• EPA Enforcement Head Resigns
  
• Cyclone Turns Deadly in American Samoa
  
• Oahu Wastewater System Overwhelmed by Rain
  
• New York Subway Riders Inhaling Steel Dust
  
• El Niño Fires Released Clouds of Greenhouse Gases
  
• Living Cells Engineered into Integrated Circuits
  
• Wind and Solar Energy Find Homes on the Range
  
• Eastern Sage Grouse Denied Endangered Listing
  

EPA Enforcement Head Resigns

John Peter Suarez, the assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, submitted his letter of resignation to President George W. Bush today and will leave his post on January 30.

An attorney by profession, Suarez has accepted a position with Wal-Mart Inc. in Bentonville, Arkansas. He cited the unique career opportunity and his desire to spend more quality time with his family as the reasons behind his decision to leave the EPA.

In his letter, Suarez assured the President that "the enforcement and compliance efforts are in good hands at EPA." Suarez said Bush "can be proud of the work that is being done to protect the citizens of this great nation and the natural resources upon which we all depend."

While at the agency, Suarez developed and championed the "Smart Enforcement" initiative, an outcome driven approach to environmental enforcement aimed at connecting environmental and public health benefits with the results of enforcement cases.

Suarez said, "I believe that the enforcement program is on the right track and headed in the direction that we need to go. EPA has demonstrated that we can use data effectively to identify and target the most significant areas of noncompliance, and then measure our successes in light of the benefits realized."

But attorney Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), called Suarez's tenure as EPA's top enforcement official "disastrous."

"His job was to put the best face on a thoroughgoing retreat from meaningful anti-pollution enforcement, even as his own office hemorrhaged with the steady departures of respected career professionals," said Ruch.

Suarez was confirmed by the Senate to lead the nation's environmental enforcement efforts on August 1, 2002. Previously, he was director of New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement, handling law enforcement in the casino industry. He was nominated to that position by then-Governor Christine Todd Whitman who later became the first EPA administrator in the current Bush administration. Suarez also served as Whitman's assistant counsel, and prior to that was a federal prosecutor in New Jersey.

When Suarez was first named in 2002, PEER opposed his nomination on the grounds that he lacked any experience in environmental law and had an undistinguished career as a prosecutor. "Our worst fears about Mr. Suarez were realized in spades," said Ruch, who heads a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals working to protect the environment. "The enforcement program drifted, lacking any strategic direction except defensiveness."

Under Suarez, the numbers of new criminal cases fell as agents were diverted to provide security escorts and perform other non-enforcement duties, and he was most visible at press conferences announcing that multi-million dollar air pollution settlements in cases that are no longer possible to initiate, Ruch claims.

Two weeks ago, Suarez agreed to restructure EPA's criminal enforcement program as recommended in a new management review that he had commissioned in the wake of negative publicity generated by a PEER survey of his own investigators.

EPA special agents complained to PEER one year ago that the criminal program needed to get back to basics.

The review found that EPA had been "inflating case statistics and could not gauge whether casework resulted in meaningful enforcement," said Ruch, a finding highlighted in a separate Inspector General report released this fall.

Cyclone Turns Deadly in American Samoa

Pago Pago International Airport is closed.

Samoa's acting national disaster management officer, Tau Lealea Usumai Malua, told Radio Australia he cannot even determine the extent of damage because of flooding. "The rivers that you have to cross at the some parts of the southern road, are flooding, so it's impossible to cross," he said.

Residents of coastal villages packed up and moved inland ahead of the storm on orders to evacuate.

The cyclone is moving southeast at about 12 knots and is forecast to accelerate further as it heads for Tonga.

Oahu Wastewater System Overwhelmed by Rain

Although the rains stopped today, the Hawaii State Department of Health is advising the public to stay out of waters in and around Oahu areas potentially affected by sewage overflow due to the heavy rains.

Those areas that have been posted or will be posted with warning signs are Hawaii Kai, Wailupe, Palolo Stream, Manoa Stream, Honolulu Harbor, Nuuanu Stream, Kalihi Stream, Salt Lake, Enchanted Lake, Kailua Beach Stream mouth and Bellows Stream.

The Health Department is currently monitoring water bodies and test samples to determine potential health hazards and the extent of contamination. The public is advised to avoid these waters for a few days until testing of water samples has been completed and warning signs removed. But not everyone is heeding these warnings, and beachgoers could be seen stretching out close to the brown, smelly water.

Inland, the health department is warning people to stay out of water in their neighborhoods that may have overflowed from manholes or sewer systems.

On the western and northern shores of the island, people are being warned to stay out of standing water in areas with cesspools and septic tanks in areas.

The heavy rains disrupted Oahu's wastewater system, causing treated and raw sewage to overflow at the Waimanalo Wastewater Treatment Plant and untreated sewage to back up from manhole covers in various parts of the island.

A 3,600 gallon sewage spill was reported from a manhole in a valley above Honolulu, the city said. Manhole covers were lifted by the heavy runoff in storm drains in downtown Honolulu.

Waterfalls flowed down driveways and between houses at many locations as rain flooded down the mountains, and landslides were reported in several areas on the eastern and southern sides of the island.

New York Subway Riders Inhaling Steel Dust

Still, the subway levels are more than 1,000 times lower than the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Permissible Exposure Limit guidelines for workers.

"This study in no way suggests that people should avoid riding the subway. There are no known health effects at the levels that we observed in the NYC subway system. Furthermore, reducing subway ridership would just increase surface traffic emissions," says Dr. Steven Chillrud, a geochemist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a division of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and lead author of the study.

The field research was conducted by 41 students attending the A. Philip Randolph Academy, a public high school in Harlem with enrollment from four of the five New York City boroughs, during the winter and summer of 1999.

Air samples were collected over 48 hour time periods from rooftop sites in Harlem and Rockland County, New York and from inside and outside of each student's home. At the same time, students carried a specially designed backpack with a battery operated pump to collect what were called personal samples as they went about their normal daily routines.

Comparing the samples collected from each of these locations showed that the vast majority of the personal samples had higher iron, manganese, and chromium levels that could not be explained by levels observed inside of the subjects' homes or in outdoor locations.

Looking at elemental ratios allowed the team to conclude that while the indoor and outdoor samples appeared to obtain their iron and manganese from re-suspended dirt particles, the personal samples were exposed to a single type of steel that was ground into a fine dust.

The subway system was pinpointed as a potential source of the steel dust when data from the winter samples showed that all the students who commuted a long distance to school were included in the group with the elevated levels of iron, manganese, and chromium. In summer, when the students were not commuting to school, the geographic pattern of elevated levels was more random.

The subway hypothesis was confirmed by a Columbia University student who went underground with two personal monitoring pumps and a particle counter for a total of eight hours.

"All indicators for the increased exposure levels point to the subway microenvironment as the source of steel dust exposure," says Dr. Chillrud. "The non-subway riding students showed levels of metals similar to the home and outdoor levels while the subway riders showed increased exposure."

Particle numbers were five to 10 times lower in air conditioned subway cars as compared to underground subway stations, indicating that the filtration systems of the car air conditioners are very effective at removing the steel dust from the passenger cars.

The results are part of the TEACH (Toxic Exposure Assessment, a Columbia and Harvard) study to understand pathways and levels of personal exposures to potentially toxic air pollutants in inner city areas of New York City and Los Angeles.

This research was funded by the Mickey Leland National Urban Air Toxics Research Center and the National Institutes for Environmental Health Sciences Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

The team's findings are scheduled to appear in the January 15 issue of "Environmental Science & Technology," a peer reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society.

"It is important to stress that there are no known health effects at these levels," said Dr. Patrick Kinney, principal investigator of the TEACH project and associate professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and a member of the Earth Institute.

Still, there is increasing interest in whether there are health effects from long term exposure to low levels of pollutants such as chromium and manganese, as well as from inhaling airborne transition metals.

"With the large number of people who ride in underground subways, we do think subway exposures are worth investigating further," said Dr. Chillrud. Along these lines, the Columbia researchers are beginning a study to look at whether the elements in airborne steel dust are absorbed into the bodies of transit workers in New York City.

El Niño Fires Released Clouds of Greenhouse Gases

Now, for the first time, scientists have quantified the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by these fires, including the two most prevalent climate warming gases - carbon dioxide and methane.

James Randerson, assistant professor of Earth system science at University of California-Irvine, and colleagues combined satellite data and measurements of atmospheric gases.

They found that fire emissions of greenhouse gases increased 60 percent in Southeast Asia, 30 percent in Central and South America, and 10 percent in the boreal forests of North America and Eurasia.

“Vast areas of the tropics dry out and become vulnerable to fire during El Niño events,” Randerson said. “It appears that El Niño events accelerate carbon loss from terrestrial ecosystems because they enable humans to use fire more effectively as a tool for clearing land in the tropics.”

The study is another step toward more fully understanding the carbon cycle – the movement of carbon in its many forms in the biosphere – and its effect on climate.

Previous studies have suggested that global warming increases the microbial activity that decomposes plants, releasing more carbon dioxide from soils.

Carbon dioxide, one of the forms of carbon, is a greenhouse gas which, when released into the atmosphere, helps raise the Earth’s temperature. The new study suggests that future carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may actually be more sensitive to the intensity and variability of El Niños than to increased microbial activity caused by warming.

The researchers also found that large scale fires contributed to most of the year-to-year changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide totals during the period from 1997 to 2001.

“Many scientists have attributed this variability to changes in the balance between plant growth and microbial activity,” Randerson said. “Our work indicates, however, this has a smaller impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels than previously believed.”

Almost all of the increased levels of methane measured during 1997 and 1998 can be attributed to the worldwide fires, the team found.

The study, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Office of Earth Science, also provides evidence that areas in southern Mexico and Guatemala experienced large scale increases in fire emissions during the 1997-98 El Niño.

“An important next step is to identify the processes that contributed to the high fire emissions, including deforestation, pasture maintenance, agricultural waste burning and savanna fires,” Randerson said. “This will help us understand how quickly greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane will accumulate in the atmosphere.”

With other researchers in the University of California-Irvine Department of Earth System Science, Randerson has embarked on a project to study the recent fires in California. Currently, he is in the field studying the impact of fires on forests in Alaska and Siberia.

Randerson’s colleagues in the El Niño study include scientists from the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, Duke University, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland.

Study results appear in the current issue of the journal "Science," a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Living Cells Engineered into Integrated Circuits

Micro Systems Technologies, a startup company in Dayton, Ohio, recently licensed bioluminescent bioreporter integrated circuit technology developed by Mike Simpson of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Gary Sayler of the University of Tennessee's Center for Environmental Biotechnology.

These whole-cell living bioreporters are genetically engineered to generate light when they have taken up the targeted substance.

Because these sensors can detect chemical and biological agents in the air, water or soil in near real time, they have potential applications in a wide range of environments.

Joe Williams, chief executive officer of Micro Systems Technologies, envisions using them for environmental contaminants monitoring, for detecting weapons of mass destruction, and in medical care devices.

Their low cost and small size make them ideal for use in areas where other analytical instruments would be impractical.

Sayler envisions their use for online monitoring of microbial contamination and radiation exposure in the spacecraft environment.

The new whole cell bioluminescent biosensor organisms are fabricated directly with wireless integrated circuits to create bioluminescent bioreporter integrated circuits (BBIC).

In the BBIC fabrication the bioluminescent biosensor organisms are engineered to produce light at 490 nm in response to specific physical or chemical agents. This light is transduced to a digital signal by the bioluminescent bioreporter integrated circuit through the silicon chip based circuitry.

For the space craft environment, Sayler says the ultimate goal is to create an array or network of small, unobtrusive, low cost, low power bioluminescent bioreporter integrated circuits for intelligent distributed monitoring of the space craft, as well as for planetary surface habitats.

Wind and Solar Energy Find Homes on the Range

In the midst of events such as the sheep shearing contest, the first ever bucking bull sale, the miniature horse performance classes, and the international yak meat seminar, farmers and ranchers can participate in workshops on clean, renewable energy systems available today.

On January 10, 17 and 25, engineers from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will host workshops called Solar, Wind and Biomass Energy for Farm, Ranch and Home.

The consumer oriented workshops will offer an introduction to solar, wind and biomass energy systems, which can provide economical ways to produce electricity and hot water. The workshop will also describe how energy efficiency combines with renewable sources to provide clean, low cost energy.

"In many cases, renewable energy systems provide the cheapest and most reliable way to meet the electricity needs of farms and ranches," said NREL engineer John Thornton. "Installing a solar or wind energy system is often cheaper than running a new power line if electricity is needed one-quarter mile or more away from an existing power line."

Solar, wind or biomass generated power can provide hot water for home and farm use, or pump water for livestock.

Powering automatic gate openers, aeration fans in grain storage bins and automatic supplement feeders is cost efficient with renewable systems, as is powering security and task lighting or as well as entrance signs.

Using renewables helps protect farmers and ranchers from electricity price spikes, brownouts, rolling blackouts and other grid related reliability and supply security issues. They can avoid the high costs of extending power lines to remote locations.

The workshops are free with admission to the Stock Show and will be offered 10 am to noon, January 10 in the NWSS Livestock Building and January 17 and 25 in the Beef Palace Auction Arena.

NREL, which is based in nearby Golden, Colorado will sponsor an exhibit for the duration of the Stock Show with free literature on solar, wind and biomass energy in the Hall of Education.

Eastern Sage Grouse Denied Endangered Listing

“New biological information indicates that the eastern sage grouse is not a valid subspecies of the greater sage grouse, nor does it merit listing as a separate population,” said Ralph Morgenweck, the Service’s director of the Mountain-Prairie Region.

The decision parallels the Service's decision on the western sage grouse issued February 7, 2003. Though western sage grouse were described as early as 1946, biologists since then have questioned the validity of separating eastern and western subspecies, the Service said.

In turning down these petitions, the Service cites a genetics study conducted on the two subspecies that indicates there is no difference between them.

Both petitions were filed by the Institute for Wildlife Protection, a which has also filed an unsuccessful petition with the Service to list a small population of sage grouse found only in Mono County, California, and Lyon County, Nevada that the group maintains should be considered a “distinct population segment,” separate from the western grouse found in declining numbers around the West.

Still, Morgenweck said the Service will continue to evaluate other petitions to list sage grouse as endangered across their entire U.S. range, which includes parts of 11 states.

The Service intends to address all outstanding petitions for the greater sage grouse within 90 days of the latest petition - by March 29, "subject to legal commitments, resource limitations, and competing priorities."

“We will continue to work with federal and state agencies as well as private organizations to conserve the greater sage-grouse and its habitat through voluntary partnerships on both public and private lands," said Morgenweck.

Since 2001, the Service has provided Utah with $2.4 million and Washington with $730,000 for the restoration of sagebrush habitat. Through its Landowner Incentive Program, the Service also provided $1.4 million to Montana to improve the management of sagebrush habitat on private lands there.

Over the past five years, the Bureau of Land Management has worked with several western states on cooperative sage grouse conservation projects and has established partnerships with communities throughout the West to conserve and restore sage grouse habitat. These efforts are designed to head off continued loss of America’s important sagebrush ecosystems, which support hundreds of plant and animal species, including sage grouse.

The Service says concern about long term declines in sage grouse populations has prompted western state fish and wildlife agencies and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service to join in a cooperative partnership aimed at conserving and managing sagebrush habitat for the benefit of sage grouse and other sagebrush dependent species.

About half of the sagebrush habitat in the United States is on land administered by the BLM. This agency will spend $1.235 million this year on a variety of projects to map and monitor sage grouse populations and habitat, develop cooperative conservation projects for these birds, and work with state and federal partners on other conservation planning initiatives.

The largest of the native grouse, sage grouse are ground nesting birds. Adult males can reach lengths of up to 30 inches and weigh up to seven pounds.

Sage grouse depend on sagebrush most of the year for roosting cover and food. During the spring breeding season, the males defend territory and perform elaborate displays with specialized plumage and vocalizations to attract females.