• West Virginia Flood Victims Get Emergency Funds
  
• Gulf War Vets Ill from Anthrax Vaccination, Medication
  
• Wasting Disease Puts Wisconsin Deer in Hunters' Sights
  
• Illegal Brazilian Mahogany Remains Impounded at 15 Ports
  
• EPA Distributes $21.5 million in Brownfields Grants
  
• Arkansas Shuts Down Tontitown Landfill
  
• Recreational Town of Lake Tahoe to Run CNG Buses
  
• Creosote Bush May Be the Oldest Living Thing on Earth
  

West Virginia Flood Victims Get Emergency Funds

While touring flood damaged areas in McDowell, Mercer and Mingo counties, West Virginia Governor Bob Wise Sunday received word from FEMA that West Virginia families will be eligible for individual assistance.

Much of southern West Virginia was swamped this morning by a flood in which three people died and nine were reported missing. The body of a 14 month old girl was found near Welch today. The body of the girl’s mother had been found near the community of Vivian on Friday. The body of a man was found in the Panther area on Thursday.

Two deaths are indirectly related to the severe weather. A woman was killed after a mudslide caused a tree to fall on her car on U.S. 52 near Keystone today. An Iaeger man died on Thursday following a cardiac emergency. Paramedics made several attempts to reach him but could not due to high water.

The West Virginia Office of Emergency Services says more than 500 homes and business have been damaged in McDowell, Mercer, Mingo and Wyoming counties. Several public buildings were also affected. Nine schools and five fire departments in McDowell County sustained damage. Emergency services offices were flooded, and several hospitals and ambulance services were inundated. Phone and electrical services are still out in some areas.

Roads were closed across the affected area as search and rescue personnel struggled to reach trapped and isolated residents. National Guard helicopters were used to lift injured people to safety including a Bradshaw firefighter, who was hurt during a rescue of a woman in Beartown on Thursday.

Fourteen water systems have been affected. Approximately 7,000 customers are without water. Boil water advisories have been issued for 14,650 customers. Power is being restored in McDowell County. Power outages remain in Panther and Bradshaw. The National Guard will provide three 5,000 gallon drinking water tankers to McDowell County. The state Division of Highways is positioning two 5,000 gallon water tankers in Princeton and two 5,000 gallon water tankers in Williamson.

The West Virginia Conservation Agency is assessing damage to area streams. The Department of Environmental Protection is assessing landfills and debris transfer sites.

Last year, a series of floods devastated much of southern West Virginia. McDowell, Mercer and Wyoming counties were heavily hit by floods in May and July 2001.

Gulf War Vets Ill from Anthrax Vaccination, Medication

Pills of pyridostigmine bromide were given to Gulf War military personnel as a pretreatment for exposure to nerve agents. A vaccination for anthrax and several others were given at the same time, and many contained mercury as a preservative, said the research team, led by Walter Schumm, a Kansas State professor of family studies and human services.

Inaccurate shot records, little rest, stressful conditions in the field, and you have the recipe for a "significant association" between subsequent declines in subjective health experiences and Gulf War veterans, Shumm's team found.

Schumm noted that their research confirms results reported previously by British, Canadian, and other U.S. research teams with respect to vaccinations and pyridostigmine bromide consumption. He is working on a critique of a report recently released by the Institute of Medicine, clearing anthrax vaccine of any connection to health problems.

The extensive review of published literature in 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War, is entitled "Gulf War and Health, Volume I."

Schumm said that it is possible that the anthrax vaccine as given today may be safe while the product as manufactured and administered during the Gulf War - in combination with all the other factors - was less than optimal with respect to the long term health of recipients.

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi armed forces invaded Kuwait; within five days, the United States began to deploy troops to Operation Desert Shield. The last troops to participate in the ground war returned home on June 13, 1991. In all, approximately 697,000 U.S. troops had been deployed to the Persian Gulf area during the conflict.

A large number of Gulf War veterans have had a range of unexplained illnesses including chronic fatigue, muscle and joint pain, loss of concentration, forgetfulness, headache, and rash. They were potentially exposed to a wide range of biological and chemical agents including sand, smoke from oil well fires, paints, solvents, insecticides, petroleum fuels and their combustion products, organophosphate nerve agents, pyridostigmine bromide, depleted uranium, anthrax and botulinum toxoid vaccinations, and infectious diseases, in addition to psychological and other physiological stress.

Ohio state officials were concerned over numerous reports of veterans in Ohio being ill with various problems and hired the team of researchers to take an independent look at the problem.

Schumm and his team studied a random selection of nearly 1,000 reserve component veterans from all branches of the military, who had either been living in Ohio in March 1996 or who had been in Ohio as of August 1990.

Among those veterans who reported excellent health before the war, 36 percent who said they received an anthrax vaccination reported poor to fair health in 1996 compared to 18 percent of those who did not report receiving the anthrax vaccination. In contrast, those who were not mobilized and did not receive an anthrax vaccination or pyridostigmine bromide pills reported much lower levels of poor to fair health in 1996 - less than five percent.

Schumm said researchers also found that many of the medical records or shot records of the veterans had been falsified or destroyed, making it virtually impossible to use clinical data to assess the impact of vaccinations or the pyridostigmine bromide pills.

"I get angry sometimes because you hear on the news that the Gulf War Syndrome symptoms are psychological; it's all in their heads," Schumm said. "I think our research suggests that there is something else going on. If it was just all just psychological I don't think we'd get these correlations with the exposures like we have. I think our findings are equivalent if not better than other studies done."

The Institute of Medicine committee recommended careful, longterm study of veterans exposed to depleted uranium and sarin; and recommended study of interactions between pyridostigmine bromide and insecticides and stress. Because few vaccination records were kept, the committee recommended long term sudy of those who were vaccinated for anthrax.

Chronic Wasting Disease Puts Wisconsin Deer in Hunters' Sights

Department of Natural Resources Secretary Darrell Bazzell said the department is issuing special deer harvest permits starting today to landowners to reduce the deer herd within a core area where chronic wasting disease has been documented in western Dane and eastern Iowa Counties.

"I cannot emphasize enough that hunters and landowners hold the keys to dealing with Chronic Wasting Disease. This deer herd belongs to all of us. If we want to have healthy deer and deer hunting in the future, we're going to have to do some hard things now - open our lands and start the very sad task of drastically reducing deer numbers in the chronic wasting disease zone," he said.

"We have a series of public meetings scheduled around the state beginning on May 1 to explain to the public why we need to take rapid and what may seem to some, drastic action. But our best chance of getting ahead of this disease is to act swiftly and decisively," said Bazzell.

Landowners will be issued permits to take as many deer as they can under this unprecedented action plan. Landowners may designate other hunters to help fill their permits for them. The Department of Natural Resources will provide supplemental hunters to landowners requesting help. Extensions to the fall hunting season are being developed.

The department is also asking landowners and hunters to join a voluntary ban on deer feeding and deer diet supplements in the area infected with chronic wasting disease (CWD) and adjacent management units. The extent of the CWD Core Management Area will be defined based on analysis of sampling results by a CWD Interagency Health and Science team.

Placing food for hunting purposes, or baiting, is only allowed during established hunting seasons. Feeding is the practice of placing food on the land outside of hunting seasons or on a year round basis and is thought to promote spread of chronic wasting disease.

A 500 deer sample is being collected for analysis by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Tough new regulations have been placed on the import of elk and deer to Wisconsin and for testing deer and elk on farms in Wisconsin.

A cousin of mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease belongs to the family of diseases known as transmissable spongiform encephalopathies or prion diseases. It attacks the brains of infected deer and elk, causing the animals to become emaciated, display abnormal behavior, lose bodily functions and die.

Chronic wasting disease has been known to occur in deer and elk in North America for decades. It occurs in wild deer and elk primarily in northeastern Colorado and adjacent parts of Wyoming and Nebraska. The disease has also been found on elk farms in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Saskatchewan. State officials note that the disease is not a threat to cattle or sheep.

The first time wildlife officials realized the disease had spread east of the Mississippi River was on February 28, when the Wisconsin DNR was alertedby the National Veterinary Lab that chronic wasting disease was detected three deer registered in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin during the 2001 nine day gun season.

Illegal Brazilian Mahogany Remains Impounded at 15 Ports

Greenpeace discovered on Thursday that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Fish and Wildlife had approved the release of the mahogany based on an April 25 document from the Brazilian environmental agency IBAMA deeming the timber legal. The international environmental group immediately sent evidence of the timber's illegal status to White House officials and showed the release document from IBAMA to top officials in Brazil.

The Minister of Environment in Brazil and other top officials then rescinded the release document, dismissed the official who wrote it and made emergency calls to the White House. In light of those frantic calls, the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service officials late Thursday rescinded a decision announced earlier in the day to allow the 15 mahogany shipments from Brazil into the country.

The White House is investigating whether any timber actually left the 15 ports on May 2. The USDA has been holding the mahogany at U.S. ports since February 8 to confirm that the export permits accompanying the shipments were valid and the wood was legally acquired.

When President George W. Bush announced in February that he was calling on the Secretary of State to begin an initiative to combat illegal logging, Greenpeace met with top advisors and provided evidence of U.S. links to illegal logging in endangered forests.

In October 2001, Greenpeace released a report, titled "Partners in Mahogany Crime," that exposed illegalities and corruption in the Brazilian mahogany trade. The report linked companies such as Aljoma, Ethan Allen and Stickley to this illegal trade. Based on Greenpeace's investigation, the Brazilian government halted all mahogany trade.

In spite of this moratorium, several exporters took legal action and continued to ship mahogany. Greenpeace has found that more than $40 million worth of shipments arrived in U.S. ports following Brazil's ban.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) issued a statement today commending the USDA for cooperating with Brazilian environmental authorities to stop suspected shipments of illegally exported mahogany from entering the U.S. market.

"Mahogany plays a critical role in the environmental well being of the Brazilian rainforest and the economic stability of local communities," said Kathryn Fuller, WWF president. "If we act now, big-leaf mahogany can be saved from extinction and continue to contribute to healthy forests and communities. I thank the U.S. government and IBAMA for working together to protect Brazil's endangered mahogany trees."

Each year, Brazil loses about 5,700,000 acres of forest - an area about the size of New Hampshire - to a variety of causes including commercial logging, conversion to agricultural use, and illegal logging. IBAMA estimates that 80 percent of logging in the Brazilian Amazon is illegal.

According to a report by TRAFFIC, WWF's wildlife trade monitoring program, "the United States is one of the latest of several significant importers from colonial to modern times to contribute to what essentially amounts to a practice and pattern of mahogany mining in neotropical forests."

IBAMA has sent a team of law enforcement officers and forestry experts into the field to analyze the mahogany "chain of custody" from the original loggers to the exporters. The results of this survey will help determine the sources and supply lines of mahogany exports to the United States.

EPA Distributes $21.5 million in Brownfields Grants

Brownfields are abandoned, idled, or under used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.

One million dollars of this year's funding is going to the state of Kansas for the cleanup of numerous small brownfields scattered across the state. Kansas, unlike many heavily industrialized states, has an abundance of undeveloped land that is attractive to developers who have moved in, built a factory and moved out, leaving a mess.

Municipalities throughout the state are making investments in the redevelopment of their historical central cores. The contamination left behind is often discovered late in a property transaction, which delays or stops such projects.

Access to low interest loans for municipalities and other qualified applicants to conduct cleanups could increase participation in the state Voluntary Cleanup and Property Redevelopment Program. Kansas will offer these loans in hopes that successful cleanups conducted with the use of the loans will encourage private lending institutions to reevaluate their policies and provide financial assistance for environmental cleanups.

"Brownfields restoration is a win-win for everyone," Whitman said, "from the children who have new places to play when a brownfield is turned into a ballfield, to the parents who have new jobs when a Brownfield becomes the site of a new office building or a retail store."

The grants are awarded under EPA's Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund program to capitalize state and local programs that in turn provide no interest or low interest loans to businesses to carry out cleanup activities at Brownfields properties. Federal capitalization of these loan programs provides necessary resources that enable state and local governments to produce or leverage billions of dollars in other public and private sector funding to revitalize economically depressed communities.

To date, EPA has awarded 143 Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund grants to 39 states and the District of Columbia totaling almost $91 million. For every dollar of federal money spent on Brownfields cleanup activities, cities and states produce or leverage $2.48 in private investment. The EPA Brownfields program has leveraged over $4 billion in public and private investments.

The EPA Brownfields website offers information about success stories, conferences, partnerships and regional initiatives. http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/topics.htm

Arkansas Shuts Down Waste Management's Tontitown Landfill

On April 22, a former employee of the Tontitown Landfill contacted ADEQ Interim Director Richard Weiss with allegations of serious environmental damage and violations of the landfill’s permit conditions. At Weiss’ direction, ADEQ staff the next day initiated an on-site investigation of the allegations, and determined that there are reasonable grounds to believe the allegations.

The former employee, who was not publicly named, told Weiss that there was a cave-in at WMI's Class 1 landfill and that the Class 4 landfill had a big hole in the bottom. The complaint alleged that WMTL had knowledge that the bottom liner system in the Class 1 landfill had failed.

The complaint alleged that during May 2001, three feet of waste would be placed in the Class 1 landfill and the next day there would be a three foot depression in that area. Fill operations in this area allegedly occurred for an extended period of time. The complaint further alleged that about 15,000 gallons of fluids were detected in the leak detection system in a week.

Weiss praised the former employee for reporting the situation to the ADEQ. “It was a courageous act,” said Weiss. “The information provided has enabled us to better meet our mission to protect and enhance Arkansas’ environment. We all owe a debt of gratitude for the actions of this individual.”

The landfill’s permit conditions require that the facility cease operations until the issues raised have been resolved to the ADEQ’s satisfaction. The order does not affect WMI’s waste tire and composting operations at the site.

The ADEQ is proposing a fine of $558,000 for the alleged violations, but reserves the right to revise the size of the fine, as well as other elements in a notice of violation provided to WMI officials April 26.

A public meeting originally set for May 16 to discuss a proposed expansion of the Waste Management, Inc., Class 1 landfill at Tontitown has been canceled due to the pending enforcement action against the facility.

Recreational Town of Lake Tahoe to Run CNG Buses

The first project will be to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling facility located in South Lake Tahoe adjacent to the transit bus facility on Shop Street. This fueling facility is need to accommodate the planned purchases of more CNG buses.

The next project involves buying five CNG buses to assist in transporting people on the North Shore. This service expansion will provide riders the ability to reach all Placer County’s ski areas from any stop along the highway, avoiding the need to drive in inclement or congested conditions.

The last project is to replace an old CNG trolley bus that is past its useful life. This trolley serves the South Shore Trolley Program that has seen a steady increase in ridership over the last four years.

Compressed Natrual Gas buses and trolleys decrease the need for people to drive their own vehicles, eliminating a great amount of pollution and improving air and water quality in that Region.

Jointly making the funding announcement Nevada's U.S. Senators Harry Reid, a Democrat, and John Ensign, a Republican, said the funding will go a long way to improve Lake Tahoe. “Lake Tahoe is a national treasure that we desperately need to preserve,” Senator Ensign said. “These funds will offer transportation alternatives to visitors, making the area more easily accessible while reducing levels of pollution that are contributing to the decline of water quality.”

“Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful lakes in the nation and is something Nevada takes great pride in,” Senator Reid said. “It is important that we are able to keep the lake and environment surrounding it healthy for the many generations to come. This funding will allow for more natural gas buses, which will decrease the pollution in the air and water, helping ensure the lake stays clear.”

Creosote Bush May Be the Oldest Living Thing on Earth

On January 23, Cornett began research to determine if a particular group of creosote bushes in Palm Springs might be the oldest living things in the world. He noticed the group of creosotes while flying to Joshua Tree National Park. From the air, Cornett noticed the unusual growth pattern of the plants and later visited the site. While on the ground, he formulated his hypothesis and is now in the process of determining its validity.

Scientific tests have not yet confirmed Cornett's hypothesis. R. Ervin Taylor, director of the Radiocarbon Lab at the University of California, Riverside, offered to perform scientific tests to determine the age of the creosote bush in Palm Springs to determine if it is the oldest living thing on earth.

"The UCR Radiocarbon Lab is happy to collaborate with Jim Cornett," Taylor said. "We would have the data back six weeks from when we received the samples, at no cost to him."

An original creosote bush can live to be about 100 years old, but it can produce clones of itself through a system whereby the inner stems die and new stems appear on the periphery. This produces a circular pattern of genetically identical plants, with the rings expanding outward about three feet every 500 years. This clone family can live a remarkably long time. Considering the cloned shoots as part of the original plant, that makes it the oldest living thing on earth.

Taylor's laboratory was used to determine the age of the creosote bush known as King Clone, discovered in the Mojave Desert in the late 1970s by Frank Vasek, a retired UC Riverside professor and a former teacher of Cornett's.

The King Clone is estimated at 11,700 years old on what is now Bureau of Land Management land near Victorville, California.

Taylor's Radiocarbon Lab also issued the first dates on a bone fragment from Kennewick Man, an ancient skeleton found in July 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. That bone fragment turned out to be 9,300 years old, making it one of the oldest and most complete skeletons found in North America. In 1994, Taylor's lab first dated "Spirit Cave Man" at 9,400 years old.

"Science is all about reproducing numbers," said Taylor. "We would be glad to help Jim Cornett find the age of the creosote bush."