat,” said Dr. William Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The issue will take center stage in the nation’s capitol this coming week, as the Institute of Medicine releases a new report on strategies to combat the obesity epidemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosts a major conference highlightingefforts to control obesity, and HBO prepares to air a four-part documentary on the obesity crisis.

As public health experts committed to stemming obesity study the history of the anti-tobacco movement and look to it for guidance, it is helpful to consider some key similarities and differences between these issues.

Children are central. The vast majority of people who use tobacco take up the habit as teenagers, and one-third of kids who smoke daily will eventually die prematurely of tobacco-related illnesses, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.

The health impact of obesity is similar: seriously overweight children are at greater risk of developing a multitude of health problems that can continue through adulthood, including diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, joint problems and asthma, and are more likely to become obese adults, a wide body of research has demonstrated.

Preventing harm to young people is a central goal of both anti-tobacco and anti-obesity campaigns.

“First, let’s protect our children,” said Dr. David Ludwig, a child obesity expert at Harvard Medical School, noting that the calorie-laden foods and drinks that kids consume in abundance “are not just neutral — they actively undermine our health by overwhelming fundamental biological pathways that regulate appetite and body weight and by manipulating dietary preferences that may be difficult to change over a lifetime.”

Changing social norms is the goal. Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, former head of the CDC and vice president for global health at Emory University in Atlanta, remembers smoking a pipe while writing up patient notes at a prestigious New York hospital in the 1970s. (He gave up the habit more than 30 years ago.)

Today, that would be inconceivable: Smoking rates have been cut by more than half, intolerance of smoking in public places is widespread and anti-smoking policies are in place at hospitals, workplaces, and venues across the country.

Koplan is convinced the same shift in social norms is called for — and achievable — when it comes to childhood obesity. ”Our (eating and physical activity) tastes, our preferences and our behaviors are learned and can be changed,” he said. It isn’t going to be easy and it isn’t going to be fast, but “we’re dealing with a population that would like to be thinner and that works in our favor,” he said.

We can’t just say no to food. “Tobacco we can get rid of entirely. We don’t need it. It has no intrinsic value. But we have to eat to live and make terms with food as the enemy,” said Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center.

That makes curbing childhood obesity a much more complicated issue than tobacco use, Katz and other experts agree. The message to kids and their families can’t be “stop, don’t do this,” which is clear and easy to understand. Instead it has to be “make good choices, do this in moderation, set boundaries,” a message that is considerably more difficult to convey.

Our biology works against us. Throughout most of history, humans lived in an environment where food was scarce and hard to get. As a result, we’re primed, biologically, to eat food when it’s available and “we’re very good at storing calories and defending calories once we’ve got them,” said Dr. Stephen Daniels, chair of the department of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. ”In some ways, you could say that our biology is our own worst enemy when it comes to being overweight or obese.”

While smoking is highly addictive, the biological responses attached to eating food are even more deeply rooted in human evolution, Katz and other experts said.

A sense of shame and denial is greater. People’s self-image is intimately associated with their body weight in a way that isn’t true of smoking.

“When you talk to kids who are excessively heavy and break through their protective shells, what you find is that they feel terrible about their weight — they feel in many ways that they’ve failed,” Daniels said.

“Obesity is seen as a pejorative term that people don’t connect with. They think ‘I’m just 30 or 40 pounds overweight, but I’m not obese,’” said Dietz of the CDC. That suggests the entire way of talking about the issue may need be reframed before personal and social change becomes possible, he suggested.

The variety of products is larger. Tobacco is a single substance, with a limited set of companies that produce cigarettes and related products.

By contrast, the food and beverage industry is enormous and makes a huge array of goods that extend into every home, restaurant, convenience store, and grocery store in America. “That makes the [struggle against childhood obesity] much more difficult than the fight against tobacco,” Dietz said.

There is no second-hand smoke equivalent. The American public was alarmed when it learned that the cigarette smoke non-smokers breathed in airplanes, bars and restaurants was dangerous, and that no amount of second-hand smoke was safe.

“The notion that my behavior as a smoker can have an effect on you and can make you sick was critically important in accelerating people’s intolerance of smoking and their willingness to see the government take action,” said Michael Eriksen, director of the Institute of Public Health at Georgia State University.

There is no equivalent in the fight against obesity. ”Your being obese does not affect me in the same direct way,” Eriksen said.

The best argument might be that obesity consumes enormous health care resources, driving up the cost of medical care for everyone, suggested Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health Program at the University of California, San Francisco. But others think that is too abstract and will never yield the same sense of personal outrage that the second-hand smoke issue created.

The role of industry is less clear. In the anti-tobacco fight, tobacco companies were painted as an enemy willing to lie and manipulate the American public for the sake of profits. In turn, the demonization of Big Tobacco — made possible by bitterly fought lawsuits and the release of thousands of company documents — cultivated a common sense of threat.

By contrast, public health advocates aren’t willing to turn food and beverage into enemies in the fight against obesity.

“With obesity (as compared to tobacco), there’s a much more nuanced relationship with industry,” said Dr. James S. Marks, director of the health group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Food and beverage manufacturers, restaurants, and grocery stores all have a vital role to play in making healthier food more widely available, he noted.

“We can’t regulate our way out of this,” said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust for America’s Health. ”We need to work with industry cooperatively to help change consumers’ tastes and habits.”

Others are much less certain that the food and beverage industry can be trusted to be helpful partners.

“Some companies are making huge profits off obesity,” said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a public policy research center in Washington, D.C., “and I worry that people who are focused on anti-obesity strategies aren’t being tough enough on them.”

This story was produced in collaboration with

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Filed Under: Health, US and World News Tagged With: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Institute of Medicine, Kaiser Health News, Michelle Obama, obesity, Public health, smoking, Smoking cessation, Stanton Glantz, United States

Many Businesses Offer Health Benefits To Same-Sex Couples Already

May 14, 2012 By Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Michael Newman

President Obama’s pronouncement last week in favor of same-sex marriage has no legal effect on employers’ decisions on whether to offer benefits to workers’ domestic partners, but some advocates believe it could reinforce a decade-long trend toward coverage.

Last year, 52 percent of all employers offered domestic partner health benefits, with the percentage varying widely by region and industry, according to a nationally representative sample of about 3,000 employers surveyed by benefit consultant Mercer. That’s up from 31 percent in 2010.

The biggest factors driving that change are employers’ views on whether such benefits help them attract and retain desirable workers.

“Employers started doing this because they felt they needed to be competitive in the labor market, just like with other benefits,” said Paul Fronstin of Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C. ”I don’t see that changing.”

The Village Voice newspaper in New York is credited with being the first private employer to offer workers domestic partner benefits in 1982. In 1995, Vermont became the first to offer coverage to state workers.

“There’s been a steady growth for a long time,” says Joan Smyth, a partner at Mercer. In the early days, some employers worried that adding coverage for domestic partners could make their costs skyrocket by attracting people with higher-than-average health risks, she said, but “that did not happen.”

The District of Columbia and almost half of states currently offer benefits to domestic partners or same-sex spouses of state workers, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign.

Same-sex partners of federal workers are not eligible for coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHB) because the Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, defines marriage as a legal union between a man and woman, the FEHB website says. That law is being challenged and may well end up before the Supreme Court. The Obama administration has said it will not defend the statute.

In the Mercer survey, coverage of same-sex partners was most common in the West, with 79 percent of large employers offering such benefits. It was least common in the South, at 28 percent. Big differences were also noted within industries. Among manufacturing firms, for example, the coverage rate ranged from a high of 96 percent for pharmaceutical companies to 18 percent for machinery and heavy equipment makers.

Public sector jobs had a lower rate of coverage, averaging 26 percent across state, county and municipal workers, the Mercer survey found.

While Smyth at Mercer doesn’t think the president’s pronouncement will sway employers, the Human Rights Campaign’s state legislative director Sarah Warbelow has a different take.

“Hearing the president supports this as well makes this even easier for corporations to get on board,” says Warbelow, adding that 58 percent of Fortune 500 companies currently offer domestic partner benefits. Some of those companies limit those benefits to same-sex couples, while others include domestic partners of opposite sexes.

The climate remains volatile, particularly for state and municipal employees. What, for example, will happen in states like North Carolina that passed a ban on same-sex marriage and have municipalities that offer domestic partner benefits to government workers?

With last week’s vote in North Carolina, there are at least 31 states that bar gay marriage.

In North Carolina, attorneys for cities such as Carrboro and Chapel Hill are still evaluating whether they can continue to offer domestic partner benefits, according to reports from the area’s local NBC television affiliate.

“We have employees asking us, ‘What’s going to happen?’ These are people who otherwise wouldn’t have health care, children who wouldn’t have health care,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt told NBC-17 in Raleigh, N.C.

Court decisions in other states with similar laws have split on whether domestic partnership benefits can be retained for state or municipal workers, says Warbelow.

Meanwhile, private-sector employers must contend with a confusing array of state laws governing the types of unions residents may enter.

Eight states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to allow same-sex couples to marry, for example, while an additional nine allow civil unions or domestic partnerships, which offer many, if not all of the same legal protections as marriage.

While many employer health programs are exempt from state law because they are self-insured, some employers buy coverage from insurers that are subject to state rules.

Employers who buy coverage from insurers in those states must follow that state’s law, even if the employees live another state, Smyth says.

A separate Mercer report out last week gave an example set in Virginia: “Ellen and Sue live in Virginia, which doesn’t permit same-sex marriage. Ellen works in Washington, D.C., and is covered by a group health insurance policy issued in D.C., which must cover same- and opposite-sex spouses equally. Ellen and Sue marry in D.C., even though they live in Virginia. Ellen may add Sue to her health coverage because they are lawfully married and covered by a D.C. policy.”

Employers are “focused on this right now and are watching” the changing political landscape to make sure they are in compliance with the rules, says Smyth. “They need to be really careful that they know the laws.”

Filed Under: Health Insurance, US and World News Tagged With: Bill Clinton, Defense of Marriage Act, Domestic partnership, Domestic partnership in the United States, Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, Human Rights Campaign, NBC, North Carolina

The Best, Most Disgusting Reporting on Food Safety

May 11, 2012 By Blair Hickman, ProPublica Leave a Comment

The recent brouhaha over pink slime (and other lovely mass meat production processes) is only the beginning. Here’s our roundup of some standout reporting about the food on your plate.

This is a multifaceted, perennial topic. If you think we missed any, we’re happy to hear suggestions. Please email a link to MuckReads@propublica.org or tweet it with the hashtag #muckreads.

Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned, The New York Times, December 2009 A look at the development of Beef Product Inc.’s “novel” method of meat production that later became known as the infamous “pink slime.” Reporter Michael Moss won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigations into contaminated beef.

Our Dwindling Food Variety, National Geographic, July 2011 Our dwindling food variety, in a stride-stopping infographic. Contributed by @kleinmatic

What the USDA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms, Mother Jones, July 2011 The U.S. Department of Agriculture appears to have repeatedly removed a report by a USDA-contracted researcher that summarized recent academic work, from “reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals,” on possible links between antibiotic-resistant infections and factory farm animals. Mother Jones got a permanent PDF of the researcher’s report, dubbing it the “document the USDA doesn’t want you to see.” Contributed by @foodinteg

Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves, Food Safety News, August 2011

Some of the biggest U.S. honey packers knowingly bought honey of questionable quality so they could sell it on the cheap. Much of it was likely smuggled from China (honey the European Union has banned) and may have been laced with lead and illegal animal antibiotics — if it was really honey at all.

America’s Dangerous Food-Safety System, The Daily Beast/ Newsweek, September 2011 A shortage of inspectors in the U.S. food-safety system exposes Americans to the risk of illness and death. Contributed by @StepShep

Nation’s Food Anti-terror Plans Costly, Unwieldy, Associated Press, September 2011 An AP investigation into the United States’ $3.4 billion food counter-terrorism program found that progress had been slowed by a complex web of bureaucracy. Contributed by @joannalin

On The Menu, But Not On Your Plate, Boston Globe, October 2011 A Globe-organized DNA test revealed scores of mislabeled fish in Massachusetts restaurants, grocery stores and seafood markets. Often, “local” fish was actually hauled from thousands of miles away, and while some chefs and store owners seemed to have no clue, others admitted to knowingly selling mislabeled food to boost profits. Experts said it reflects a nationwide trend that causes diners to unwittingly overpay, may make people sick and results in overfishing.

Contributed by @JoeYerardi

Dispute Over Drug in Feed Limiting U.S. Meat Exports, MSNBC, January 2012 The controversial drug ractopamine has sickened or killed more pigs than any other livestock drug on the market, leading the EU and China, which together produce and consume about 70 percent of the world’s pork, to refuse meat imports raised on the additive. The U.S. pork industry wants to change their minds. Contributed by @NaomiStarkman

How Washington Went Soft on Child Obesity, Reuters, April 2012 The food and beverage industries have more than doubled their spending on lobbying in Washington in the last three years. And now Congress has declared pizza a vegetable. Contributed by @mariancw

A History of FDA Inaction on Animal Antibiotics, ProPublica, April 2012 Everything you ever wanted to know about the Food and Drug Administration’s actions, or lack thereof, to keep antibiotics out of your food.

As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving? The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2012 A growing number of animal scientists employed by public universities are accepting payouts from pharmaceutical companies. They’re often hired to persuade farmers to use antibiotics that fatten up cattle but haven’t necessarily been proven safe. Some have been banned in the E.U. and China. Contributed by @MelodyPetersen

Bonus points: In 1968, Nathan Kotz of the Des Moines Register and Minneapolis Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on unsanitary conditions in meat packing plants, which, according to the Pulitzer site, helped ensure passage of the Federal Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. Anybody have an online copy?

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: European Union, Factory Farms, Food, Food and Drug Administration, Food safety, Food Safety News, foodsafety, Meat, meat production, pink slime, United States Department of Agriculture

Behind the Battle Over Hidden Debit Card Fees

March 22, 2011 By Marian Wang, ProPublica Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of MoneyBlogNewz

A provision within the financial reform bill that would regulate debit card transaction fees could be postponed by a year or two following fierce objections from banks. Specifically, banks large and small are objecting to a Fed proposal to limit what are known as interchange fees 2014 the fees they collect from merchants every time a customer uses a bank-issued debit card to make a purchase.

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress last week drafted legislation to postpone writing new debit interchange rules for one to two years. According to Dodd-Frank, the rules were supposed to be finalized by April 21 and to go into effect by July 21.

Consumer groups have decried the delay, saying it would postpone much-needed reform to a system that is “uncompetitive, non-transparent and harmful to consumers“. At the same time, these groups voiced concerns that if interchange reform passes, banks will levy other charges on consumers – something many banks have warned they may do.

Given the controversy, we’re taking a closer look at how interchange works and what’s at stake for banks, for businesses and for consumers.

How Interchange Works

Many consumers are only vaguely aware of the existence of the interchange fees – or “swipe fees” – but they’re still paying for them because the costs are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. The fees often cause retailers to offer discounts for cash or set minimums for credit and debit purchases.

Aside from the argument that paying with plastic is convenient for both consumers and merchants, the justification for interchange fees is partly that banks assume some risk in these transactions, particularly with credit purchases. But because debit transactions are simpler – a matter of moving money from one account to another – some have argued that debit interchange fees are unjustifiably high.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill takes aim at only these debit interchange fees. It tasked the Federal Reserve with adopting standards to determine whether interchange fees are “reasonable and proportional”to the cost of processing the transaction.

What the Fed came up with was a plan to cap debit interchange fees at 12 cents per transaction – a proposal that banks appear to uniformly hate. They currently get about 1 to 2 percent of each debit transaction, which averages out to about 44 cents.

The exact numbers are squishy here and are negotiated between merchants and payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, but generally fees for credit cards are higher than for debit cards – and they get even higher if the cards have fancy reward programs. (The card networks also collect their own “network fees“ from merchants, which they keep, but as the New York Times has noted, those fees are smaller, and they’re not particularly controversial.)

Some have pointed out that this means merchants – and customers, in the form of higher prices – essentially subsidize the purchases and perks of card-users. According to an analysis released last year by the Boston Federal Reserve, such subsidies average more than $1,000 for card-using households each year.

It’s also worth noting that debit card payments with PIN numbers are less costly for merchants than debit card payments with signatures. The larger fees are why some banks have tried to encourage customers to use signature debit instead of entering their PINs, even though PIN transactions are more secure and cost businesses less.

The debit transaction themselves, as the Washington Post has pointed out, only cost a few pennies each to conduct if you don’t count the infrastructure costs. (As it happens, the Fed isn’t counting infrastructure costs in calculating the fee cap. Costs like network connectivity or overhead costs, “cannot be attributed to any particular transaction, given that they could not be avoided if any particular transaction did not occur“ Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin testified last month.)

As Reuters columnist Antony Currie points out in his handy FAQ, Visa Europe has capped its debit card interchange fees at 0.2 percent of each transaction, and U.S. interchange rates currently average about six times that.

Billions at Stake for Banks, Which in Turn Warn of Impact on Consumers

In their lobbying pitches to regulators, banks and merchants have both argued their positions by citing the effect of the proposed rule on consumers.

“The concerns that we have raised revolve around how this is going to impact basic free checking accounts, particularly for low-income Americans,” a spokesman for the American Bankers Association recently told the St. Petersburg Times.

The banks’ professed concern for the low-income is interesting: As financial blogger Mike Konczal has pointed out, there really is no such thing as “free” checking. There’s just “a monthly fee that is waived if you do certain things“ and meet certain requirements, like a direct deposit or minimum balance – which low-income people are the least likely to be able to meet, anyway.

The big banks – whose cards account for 80 percent of debit transactions – stand to lose billions in revenue each year. (The amount has been pegged at anywhere from $12 billion to $20 billion.) The New York Times points out that debit transactions are forecast to overtake cash purchases by 2012.

Many banks say they will be forced to cut rewards programs or eliminate services such as free checking. Some, like JPMorgan Chase, are even considering putting a cap on the size of debit purchases.

Despite an Exemption, Community Banks Say They’re Concerned Too

Big banks aren’t the only ones complaining. Even though the Fed’s proposal exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the interchange cap, and Visa has said it will implement a two-tier system to protect small banks, community banks have argued that the exemption won’t work because merchants will discriminate and refuse to accept their cards, forcing them to lower their fees in order to remain competitive with the big banks.

“This rule will unquestionably lead to more consumer fees, fewer product choices and greater consumer confusion regarding card acceptance,” the trade group Independent Community Bankers of America has stated.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said “it is possible“ that the exemption won’t work, but Sen. Richard Durbin – who proposed the community bank exemption in the Dodd-Frank law – has said Bernanke is wrong. He pointed to “very strong“ rules by card companies that bar merchants from refusing cards within their networks.

Some advocates of interchange fee reform, including Durbin, suspect the bigger banks are manipulating the community banks and credit unions to raise their objections. Durbin called it “one of the most active lobbying efforts I’ve ever seen.”

“The fact is credit unions and smaller banks are just more effective spokesmen on this issue right now,” Politico quoted an anonymous executive at a large bank as saying.

Retailers Argue Current System Gives Banks and Card Networks Too Much Power

The National Retail Federation, a trade group for retailers, has argued that the current payment system is not competitive and that Visa and Mastercard – the two major networks in the debit world – have too much power to control and inflate fees.

And while banks have argued that competition between Visa and Mastercard is strong and enables merchants to apply pressure to drive down fees, a piece in the New York Times from January suggests the competition actually goes the other way: Payment networks compete to keep the banks happy with higher fees. From the Times:

As debit cards became the preferred plastic in American wallets, Visa has turned its attention to PIN debit too and increased its market share even more. And it has succeeded – not by lowering the fees that merchants pay, but often by pushing them up, making its bank customers happier.

In an effort to catch up, MasterCard and other rivals eventually raised fees on debit cards too, sometimes higher than Visa, to try to woo bank customers back.

Even the federal government – which some have argued should be able to negotiate rock-bottom interchange fees because the risk the banks front for the feds is next to nothing – has had trouble controlling the millions it pays in fees deducted from debit and credit transactions.

“Some federal entities have attempted to negotiate with the card networks to lower interchange rates applicable to their transactions, but with limited success“ read a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. An earlier GAO report found that non-government merchants also had little success.

Merchants Promise They2019ll Pass Savings On to Consumers

Small business owners and major retailers have argued that the Fed plan to cap interchange fees is a pro-consumer move, according to Bloomberg, which reported that about 170 small business owners recently flew to D.C. to relay that message.

Several retailers supporting the cap have promised to share their savings. Here2019s the Wall Street Journal:

Retailers maintain that most of their fee-cut windfall would be shared with customers. Home Depot, among those lobbying most aggressively for the cuts, said: “Any relief as it pertains to these fees will give the Home Depot the ability to reduce our cost of doing business. … Such benefits are likely to include lower prices and investment in the business to better serve customers.”

There’s nothing in the proposed rule or in Dodd-Frank, however, to ensure that savings are passed on.

A 2009 government report found that even if interchange fees were to be capped, “the ability of merchants to pass on their savings from lower interchange fees would depend heavily on the respective merchants2019 size and market share“.

The Fight Continues as Lawmakers Consider a Time-Out

In addition to heavy lobbying on Capitol Hill, banks have taken their pleas directly to consumers by setting a website called Don2019t Make Us Pay. It warns consumers that “Congress and the Federal Reserve want to force YOU to pay more to use your debit card.” “NO MORE REWARDS,” “MORE RESTRICTIONS,” “HIGHER FEES,” “END OF FREE CHECKING,” the website warns. “TELL CONGRESS NO!” (Hat tip to Slate for flagging the site.)

The group behind the website is the Electronic Payments Coalition, whose members include the major banks, bank trade groups, and both Visa and Mastercard. Politico reported that the coalition has also been running television ads and placing ads in D.C. subway cars.

The Hill reported that merchant groups have also taken out ads to promote interchange fees, though between banks and merchants, NPR notes that banks have the edge in the fight based on financial heft:

Commercial banks, credit unions, and Visa and MasterCard – who run the biggest debit card networks – spent a combined $75 million lobbying on all issues in Washington last year, nearly double the retail industry’s $40 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks such spending.

Financial firms’ campaign contributions during the 2009-2010 cycle also were twice those of merchants, according to NPR.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: Banks, Credit card, Debit card, debit cards, Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Federal Reserve System, fees, Interchange fee, New York Times, ProPublica, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Visa Inc, Washington Post

A Look Back At President George H.W. Bush

March 21, 2011 By John Solomon, Center for Public Integrity Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Marion Doss

He’s 86 now, his eyebrows silver and his legs weakened by Parkinson’s-like symptoms. But as George Herbert Walker Bush approaches his twilight years, the untold tales of his life of public service are beginning to spill out.

Americans grown weary of political spin and attack-dog politics are coming to embrace the 41st president in ways they didn’t when he actually occupied the Oval Office, or before that, when he served as Ronald Reagan’s loyal right-hand man.

And Democrats who once mocked the Bush political dynasty are leading the charge. President Barack Obama has saluted the elder Bush several times, mostly recently bestowing on the Bush family patriarch America’s highest civilian honor last month at the White House.

And Bill Clinton, who ousted Bush from office in 1992 and later became his friend, is slated to lead a celebration Monday (March 21) at Washington’s Kennedy Center to honor Bush’s volunteer efforts through the Points of Light Foundation.

Former first lady Barbara Bush “likes to refer to me as her errant son, the black sheep of the family,” Clinton told the Center for Public Integrity in emailed answers to questions on Friday. “I have always liked and admired President Bush. In the last decade, I have come to love him and the time we share.

Clinton also sees in Bush a civility and pragmatism absent in today’s politics.

“I think people appreciate the leadership he provided in the critical years after the Berlin Wall fell, supporting democracy in Russia, the reunification of Germany, and the reaffirmation of the NATO alliance; his success in building a real coalition to win the first Gulf War.” But as much as any of that, Clinton said, people have come to value “the contrast between his kind of conservatism and that which dominates today – less extreme in substance, less harsh in rhetoric, more open to reasonable compromise.”

The questions that once dogged Bush’s political ascension — Iran-Contra, the “wimp” factor and “read my lips” to name a few — are long since faded to memory as Americans now are reminded of acts of heroism, bipartisanship, political selflessness and stubborn discipline revealed by close friends seeking to cement his place in history.

One such dramatic episode takes on new significance as Obama this weekend departs on his first trip to Latin America, eyeing new threats to democracy born during the strife and violence of the 1970s and 1980s.

In December 1983, then-Vice President Bush slipped away from a Latin America trip on a secret mission known only to a handful of U.S. leaders — his absence hardly noticed amidst the season’s normal holiday fare.

El Salvador’s military, embroiled in civil war, was losing American confidence as reports multiplied of human rights abuses and murders of civilians carried out by death squads of soldiers. And emotions were still raw over the unsolved killings of three Roman Catholic nuns and a laywoman.

Bush and a small contingent of White House aides and Secret Service agents whirled through the Salvadoran mountains aboard two Army Black hawk helicopters.

Their task was to deliver a stern warning to the Salvadoran military commanders from Reagan: end the murders and human rights abuses and allow fully free and democratic elections or the United States would instantly cut off aid in the fight against Cuban-backed communist guerillas.

Air Force II landed at San Salvador’s airport and Bush was then escorted onto a green Army Black Hawk chopper — absent the vice presidential seal. As the chopper wound its way through the mountains, the pilots maintained an unusually high altitude — about 5,000 feet — hoping to avoid anti-aircraft and small arms fire from rebels on the ground below.

For the White House advance staff, the setting seemed more than a bit incongruous for a man just one heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency: a sultry mountainside villa with faded pink concrete walls that was part of a compound purportedly used by San Salvador’s president as a residence.

When Bush’s advance team scouted the location a few days earlier, they thought they’d stumbled onto the set of a Grade B horror movie.

The carpets were stained with a brown, bloody color, and there were similar spatter stains on the walls. “It looked like a meeting had gone terribly wrong and no one survived,” recalled Antonio Benedi, one of Bush’s most trusted advance aides, who accompanied him on the mission.

Added Hector Irastorza, a White House aide who went with the security detail to inspect the presidential meeting place: “There was blood all over, and things were turned upside down. There were bullet holes in the wall. It was pretty fresh. It was clear they had had a skirmish there.”

“My first thought,” Irastorza recalled in an interview Friday, “was, ‘Is he (Bush) really going to meet with the people who did this?’”

Benedi and his team pondered calling off the get-together, but no one wanted to tell Bush, a former World War II bomber pilot who survived being shot down in the Pacific, that they were afraid for his safety.

Bush’s stated reason for the Latin American trip was the typical pro-democracy boosterism reserved for a vice president — attending the inaugural celebration of Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina’s democratically elected president.

Only a handful of top Reagan and Bush aides were privy to the Salvadoran side-trip and the planned confrontation with military commanders who supervised the death squads.

A Marine officer assigned to the National Security Council — who a few short years later would burst into the national limelight as the unrepentant central figure of the Iran-Contra affair — was among the chosen few. Then-Major Oliver North was at Bush’s side for much of the journey.

The night before the Salvadoran mission, Bush retreated from the Argentinian festivities to the U.S. embassy. Seemingly at ease, he challenged his traveling partners to a game of low-stakes poker.

“Bush pulled a Harry Truman, and asked if anyone wanted to play poker,” North recalled in an interview this week. “I told him my personal limit is $5, and before long I’m out of the game, real quick.”

The next morning Bush’s jet departed for El Salvador, and the crew made a re-fueling stop in Panama.

There, Bush asked Panamanian strong-arm man Manuel Noriega — who years later Bush, as president, would oust from power in a military invasion — to meet him at the airport for a lecturing on the need for more democracy in the Central American nation.

I watched George H.W. Bush confront the man directly about the drug trade, his support for bad people in Latin America and the need to bring real democracy to Panama,” North recalled.

Then it was off to El Salvador. The official report of the trip states that Bush visited with the Salvadoran president Álvaro Magaña and urged him to disband the so-called death squads, even giving a tough speech before he left the country.

But the full mission was the stuff of thrillers. The Black Hawks landed in a grassy field near the presidential villa. Surrounded by peaks, the location offered a reminder of the violent divisions inside the country at a moment when the military was locked in a stalemate with the communist rebels. The sound of fire from a Salvadoran gunship — perhaps ten to 15 kilometers away — was faintly audible as the vice president strutted inside.

The Salvadorans had spruced the villa’s walls with a fresh coat of paint and installed a new carpet.

After some brief pleasantries, Bush retreated to a room for a private discussion with the Salvadoran president.

Outside in the hallways, a couple of Secret Service agents grew alarmed as a large number of Salvadoran military commanders — each with pistols in holsters and some with semiautomatic rifles slung across their shoulders — entered the villa, preparing to meet the vice president.

A commotion broke out as the soldiers refused the Secret Service agents’ request to leave their arms outside. Bush poked his head out to ask for quiet.

We Americans were outgunned 5-to-1 and the prospect of having the VP deliver a message that they clearly didn’t want to hear was stark at best,” North recalled.

Aides suggested to Bush that perhaps the session be called off for security reasons. The vice president refused. “That is what we are here for. We’re here so they get the message,” North recalled Bush saying.

Soon, an entourage of military commanders filed into the room with their sun-faded camouflaged fatigues and weapons. Some stood, as there weren’t enough chairs to go around.

After brief pleasantries, an animated Bush slammed his fist on the table as he condemned the killings of the nuns and other human rights abuses. His message and tenor were unmistakable.

The vice president “told these commanders that their actions would have to stop immediately in order to restore the United States confidence in their ability to fight this war. Otherwise, the US would be forced to cut off aid,” Benedi recalled.

North said the scene was surreal. “They’re all senior guys, some of whom we had good reason to believe were involved with deaths squads. And everybody — to include the VP — knew that,” he said.

“He delivers this incredibly stark message, ‘If the killings don’t stop and you don’t hold elections, we are going to cut off our aid and it will stop you dead in your tracks and you know what that means.”

Bush dispatched the message and boarded his Black Hawk again, hoping the abrupt visit would make a lasting impression. North had handed the military leaders a list of death squad leaders the Americans wanted removed. And then they were off.

Within two weeks, the Salvadoran army reported it had begun disbanding its notorious death squads — and U.S. aid continued to flow as reports from private groups and the United Nations indicated that human rights abuses grew more infrequent. A democratic election was held the next year.

Cynthia Arnson, director of Latin American Programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said it had long been rumored that Bush met privately with Salvadoran military leaders and the detailed account emerging today fits Bush’s mission to deliver a blunt mission.

She said human rights and UN reports at the time clearly indicated human rights abuses went down after the Bush visit and Democratic elections occurred successfully. But recently declassified document shows the CIA was less convinced of the progress.

Still, Bush’s visit with the military commanders “was a dramatic demonstration that the most senior levels of the Reagan administration saw curbing death squad violence as the key to accomplishing U.S. goals in El Salvador,” Arnson told the Center.

The civil war, however, would rage on for years and reports of deaths squads returned during Bush’s presidency, when the 1989 slayings of Jesuit priests renewed human rights concerns.

Bush ultimately brought closure to the Salvadoran conflict, traveling in person to San Salvador in 1992 shortly after the government and rebels signed a peace accord that brought democracy to the central American country — a peace that holds even today amidst continued violence and strife inside the country.

Julia Sweig, a Latin America policy expert on the Council of Foreign Relations, said Friday that Bush as president ultimately “put the full force of his office behind the peace process and disarming both the Salvadoran right wing squads and the guerillas.”

On the helicopter ride back from the 1983 sojourn, Bush kept his matter of fact tone, refusing to acknowledge even for a second the risks he had just taken.

But his team was quickly reminded. Just two weeks later the veteran Army pilot who flew Bush’s chopper was shot dead as he sat in his cockpit in San Salvador, the victim of a communist rebel gunman, Benedi recalled.

Bush prefers to keep such stories to himself, seldom venturing into public save for an occasional sporting event or social dinner. He declined an interview request from the Center.

Mostly gone from public memory is Bush’s infamous portrayal of himself as a passive bystander in the Iran-Contra scandal or the Newsweek cover questioning whether the president-to-be was a “wimp.” Faded too are the memories of a painful 1992 re-election loss or the chronic attack ads playing back Bush’s broken “read my lips” promise on taxes.

Bush wasn’t afraid to mix it up politically — as Republican Party chairman he was a fierce defender of Richard Nixon during the early Watergate scandal and he later knocked Michael Dukakis out as a presidential candidate with the Willie Horton soft-on-crime line of attack.

But he also possessed a willingness to compromise with Democrats that often alienated his conservative base, as well as an aw-shucks, aloof but humble side that at times seemed awkward for a man at the pinnacle of powers.

A fumbled phrase, an awkward joke or lines like, “Not going to do it. Wouldn’t be prudent” gave comedian Dana Carvey plenty to parody on Saturday Night Live. But today those quirks have also given the 41st president a tangible, human quality.

“At the time, they didn’t seem to be leadership qualities to the public. They didn’t seem to have impact. Some even saw it as weaknesses,” said Roman Popadiuk, who worked alongside Bush in the White House as a national security spokesman and today heads his presidential library foundation.

“But now people are looking back at how he treated people and how Washington is now. And they’re appreciating how he harkened back to an era in which people were treated with respect and in which politics had some civility,” Popadiuk said. “The mutually cooperative way he tried to address things, the calm way he handled things in crisis, people see it today as a strength.”

Former President Clinton remembers back in 1983 when he visited the Bush family at its vacation compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, and his daughter Chelsea needed a bathroom.
“The then-Vice President took her by the hand and led her straight to the bathroom. I was so impressed,” Clinton recalled.

Two decades later while returning with the elder Bush on a trip back from visiting tsunami victims in Asia, the two former presidents faced a dilemma aboard their small plane.

“We took one long flight together to Indonesia to tour the tsunami zone and the plane had one small room with a bed,” Clinton recalled. “He offered the room to me to start and said that we’d switch. But I told him to go ahead and take the room, that I’d be fine sleeping on a mat on the floor. After forty years of sleep deprivation I can sleep anywhere. He deserved the bed.”

Popadiuk and Benedi also remember how Bush’s calm, muted response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 led some conservatives to question why he hadn’t celebrated more overtly the American victory over communism. To this day, many conservatives give Reagan the credit, though it occurred on Bush’s watch.

What the public didn’t know then — and Bush refused to discuss publicly — was that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had sent an urgent cable to Bush on Nov. 9, 1989 as the wall crumbled asking the United States not to take provocative action that might instigate a Tiananmen Square-like military crackdown in East Germany.

The letters remain classified but sources described to the Center that Gorbachev’s letter pleaded that neither side take any action that would lead to confrontation or provoke protests that might spiral.
The president acquiesced, settling for a response so muted that reporters opined during an Oval Office news conference why he didn’t seem more enthused about the historic crumbling of communism’s most famous symbol.

Bush didn’t let on. Six days later, Bush penned a three-page letter to Gorbachev assuring him the United States appreciated the Soviet leader’s careful approach to the events in East Germany and was supportive of the peaceful transition of power.

Today, the continuing attacks on the 41st president’s son, George W. Bush and his performance as the 43rd president, don’t seem to phase the patriarch of America’s modern political dynasty.

He’s known to start a tale among friend with lines like, “Back when I gave a damn.”

Friends say Bush still likes to take a personal stroll to the local grocery store in Houston or take in a ballgame or two. But he has slowed with the loss of strength in his legs, which friends describe as Parkinsonism, a vascular condition that weakens his lower extremities and manifests some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease like unstable walking.

The symptoms started a few years back as Bush recovered from back surgery and the weakness has progressed such that he struggles to walk, even with a cane these days, though his upper body remains firm, friends say.

When the elder Bush came to Washington for the Medal of Freedom ceremony with Obama, he stopped first for lunch with some of his friends like Benedi. Bush arrived in a wheelchair before getting into a chair at the table.

But when the time came for him to appear in public, Bush left the wheelchair behind, insisting to walk on his own at the White House –with the help of a military aide. The ceremony gave much of America its first glimpse in years of the 41st president.

Separated by generation and ideology from the man he was honoring, Obama rattled off a litany of accomplishments, then quipped about one of Bush’s late-in-life exploits that endeared him to many younger generations. “Just to cap it off, well into his 80s, he decides to jump out of airplanes,” the current president said adoringly as he secured the blue-and-white ribbon around Bush’s neck.

To those who honor Bush – Democrat and Republican alike — what matters now is highlighting the resume and accomplishment of a man who traded his privileged upbringing for the cockpit of a Navy torpedo bomber. Shot down into the Pacific by Japanese fire, Bush only yearned for more public service after three years of education at Yale and a chapter as a Texas oilman who earned a small fortune.

Bush held nearly every power title one could crave: congressman, Republican Party chairman, CIA director, envoy to China, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, vice president and finally president.

But lofty titles, the perks of power or even the warm embrace of political popularity seemed to matter less to Bush than the simple satisfaction of getting a job done effectively.

It’s likely what made him comfortable in the shadows of the more famous and eloquent Reagan, or made him willing to swoop into a room full of armed military officers in a Latin American mountainside villa, friends say.

These are also the qualities that have led Americans — even Democrats — to cast aside whatever doubts they held from a political era gone by and to embrace Bush Sr. as elder statesman.

During the bitter debate last year over cap-and-trade regulations opposed by Republicans, Democrats hailed the elder Bush for creating an earlier cap-and-trade permitting system in the early 1990s that helped substantially reduce the pollution that causes acid rain. Anathema to his own party today, Bush’s stance two decades ago is cherished by environmentalists.

Last summer, Obama singled out the elder Bush on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, another law fostered during the 41st presidency.

“Equal access. Equal opportunity. The freedom to make our lives what we will. These aren’t principles that belong to any one group or any one political party. They are common principles. They are American principles,” Obama declared that day.

Bush was absent from the ceremony. But friends say he basked in being recognized for the spirit of compromise and cooperation it took to get something like the ADA made into law two decades ago.

It was republished by permission from the Center for Public Integrity. It originally appeared at http://bit.ly/fuRAP3.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: Barack Obama, Barbara Bush, Bill Clinton, Center for Public Integrity, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, President George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, United States, White House

Worst Case: Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach

March 18, 2011 By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica 1 Comment

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Unit 3 from above.

For more than a week the world has watched the escalating crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant slide from one catastrophic episode to a seemingly graver one, often upending assurances from the Japanese and adding to the fear and confusion about how it all might end.

Are we on a slow-motion path to a six-reactor meltdown? Or will Fukushima stop short of being the worst nuclear power disaster ever, and squeeze infamously somewhere alongside Chernobyl and Three Mile Island?

While there can be no definitive answers amid a still-unfolding disaster, ProPublica spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster’s potential health and environmental impacts.

The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan.

Even in the worst case, the crisis should not lead to the level of health and environmental destruction that followed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the experts say. Unlike Chernobyl, the potential for an explosion large enough to carry contaminants high into the atmosphere and to far away areas appears remote.

A complete loss of control of the Fukushima plant, followed by total meltdowns at multiple reactors and fires in the spent fuel stocks, would be an extraordinary development leading to very high radioactive emissions and contamination of the surrounding landscape that could last for decades.

Such a scenario is now less probable, in part because the fuel rods in the reactors are expected to continue to cool each day. Even a sustained fire in the spent fuel that sits on the top level of the reactors is unlikely to result in “criticality,” or a new nuclear chain reaction and reheating of that spent fuel.

The New York Times reported that Japanese officials remain concerned that criticality is possible in some of the troubled reactors or spent fuel. But even if it were to happen, the process can eventually be interrupted.

Experts interviewed by ProPublica said that even if a meltdown scenario unfolded unabated, the contamination would likely remain localized and would not affect a large population because evacuations have already been ordered. There remains uncertainty about whether worst-case contamination could reach as far as Tokyo, about 150 miles from the Fukushima plant, but few believe there is any chance of dangerous levels of contamination spreading offshore.

“The events that have happened, and the speculation for what could happen is not on the same scale as the release from Chernobyl,” said Peter Caracappa, a nuclear engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. “Based on all the available information, the risk to any of the places far from the plant … would be too small to calculate with any confidence. We’re not talking intercontinental effects.”

Odds of Total Meltdown Diminish

There are two aspects to the ongoing risk at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan: the fate of the reactors themselves, and the condition of the millions of pounds of spent fuel rods stored in open pools atop the reactor structures.

A total meltdown would occur if the fuel rods inside a reactor continue to overheat and break down, spilling the uranium or uranium-plutonium pellets inside them into a heap on the reactor floor. The core of the reactor containing the fuel rods is encased in a steel vessel that is then surrounded by a huge reinforced concrete containment structure.

As the fuel consolidates, there is less space for cooling water to circulate among the pellets, which can heat into a molten substance. The hotter that molten slurry gets, the greater the possibility that it can burn through the fortified steel containment vessel meant to isolate whatever happens inside the reactor.

A breach of the reactor vessel would normally be the most critical danger. If a meltdown did happen, experts say the fuel could leak out and spread through cracks in the concrete containment, sear through a second metal liner, and then flow out in the open air towards the perimeter of the plant.

“That’s the event that changes this situation from a horrible situation to a nightmare of unprecedented proportion,” said Kenneth Bergeron, a physicist who worked on nuclear reactor accident simulations at Sandia National Laboratories.

Officials have said they believe there has been a partial meltdown at least two of the four troubled reactors. But it has now been seven days since the reactors were shut down following a 9.0 earthquake that rocked the islands of Japan and triggered the devastating tsunami that swamped the power plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, continues to work to control the temperature inside the reactors and has been injecting sea water laced with boron, which short-circuits the nuclear reaction, into the reactors to maintain cooling. Experts believe that by now, the reactors should have cooled substantially. And with each day that passes, they say, the temperature drops further and the possibility of a full meltdown diminishes.

“That doesn’t seem very likely now,” said Louis Lanese, a nuclear engineer who worked on the Three Mile Island crisis in 1979 and now is a partner with Panlyon Technologies, a nuclear energy services firm in Flanders, N.J. “It’s cooled down. They have water over the core. Every day makes the consequences a little bit better.”

For those cores to melt now, Lanese said, there would have to be a complete loss of water and fuel rods would have to sit for some time – days or even weeks. Even then, he said, “I don’t know if there is enough energy in that fuel to even get out of the reactor vessel.”

Spent Fuel Is Less Potent

The greater risk may now lie with the spent fuel sitting in storage pools on top of the reactors. Those pools contain very large quantities of old fuel, at least some of which still contains significant amounts of uranium, and they are not in containment like the reactor cores.

The spent fuel rods generate residual heat and must to be cooled by water, but water levels have been precariously low in at least one pool – Unit 3 – and may have dried up altogether in the pool at Unit 4. The danger is that the zirconium cladding that contains the fuel pellets, when exposed to the air, can catch fire and burn intensely and leave the fuel pellets exposed.

Twice, reports have emerged of smoke and a possible fire in the pool atop Unit 4, but it has been difficult to confirm exactly what is taking place. Those reports have also stoked concerns that spent fuel could also melt down, and because it is not contained, release large amounts of radioactivity.

But much of the most dangerous material has already been spent, or has begun to degrade. Lanese said that if the cooling water has already evaporated from the pool in Unit 4 without a significant fire erupting, it is a sign that convection cooling from exposure to the air is enough to keep the rods stable.

Explosions remain a risk at the site. When nuclear fuel is hot enough, it can split the water molecules, releasing hydrogen, a flammable gas. Should spent fuel become molten, it could melt through the floor of the pool. When doused again with water, it could create hydrogen and an explosion that released radioactive contaminants. If reactor fuel were to melt down, it could fall into an area that contains water.

There have already been three hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant – a gas buildup in the reactor buildings of Units 1, 2 and 3 destroyed the exterior walls. But unlike Chernobyl, the worst explosion believed possible at the Japanese plant would not push tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere and would be a momentary event.

That explosive power is the key difference.

In Chernobyl, the reactor burst in a fiery ball while running at full capacity. The Chernobyl plant was also an entirely different design. It did not have a containment vessel to hold the fuel inside, and the core of the reactor contained graphite. The graphite burned like coal and sustained a roaring fire for two weeks, pushing radioactive particles miles into the atmosphere. That is how some of Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout ended up in Northern Europe.

Radiation risk mostly local

If there is open-air exposure of molten fuel at Fukushima Daiichi, there does not appear to be a mechanism for carrying large quantities of radioactive byproducts over wide areas or great distances. A fire or hydrogen blast could carry contaminants into the lower atmosphere, but only for a relatively short way, scientists say.

The exposed fuel rods or molten slurry emit large amounts of radiation and present a serious health risk to workers inside the plant. But the radiation itself doesn’t extend very far. To affect people outside the Fukushima facility, radioactive material has to be spread around.

Long-term radiation risks result from people swallowing or breathing in tiny particles that continue to be radioactive inside the human body, and continue to emit radiation as they break down over time. The radionuclides of most concern include cesium 137 – which has been detected around the Fukushima Daiichi plant – as well as strontium 90 and plutonium 239.

“A fuel melt doesn’t necessarily lead to a big disaster, any more than what we have,” said Gilbert Brown, a professor in the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachussetts in Lowell. “Even if it’s a fuel melt, you have to have a mechanism to get all that radiation to people, to get hurt by it.”

Bergeron estimates that even after the worst kind of explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, contamination might be detectable 200 miles away, with the most serious contamination within a 100 mile radius.

“That, although striking and horrible, is something described as manageable,” Bergeron said.

An evacuation has cleared out part of the area around the plant. Experts say the largest environmental impact, outside the facility, is potential contamination of the surrounding landscape. Fallout could affect groundwater and surface water supplies, as well as render much of the nearby farmland too dangerous for use.

Some of that environmental contamination can be cleaned up, but agriculture and food supplies could be affected for decades. Human health exposure can be limited by both evacuations and other precautions.

“I don’t think we are going to kill a lot of people,” said Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former head of the physical sciences department at the Rand Corporation. “But you could have a tremendous amount of land contamination. Depending on the half life, it could be many time more than 30 years before you could go there.”

Much uncertainty remains about what will happen next at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Experts caution that if there has been any lesson thus far, it is that assumptions can be easily proved wrong. But with every day that Japanese responders hold wholesale deterioration at bay – however tenuously – the health and environmental impacts should be less severe.

“I’ve worked almost 40 years in this business to keep anything even remotely like this from happening,” said Lanese. “But strange as it is, these situations tell me that these plants have even more resilience than I had expected.

“This is what an 9.0 earthquake and an eight-foot Tsunami does?” he asked. “It’s unprecedented. And those nuclear reactors are still there and still hanging in there.”

Michael Grabell and Nick Kusnetz of ProPublica contributed to this report.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: Chernobyl disaster, Japan, Nuclear meltdown, Nuclear power, ProPublica, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Spent nuclear fuel, Tokyo Electric Power Company

Our Reading List for Following Nuclear News From Japan

March 17, 2011 By Marian Wang, ProPublica 1 Comment

OFUNATO, Japan (March 15, 2011) A Mickey Mouse doll lies among debris in Ofunato following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Matthew M. Bradley/Released)

If you’re trying to follow the news from Japan, you may be finding that the news is coming out faster than you can actually read it.

We’ve compiled a few resources that we’ve found helpful as we track this developing story. With the news itself overwhelming enough as it is, we’re trying to keep it short so as not to overwhelm with quantity, but feel free to put your suggestions in the comments below.

Resources for news in real time:

The Guardian has kept a helpful live blog going, keeping it up to date but not too cluttered. The New York Times and NPR have also been updating.

As for Twitter, The Globe and Mail’s East Asia correspondent @markmackinnon has a good Japan twitter lis to follow. The UK’s Daily Telegraph (@TelegraphWorld) has another. Energy writer @JesseJenkins has a list specifically on the nuclear crisis. The Japanese government2019s press secretary Noriyuki Shikata is also tweeting at @norishikata.

How nuclear plants work and what’s at risk of happening:

The Wall Street Journal has good backgrounder on how nuclear reactors work and what went wrong in Japan. It covers the basics, including the difference between a partial meltdown (what’s happened so far) and a full meltdown (the situation that Japan is fighting to avert).

The New York Times also has a helpful interactive for understanding some of the technicalities about nuclear reactors. The Washington Post has a map of nuclear plants in Japan that shows the reach of the evacuation zones overlaid with population density (tab 7).

We’ve also reported on why the storage of “spent” nuclear fuel is a growing safety concern for Japan – a concern related to but separate from fears of a full meltdown.

The public health angle:

The World Health Organization has an FAQ on the health risks of radiation exposure in Japan. About 140,000 people have been ordered to stay home to avoid exposure.

NPR has a short explainer on the iodine tablets being distributed at evacuation centers. We noted that those pills were deemed by U.S. officials in recent years to offer limited protection from the effects of radiation exposure.

About the wider crisis:

The New York Times has a quick look at the current state of things on the ground right now in Japan: More than 2,700 confirmed dead, thousands still missing, and about 400,000 living in makeshift shelters and evacuation centers.

The Times also has before-and-after interactive satellite images showing the devastation to key locales. And the Big Picture blog, as always, has compiled several sets of incredibly heartwrenching photos.

Nuclear safety concerns outside of Japan:

The Post interactive includes a map of nuclear plants in seismic zones around the world (tab 9). It shows that in the United States, two plants in California are located in areas of “very high” degree of seismic hazard.

We’ve also published a piece on the capacity of U.S. nuclear plants to handle a major natural disaster like Japan’s. And given the New York Times piece today on the design weaknesses of the reactors used in Japan, McClatchy Newspapers has a piece on the 23 nuclear plants in the U.S. that use the same reactors. General Electric, which designed the reactors, has defended them as safe and reliable.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: earthquake, Japan, New York Times, NPR, nuclear disaster, ProPublica, The Globe and Mail, tsunami, Twitter, United States, Washington Post, World Health Organization

Regulatory Flaws, Repeated Violations Put Oil Refinery Workers At Risk

March 1, 2011 By Jim Morris, Center for Public Integrity Leave a Comment

A night view of the Tesoro Corp.’s refinery in Anacortes, Washington. Credit: Emma Schwartz/The Center for Public Integrity

One evening last April at the Tesoro Corp.’s refinery in Anacortes, Washington, Matt Gumbel and six co-workers cautiously returned to service a stack of giant, radiator-like tubes filled with volatile hydrocarbons. The tubes, known as heat exchangers, tended to leak, especially during start-up, and workers sometimes armed themselves with long, steam-spewing lances to keep any escaping vapors from igniting.

Nearby, another stack of exchangers droned at full temperature and pressure.

Away from work, Gumbel, 34, enjoyed off-trail snowboarding and driving his turbocharged sports compact. On the job, he had a reputation as a meticulous worker. One has to be. Gasoline and other fuels are made from hot, sometimes barely contained brews of combustible substances. Gumbel knew the hazards intimately; he’d followed his father’s footsteps into a job at the refinery.

Not long after midnight, as the crew monitored the equipment being brought back online, welds on one of the exchangers running a few feet away suddenly blew, engulfing the seven workers in a fireball of naphtha, a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons. The inferno melted aluminum up to 100 feet away. Four of the workers died instantly, three later.

Paul Gumbel — Matt’s father — witnessed the explosion from about 150 yards away. The elder Gumbel seized his firefighting gear — refinery workers typically must know how to use it — and raced toward the blaze.

He spotted a dead man and two women — alive but badly burned. Then another man, still breathing but aflame. As Paul Gumbel tried to comfort the wounded, he kept thinking: Where’s Matt?

Matt was alive. Enshrouded in a fire blanket, he had managed to stumble away from the wreckage. Burns covered two-thirds of his body. Rushed by ambulance to the hospital, he survived 22 days before succumbing.

Events like the April 2 Tesoro explosion, as well as many harrowingly close calls, occur more often at the nation’s 148 refineries than is widely known. While public and government attention focuses on singularly catastrophic events, such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, problems quietly fester at the factories that refine the nation’s fuels — labyrinthine complexes full of hazardous chemicals that are plagued by often-preventable accidents, putting workers at risk and endangering nearby communities.

Documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity, along with interviews of top safety officials and refining industry insiders, confirm an array of contributing factors ranging from haphazard enforcement to resistance from a politically influential industry. An easily manipulated regulatory system allows companies to challenge citations for years and postpone mandated fixes. Despite calls for change, some refineries still run equipment to failure rather than maintaining it.

Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. Credit: ABC“We have a problem with the refinery industry,” said Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent government agency whose investigations of refinery accidents have uncovered a pattern of safety lapses.

“We have decreasing staff levels, disinvestment in safety, a lack of training, and accidents or near-misses — indicators of catastrophe — being ignored,” Moure-Eraso said.

At Anacortes, state regulators concluded, Tesoro hadn’t adequately inspected the welds that ruptured in 12 years — a charge the company disputes. The heat exchanger that blew in April “came apart because cracks had developed along its weld seams,” Steve Garey, a Tesoro machinist and president of the local United Steelworkers union, told the Center. “It opened up like a firecracker.”

A year before the incident, state authorities had criticized the company’s internal inspection program and warned that Tesoro’s failure to investigate near-misses “could lead to serious injury or death of employees.”

Investigators’ findings often go unheeded. Over the past five years, only 13 of 41 remedies urged by the Chemical Safety Board after refinery accident investigations have been adopted by oil companies, trade groups, and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the government’s main workplace safety agency.

Almost four years ago, for example, the board recommended that union and oil industry leaders collaborate on standards to help identify possible precursors of serious accidents and restrict work hours to prevent fatigue-related mistakes; that recommendation remains unresolved.

Like the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates transportation accidents, the chemical board can only suggest; it has no power to compel changes.

Though the refining industry represents a relatively small part of the board’s jurisdiction, nine of 17 open accident investigations involve refineries. All nine occurred within the past 37 months.

Even an industry insurer perceives an elevated risk. U.S. refineries have sustained financial losses from accidents at a rate much higher than their overseas counterparts — four times as high, according to a 2006 report by Swiss Re, the world’s second-largest reinsurer, obtained by the Center. The difference was due in part to U.S. companies “pushing the operating envelope,” the reinsurer said. Losses stemmed, among other things, from flaws in refinery design, safety procedures and employee “alertness.” In a briefing to the Chemical Safety Board last year, Swiss Re officials reported that the gap between U.S. refineries and those in other parts of the world had widened, according to two people who were present.

To be sure, refineries — industrial behemoths that transform crude oil into gasoline and other fuels — are inherently dangerous places. Workers navigate treacherous thickets of pipe. Hulking tanks and other vessels harbor superheated liquids and some of the most flammable vapors and toxic gases known to man.

“These are highly technical, highly complex things,” said Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, a trade group. “We’re working with extremely volatile compounds, high pressures, high temperatures and rotating equipment.”

Although the refining industry’s safety record is “better than most,” Drevna said, “it’s a record that we have to improve upon.”

A six-month Center investigation suggests the industry may have a long way to go. Among the key findings:

Little-noticed, seemingly minor incidents that occur regularly at refineries can provide telltale clues about big hazards. Since the beginning of 2009, at least 80 fires have broken out at 59 refineries. A fire causing as little as $2,500 in damage may flag “a weakness that can be corrected before a higher consequence event occurs,” the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade association, notes in a 2010 guidance document. Already this year, fires have been reported at refineries in North Dakota, Texas and California.
Many accidents are associated with equipment failure and, possibly, deferred maintenance.Over the past decade, equipment failure was blamed for about half of the roughly 7,600 accidental chemical releases from refineries reported by companies to the U.S. Coast Guard’s National Response Center. Refiners are scheduling fewer top-to-bottom maintenance shutdowns, known as turnarounds, while increasing burdens on aging equipment to meet rising energy demands. This is sometimes called a “run-to-failure” approach — equipment pushed until it breaks.
Larger populations may be at risk. Fifty U.S. refineries continue to use an extremely toxic chemical, hydrofluoric acid, even though a safer alternative exists. Worst-case scenarios outlined in obscure regulatory filings tally up the potential consequences of releases of the acid, which can swiftly move long distances in a cloud. Altogether, at least 16 million people live within its potential path, in or near cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, as well as in rural areas of Oklahoma, Wyoming and Kentucky.
Regulators have little sway over refineries. Between 2000 and mid-2010, refinery owners contested 53 percent of all violations cited by state or federal safety inspectors, allowing companies to put off improvements and save money. On average, some 20 months pass before a contested case is closed. No other industry with more than 1,000 violations appeals such a large proportion of findings. This ability to keep regulators at bay has benefits that go beyond dodging penalties: Except in Oregon, state and federal rules allow employers to avoid correcting even life-threatening hazards while they are challenging citations.

‘CATCH ME IF YOU CAN’

The refining industry faces rising demand for gasoline while contending with aging facilities. Some date to the early 20th century, and no major refinery has been built since 1976. Despite obvious wear and tear, the factories are being pushed to their limits. Critics say this compels some companies, already operating on a razor-thin profit margin, to engage in a high-stakes guessing game: How long can a pump or section of pipe stay in service before it disintegrates? Is it better to keep equipment running, or shut down an entire system for preventive maintenance? Sometimes refinery managers guess wrong.

“All the units are working at higher capacity, higher pressure, higher throughput,” said Russ Elveston, a forensic engineer and safety consultant who retired from OSHA’s Houston office in 2007. “Hazards have increased simply because the units operating now produce more than they did 15 or 20 years ago. When there’s a release, the results tend to be a little more significant.”

With executives pushing for more production, meanwhile, workers can be “afraid to really report what’s wrong,” said Bob Cavnar, a longtime manager in the oil and gas industry. Result? “Years and years of deferred maintenance.”

Internal BP documents show that in the years leading up to a 2005 explosion at the company’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, which killed 15 workers, managers close to the scene agonized over safety practices at the refinery — but the message either didn’t reach or didn’t register with headquarters in London. “We have never seen a site where the notion ‘I could die today’ was so real for so very many hourly people,” reads a BP summary of interviews with Texas City workers three months before the blast. A business plan circulated eight days before the disaster noted “key risks” for 2005 — including “safety not being viewed as the #1 priority” and the prospect that the refinery “kills someone in the next 12-18 month[s].” (BP recently announced plans to sell the refinery, along with one in California, perhaps by 2013.)

The aftermath of a 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers and injured at least 180 others. Credit: U.S. Chemical Safety BoardSafety rules are on the books, but enforcement, if it happens at all, frequently results in a standoff: A federal or state agency inspects a refinery, finds violations, issues citations … and waits. Oil companies routinely challenge even the most minor allegations, mindful that any admission of fault could haunt them if they were sued or prosecuted following an accident. When a refiner appeals, 609 days pass, on average, before the case is closed — a time frame almost 20 percent longer than the average for all industries, a Center analysis of a decade of enforcement data shows.

Even in incidents where people died and regulators cited companies for willful violations — defined by OSHA as those that involve either an intentional flouting of the law or “plain indifference” to it — companies almost always assert that the tragedies were unforeseeable. Sometimes, the enforcers simply give up: Nearly a quarter of all fines proposed against refiners from January 2000 through June 2010 were erased from the books, a dismissal rate 2 1/2 times that of U.S. industry as a whole, the Center found.

Michael Silverstein, who heads the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries’ Division of Occupational Safety and Health and is a former federal OSHA policy director, said the regulatory scheme at both the state and federal levels is flawed. “Right now, it’s a catch-me-if-you-can system, and the consequences of being caught are relatively small.”

After its inspection of the Tesoro refinery in October 2008 — 18 months before the fire that killed Matt Gumbel and his co-workers — Silverstein’s agency reduced an already-modest $85,700 fine to $12,250, and withdrew 14 of 17 alleged violations. He was, in effect, bargaining. His aim? To persuade the company to drop its appeal and fix problems that could lead to a catastrophic accident.

Silverstein said he chose results over a drawn-out quest for a bigger penalty. “As long as the case was in appeal, Tesoro had no legal obligation to correct the problems cited,” he said. The department insisted on an independent safety audit as part of the settlement.

The April 2 disaster in Anacortes brought far higher potential penalties for Tesoro — and expectations that they, too, will be whittled down. The company faces a fine of nearly $2.4 million for 44 alleged violations, 39 of which are classified as willful. The state agency alleged that Tesoro “disregarded a host of workplace safety regulations, continued to operate failing equipment for years, postponed maintenance [and] inadequately tested for potentially catastrophic damage.”

Once again, the company is appealing.

“We disagree with L&I’s [Labor & Industries’] characterization of Tesoro’s operations at Anacortes and believe — based on available evidence and scientific reviews — that many of the agency’s conclusions are deeply flawed,” the company said in a written statement to the Center. “We continue to cooperate with L&I and other investigative bodies and look forward to clarifying the facts as the process unfolds.”

Silverstein said the problems found at Tesoro are far from unique. “We as a nation do not have a good grip on this industry,” he said. “It would be one thing if these were just paper violations – refineries were being a little bit sloppy at keeping records – but there’s been an unending series of catastrophic explosions, fires, chemical releases and near-misses.”

The muddled regulatory system Silverstein laments didn’t evolve by chance. Fortified by enormous reserves of money, the oil and gas industry often gets its way. A notable exception last fall: Its failure to kill a California law requiring reductions in greenhouse gases.

In 2010 alone, the industry reported spending more than $146 million to lobby the federal government. During the 2009-2010 election cycle, it donated $25 million to federal campaigns — mostly Republican, data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show. The American Petroleum Institute reported spending $6.75 million on federal lobbying last year, the refiners’ association $2.76 million. Oil and gas interests spent another $41.5 million on campaign contributions in the states, which also oversee refineries and other oil company activities, during the 2009-2010 election cycle, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Over the years, the industry has fended off a variety of rules and reforms. In 2010, it had a hand in killing federal legislation that would have increased the size of civil penalties OSHA could impose, made it easier for the agency to build criminal cases and forced employers to correct hazards while contesting citations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — to which oil companies have contributed generously — led the charge against the bill.

Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association. Credit: ABCNow, leveraging the anti-regulatory mood in Washington, the industry is attacking a host of rules it must follow, most of which involve climate change but some of which involve health and safety. In a nine-page letter to Darrell Issa, the new Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, on January 10, Drevna, of the refiners’ association, complained about a “tremendous onslaught of regulatory activity.”

“If left unchecked,” Drevna warned Issa, this onslaught could “threaten the continuation of a substantial portion of domestic refining and petrochemical production and well-paying existing American jobs, and the security of the nation.”

FATAL LAPSE IN ANACORTES

At a refinery, a heat exchanger transfers heat from one liquid to another without allowing them to mix, conserving energy that otherwise would be wasted. The exchanger that blew apart in Anacortes, known as Unit E, was put into service in 1972, four years before Matt Gumbel was born. According to the Washington Department of Labor & Industries, Tesoro last examined welds on the device — using a sophisticated method that could detect cracks — in 1998. This was the only time in the exchanger’s 38-year life that such an inspection had taken place, the department said; moreover, it found, Tesoro had tested fewer than 20 percent of the welds and focused on areas least susceptible to damage. Company records indicate that a planned 2008 inspection by Tesoro never took place, the department said.

In its statement to the Center, Tesoro said the heat exchanger that failed “was inspected regularly and was fully compliant with regulations and industry standards. The exchanger underwent external inspections once every two years and internal inspections in 1998 and again in 2005 . . .” State officials, however, say there is no evidence that the 2005 inspection was of the type that would have enabled the company to find cracks in the welds.

In its formal appeal of the state citation, the company denied that it had violated safety rules and said it might raise any number of defenses, including “unanticipated employee misconduct.”

A lawsuit filed against Tesoro on February 9 by families of six of the dead workers claims that the company pushed its heat exchangers too hard, for too long, scrimping on inspections and ignoring signs of trouble. Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that in 2001, an exchanger similar to Unit E “failed catastrophically as a result of thermal fatigue and crack propagation,” but that Tesoro “willfully disregarded” a company recommendation to inspect other exchangers for the same sorts of flaws.

“The plaintiffs’ allegations are incorrect,” countered Tesoro in its statement. The 2001 incident had different causes, the company said. Cracks “had formed through a degradation mechanism entirely different from that involved in the April 2, 2010, incident.”

The company declined in its statement to say whether the accident was preventable, as regulators asserted, instead stressing that it “deeply regrets the immeasurable impacts” the tragedy has had on workers’ families. Safety is “job number one” at Tesoro, the company added, “and we strive for continuous improvement in safety performance.”

Tesoro refinery worker Matt Gumbel. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Gumbel familyWhen the welds on Unit E popped, Matt Gumbel and his co-workers had been tending to the leak-prone exchangers being brought online after a maintenance shutdown. His father — who was working in the catalytic cracking unit, also known as the cat cracker — heard the explosion and felt the concussion.

Paul Gumbel remembers running toward the naphtha hydrotreater unit, where he knew Matt had been working. “One of the first people I saw inside the unit was obviously deceased,” Paul recalled. “It was a man … unrecognizable.” A woman was burned so badly “I was afraid to touch her.” As he tried to comfort her, he noticed another woman in bad shape, and then a second man — with flames on him. “We got him out,” Paul said. “Then I grabbed a fire hose and tried to knock the flames down.”

He stayed on the hose for 20 minutes, still not knowing his son’s whereabouts. “I had a feeling he was there [in the hydrotreater unit],” Paul said, “but nobody could answer my questions. They made me leave and go sit by a phone.” About 10 minutes later, the phone rang. Matt, the caller said, had somehow gotten out of the unit and was already on his way to Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon, Washington. By the time his parents and his 32-year-old sister, Amy, arrived at the hospital, Matt was being prepped for a helicopter ride to a Seattle trauma center. He never regained consciousness and died there on April 24.

When Paul went back to work at Tesoro in June, he felt angry and couldn’t concentrate. He lasted five days. “I had a humongous feeling of dread about even going through the gate,” he said. He began seeing a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a product of his horrific experience. After taking medical leave, he returned to the refinery in October as an operator.

Then, another setback: A boiler backfired. It was nothing, really — and everything. Paul now works in the Tesoro garage, a less stressful environment than the cat cracker unit.

LESSONS UNLEARNED

Preventable tragedies keep occurring at refineries, despite abundant information on how to make them safer.

Many expected a 1989 explosion in Texas to bring about a sea change. That blast, so powerful it measured 3.5 on the Richter scale, started when a vapor cloud ignited at Phillips 66 Company’s Houston Chemical Complex. The explosion — which killed 23 workers and injured 132 — came not quite five years after a chemical leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, had killed thousands.

The Phillips blast prompted a key reform: OSHA’s adoption in 1992 of a rule requiring high-hazard industries such as oil refining and chemical manufacturing to identify risks and address them before an accident could kill, maim or unleash toxic chemicals into neighborhoods. Under the so-called process safety management standard, eventually copied by many states, companies must have in place a system of inspections, maintenance and emergency procedures to prevent catastrophic fires, explosions and chemical releases. Publicly, affected industries were supportive — for good reason, it seemed. “[W]e believe that the benefits of the program justify the investment of resources,” BP America wrote to OSHA in April 1991, noting that “the cost of a single incident can total millions of dollars in repair costs and lost production capacity, not to mention the potential impact on human life.”

While some major accidents may have been averted, the effect of the 1992 rule has been limited. For instance, it apparently didn’t dissuade BP from cutting corners and overlooking lessons of the past at its Texas City refinery, acquired from Amoco in 1998. On March 23, 2005, an old, poorly designed relief system at the refinery was overfilled with flammable hydrocarbon liquids and vapors, which poured out and ignited, causing a series of explosions and fires. Fifteen workers died and 180 were hurt.

Signs of trouble at the refinery had been plentiful but evidently ignored. In its investigation, the Chemical Safety Board found that the relief system had overflowed eight times between 1994 and 2004, well before the explosion. None of the eight incidents, the board found, had been properly investigated or acted upon.

After fining BP $21 million for the disaster, OSHA returned to the Texas City refinery in 2009 and discovered that the company had broken its promise to fix hundreds of hazards. Finding fresh cause for concern, the agency also cited BP for hundreds of new violations. Last August, BP agreed to pay $50.6 million for the 270 “failure to abate” violations and spend at least $500 million to upgrade the refinery. But the company is contesting a $31 million fine proposed by OSHA for the new violations. Four workers have died at the refinery since 2005, and the company has paid $65 million to settle criminal and civil Clean Air Act cases brought against it by the U.S. Department of Justice as a result of the 2005 blast.

In a written statement, BP said it had “systematically refurbished and inspected major process units” in Texas City and replaced the antiquated relief system since the accident. A “new culture of openness” exists within its workforce, the company said.

MISSED WARNING SIGNS

The problems aren’t limited to big refiners like BP-Texas City, which processes 437,000 barrels of crude oil per day. In February 2008, OSHA inspected a 58,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Tyler, Texas, operated by Delek U.S. Holdings Inc. The agency cited Delek for 16 violations and fined the company $68,250; Delek contested all 16. Two months later, three Delek workers were taken to the hospital after being burned by oil that spewed from a sewer drain. OSHA cited the company for two more violations and proposed an additional $6,300 in fines. Delek contested.

On November 20, 2008, a pipe ruptured and an explosion tore through two of the refinery’s control rooms, killing one worker and injuring four, one of whom died 13 days later. In May 2009, OSHA citedDelek for 30 violations — including a willful violation for operating the failed pipe more than five years beyond the retirement date set by the company — and proposed $217,350 in fines. Again, Delek contested.

In a deposition taken in February 2010 in connection with personal injury lawsuits filed against Delek, refinery manager Frank Simmons said an investigation by the company revealed that the accident was caused by a “localized point of very high corrosion” on the 31-year-old pipe, which carried naphtha and liquefied petroleum gas. “I really believe [it] was unforeseeable for us,” Simmons testified. He acknowledged under questioning, however, that portions of the pipe that failed were below structural minimums established by the American Petroleum Institute. A spokesman for the company declined to comment.

Throughout the industry, warning signs continue to be missed or disregarded.

On March 2, 2010, a month before the Tesoro accident in Anacortes, four contract workers were caught in a storage tank blast at the 105,000-barrel-per-day Navajo refinery in Artesia, N.M. Two of the men died and two were injured. In the 15 months leading up to the accident, company officials had reported 22 fires to the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau. Eight of these fires occurred in January 2010 alone.

In a deposition last November, the refinery’s former health and safety manager, William Jones, said that Navajo should not have allowed the workers to weld on the tank without Navajo’s first testing it for flammable vapors.

“Would you agree that the definition of gross negligence has been met in this case, based on what Navajo failed to do?” one of the victims’ lawyers asked during the session.

“Yes,” Jones replied.

Last August, New Mexico regulators hit Navajo with a $707,000 fine. The company is appealing.

A spokesman for Navajo’s parent, the Holly Corp., declined to comment because of pending lawsuits.

Sometimes, it’s blind luck that no one is killed when a unit catches fire or blows up. The Silver Eagle refinery in Woods Cross, Utah, for example, had two major accidents 10 months apart in 2009. In January, a vapor cloud from a storage tank full of naphtha ignited, burning four workers in a flash fire. In November, a 10-inch hydrogen pipe burst, producing a 100-foot-high fireball and a concussion that damaged more than 100 homes, one of which was knocked off its foundation. Commuter rail lines pass near the refinery.

“Fortunately,” Chemical Safety Board investigator Don Holmstrom said shortly after the accident, “there was no train present during the blast.”

‘RUN TO FAILURE’

Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, acknowledged the string of recent accidents in the refining industry. “Have there been incidents? Absolutely,” he said. “Do we need to correct those? Do we need to prevent those? Absolutely.” He insisted, however, that these episodes do not signal a pattern and that the industry “doesn’t take economics into consideration” when making decisions that could impact safety.

Workers interviewed by the Center disagree. They describe a climate in which safety takes a back seat to ramped-up production. Rather than schedule top-to-bottom maintenance outages, which take units out of operation for extended periods, equipment is being pushed hard, sometimes beyond its design life, the workers say. They have a term for it: “Run to failure.”

“They’re managing their shareholders’ investments,” Dave Campbell, secretary-treasurer of United Steelworkers Local 675, which represents workers at five refineries in the Los Angeles area, said of the oil companies. “The price we pay is with our lives and our health.”

For instance, Campbell said, increasing use of heavier, higher-sulfur crude has heightened dangers in coker units, generally the last stop in refining. Residual materials known as bottoms are extracted from crude in drums up to 90 feet high. To keep up production, refiners are filling, cooling and emptying the drums more often than they used to, Campbell said. This puts more stress on the metal, and can lead to cracking.

In 2003, OSHA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an alert on the hazards of a practice in coker units that requires the use of high temperatures for long periods to upgrade low-quality crude. The agencies warned that such operations had resulted in a number of serious accidents, especially during procedures such as drum head removal.

In April 2009, as workers removed a drum head at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, scalding water sprayed a 49-year-old operator named Nelson Tan. He survived 18 days before succumbing to second- and third-degree burns that covered 85 percent of his body. It was just the sort of scenario OSHA and the EPA had warned about in 2003.

After contesting three citations issued by the California Division of Occupational Safety & Health, ExxonMobil, which made a profit of $19 billion in 2009, paid a $24,200 fine for violations connected with Tan’s death.

In a statement, ExxonMobil said it “deeply regrets” the incident. “Safety is our first priority, and the loss of life at our facility is not acceptable, under any circumstances. We fully cooperated with the Cal-OSHA investigation. We are committed to ensuring the health and safety of all the workers at all our facilities.”

MISLEADING NUMBERS

The refining industry has a better injury and illness rate than private industry as a whole. In 2009, the rate for refineries was one case per 100 full-time workers; the rate for all industries was 3.6 cases per 100. The rates were 2.9 for textile mills, 4.1 for coal mines and 7.8 for motor vehicle manufacturing plants. “The oil and natural gas industry is becoming an increasingly safer place to work, despite a job environment that often involves heavy equipment, hazardous materials, high temperatures and high pressure equipment,” the American Petroleum Institute said in a written statement. Officials at the institute did not respond to repeated interview requests from the Center.

Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor. Credit: U.S. SenateBut low injury rates, for broken legs or wrenched backs, say little about systemic mechanical problems, such as leaking valves or corroded pipes, which can lead to fires and explosions. For example, the injury rate at BP’s Texas City refinery in 2004, the year before the deadly blast, was about one-third that of the entire refining sector. “I cannot say too strongly to industry leaders: Stop boasting about your safety records when you’re literally putting out fires,” Jordan Barab, a U.S. deputy assistant labor secretary, said at a May 2010 safety conference sponsored by the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association. “You’re only undermining your credibility. … Boasting about the great safety record of [the] refinery industry while widows and children are planning funerals doesn’t make you sound like a serious organization. And giving awards to your members based solely on a lack of slips, trips and falls doesn’t make you sound like a serious organization.”

Even limited to injuries and deaths, refiners’ safety records are misleading. They don’t include data on thousands of contract workers, who often perform the most hazardous jobs. All 15 workers killed in the BP-Texas City accident, for instance, were employed by contractors; the deaths, therefore, aren’t attributed to BP in OSHA records. In all, the Center identified 44 deaths at refineries during the past decade. Nearly three-quarters of those killed — 32 — were contract workers.

Despite a special inspection program launched by OSHA in 2007 — and mirrored by most states that have their own safety programs — problems continue to occur at refineries with stunning regularity. A Center analysis found that 24 of the 58 refineries examined by federal officials as of November 2010 had fires or explosions after the inspections were opened. On average, OSHA has issued 17 citations and proposed $166,000 in fines per refinery. Given the size and complexity of these operations, however, inspectors can comb only a fraction of each refinery. Nor does OSHA have many qualified personnel who can give the task their undivided attention. Only seven of 320 OSHA inspectors trained in the nuances of process safety management are dedicated to it full time, and they are only in one location: Houston. In addition, OSHA’s targeted inspection program is to end this year, though officials say they plan to maintain a presence in refineries.

Those who argue for stronger enforcement point to programs in Britain, which requires assiduous planning by companies and thorough reviews by regulators before oil and gas activities start, and California, which maintains a steady presence at refineries rather than simply dropping in, inspecting and writing citations.

‘HE WASN’T FRIGHTENED’

Shauna Gumbel tells a story about her son, Matt, when he was a toddler. As the two of them ran pre-Christmas errands and encountered a succession of Santa Clauses in their hometown of Oak Harbor, Washington, Matt noticed minor differences: One wore glasses, another gloves, and so on. “Santa can’t be everywhere,” his flustered mother improvised. “He has to have helpers.” Matt was skeptical.

“He always noticed little things,” she recalled. “He was never afraid to ask questions.”

Amy, Paul and Shauna Gumbel. Credit: Emma Schwartz/The Center for Public IntegrityMatt’s curiosity and attention to detail served him well when he became an operator at the Tesoro refinery in the fall of 2007. His father, Paul, who had worked there for six years, had encouraged Matt to apply. It was a job that played to Matt’s strengths. At a refinery — a place of incessant noise and action — the person who notices subtleties can make a big difference. An acrid odor, for instance, can signal the presence of a lethal gas. “You need to pay attention to everything you’re doing and everything that’s going on around you,” Paul said. “You never know what can go wrong.”

Nonetheless, Matt liked the work. “He wasn’t frightened,” his father said.

Outside the refinery, Matt was a risk-taker. He loved snowboarding — “not always in places he should have been,” his mother said — and driving his turbocharged 2008 Mazdaspeed3. Neither loud nor timid, “he was a thinker,” Shauna said. He was proud of the blue hardhat he earned in 2009, proof that he’d completed his Tesoro training. He and Paul would talk at length about work; Shauna would eavesdrop, not understanding the terminology but pleased to see the bond strengthening between father and son.

The night of the accident, as Paul battled the fire in the naphtha hydrotreater unit and waited for word about Matt, Shauna had the telephone ringer off while she slept at home. At about 2:15 a.m., her daughter, Amy, woke her. “There’s been an accident at the refinery,” Amy said. “Matt’s been hurt. Dad’s OK.” Shauna insisted on driving to Skagit Valley Hospital, to give her something else to focus on.

Matt was in the emergency room, awaiting transport by helicopter to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, 60 miles to the south. Paul, Shauna and Amy took off for Seattle by car, arriving around 4:45 a.m. There, for the next 22 days, the family’s hopes rose and fell, as noted in Shauna’s online journal:

Matty is so strong … he will pull through this soon. (April 4)

Matt came through surgery well. They removed all the burned skin from his legs from above his ankles up to his thighs. (April 6)

Matt is out of surgery and they are pleased with how he did. (April 9)

He had his eyes open a little bit (April 14)

Matt had a rough night. (April 17)

Surgery went well. … [But] after Matt was brought up to his room they could not get his vital signs stable. He is now going back downstairs in emergency exploratory surgery to try and find out what is going on. (April 23)

They didn’t really know what caused the multiple organ failure and the swelling. … Matt fought a good fight and I think his body was telling us that it was tired and he didn’t have the fight left in him. (April 24)

On May 8, about 500 people, including many Tesoro workers, turned out for Matt’s memorial service at Oak Harbor High School. His sister and one of his closest friends scattered some of Matt’s ashes at his favorite place, a state park overlooking the water and the Olympic Mountains in the distance. The rest of the ashes are in an urn at Paul and Shauna Gumbel’s home.

Five days after the memorial service, Tesoro invited the family to the scene of the accident. They noticed the two heat exchanger banks, still mangled. A company official explained how Matt had walked away from the raging fire. “It was overwhelming to me just to see what it looked like,” Shauna said. “It was frightening and mind-boggling.”

Tesoro, meanwhile, appears to have rebounded from last April’s calamity. After a slight dip in the months immediately after the accident, the company’s stock price is nearly double what it was a year ago. In a December presentation, CEO Greg Goff assured Wall Street analysts that the refinery in Anacortes had been safely restarted and that “insurance recoveries [were] underway.” Markets for Tesoro’s products were improving, Goff observed. “Our strategic priorities are clear, our plan is focused and the organization is aligned,” state materials from the presentation. “We are committed to driving shareholder value.”

This article was co-authored by Chris Hamby and M.B. Pell. It was republished by permission from the Center for Public Integrity. It originally appeared at http://bit.ly/i3v5n1.

Filed Under: US and World News Tagged With: Anacortes Washington, Center for Public Integrity, National Transportation Safety Board, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, oil refineries, Swiss Re, Tesoro, U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, United Steelworkers, workers

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