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Fox News Retracts Tweets Implying Quebec City Mass Shooter Was Muslim

by Tarah51F22734806 Posted on February 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Fox News has retracted and apologized for three tweets misidentifying the suspect in the massacre at a Quebec City mosque on Sunday night as a Moroccan.

Quebec authorities initially indicated on Monday that they had two suspects in custody, but soon clarified that the sole suspect in the killings was a white Canadian man. Although Fox News updated its story with that information on Monday, the network’s erroneous tweets remained online, pointing to a person identified by authorities as Mohamed el Khadir as the perpetrator. In fact, the sole suspect in the attack was 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, who was reported to be a right-wing extremist and vocal supporter of Donald Trump.

A day after Mother Jones first reported on the erroneous Fox News tweets—which collectively were retweeted thousands of times before their removal—the director of communications for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent an email to Fox News calling for a retraction and rebuking the network for allowing “false and misleading language” to continue circulating:

These tweets by Fox News dishonour the memory of the six victims and their families by spreading misinformation, playing identity politics, and perpetuating fear and division within our communities.

We need to remain focused on keeping our communities safe and united instead of trying to build walls and scapegoat communities. Muslims are predominantly the greatest victims of terrorist acts around the world. To paint terrorists with a broad brush that extends to all Muslims is not just ignorant — it is irresponsible.

(See the full text of the email from Trudeau’s communications director, Kate Purchase, in her timeline.)

In a statement emailed to Mother Jones, the managing director of FoxNews.com, Refet Kaplan, said: “FoxNews.com initially corrected the misreported information with a tweet and an update to the story on Monday. The earlier tweets have now been deleted. We regret the error.”

The earliest information to emerge as a mass shooting unfolds almost always contains inaccuracies, a well-known fact in newsrooms. Two of the Fox News tweets highlighting the unconfirmed identity of the shooter as a Moroccan were posted on its primary account, which has 13 million followers, and remained online for more than a day. A third tweet, posted on anchor Bret Baier’s Twitter feed for his show “Special Report,” was removed on Wednesday morning. It had circulated widely since Monday, after being retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. (See all three tweets here.)

On his show Monday night, Baier appeared to remain focused on the shooting suspect as a Moroccan—even after his own correspondent reported otherwise on the air.

“Bret, in the aftermath of this attack there was a great deal of confusion and contradictory reports,” said Fox correspondent David Lee Miller, reporting from Quebec City. “Initially it was said that there were two shooters. Now authorities are saying there was only one, and just a short time ago the suspect was brought into court. He is identified as Alexandre Bissonnette.” Miller described Bissonnette’s age and the murder charges brought against him. Then he added: “We are told he had been a student at a local university here, and that he had what are described as extreme right-wing views.”

Miller also went on to say that the mosque had previously faced anti-Muslim harassment, including reports of it being vandalized with swastikas and the delivery of a pig’s head to the building last summer.

After Miller’s reporting of all these details, Baier responded:

“And just to be clear, David Lee, one of them is Moroccan? Do we know anything more about the background?”

Miller again emphasized that el Khadir had by then been identified as a witness to the shooting, not a suspect: “The man described as the Moroccan was someone who was worshiping inside the mosque when the gunfire erupted.”

“OK, that’s a good point to make,” said Baier.

Watch the full segment here:

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

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Fox News Retracts Tweets Implying Quebec City Mass Shooter Was Muslim

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Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

by RoccoKroemer Posted on June 6, 2016

Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

By on Jun 6, 2016Share

An oil train that went off the tracks and burst into flames in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon last week hasn’t been cleaned up yet, but the railroad is already back to business as usual. And many North Americans are feeling renewed anxieties about the danger of what activists call “bomb trains.”

On Friday, 16 Union Pacific train cars filled with highly combustible fracked oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota derailed outside Mosier, Ore. Multiple cars caught fire, and about 100 people were evacuated from nearby homes. Elizabeth Sanchey, one of the first responders, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the scene “looked like the apocalypse.” This weekend, a sheen of oil was spotted on the Columbia River nearby.

Mosier city officials quickly passed an emergency motion calling on Union Pacific to remove all oil from the damaged cars before the line was reopened, but Union Pacific just pushed the disabled cars to the side of the track and restarted operations. As of this writing, the cars are still filled with oil.

Oil train derailment in Mosier, Ore.Columbia Riverkeeper

“Restarting trains before the high-risk carnage of their last accident is even cleared from the tracks is telling Mosier they are going to play a second round of Russian roulette without our town,” said Mayor Alrene Burns in a statement. “It’s totally unacceptable.”

Mosier’s citizens agree. Dozens of locals — including city officials, tribal representatives, faith leaders, and members of environmental groups — gathered in nearby Hood River, Ore., over the weekend to protest the oil trains moving through their communities.

Protesters gathered after Mosier oil-train explosion.Columbia Riverkeeper

Mosier, of course, isn’t the only town at risk.

Crude oil from the Bakken shale is especially flammable, and it is transported all across the U.S. and Canada. In 2013, a train moving Bakken crude derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and destroying much of the town center. It was the most deadly oil-train derailment in recent history, but it was far from the only one. In the past few years, more than a dozen derailments and explosions have occurred, leading to evacuations, oil spills, and, in some cases, fires that burned for days.

The 2013 oil-train disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Public Herald

Though oil transport by rail is increasingly common, many residents have no idea that these trains are passing through their communities. (This map shows some rail lines that transport oil, as well as sites where accidents have occurred.) In 2014, national railroad operators agreed to eight voluntary measures to lower the risk of derailments, including reducing speed in some cities and increasing inspections, but communities still aren’t getting the information they would need to effectively respond to disasters, let alone prevent them.

Mosier has about 400 residents, but these oil trains aren’t only going through rural areas and small towns. They go through major American cities as well.

In Seattle, an oil train carrying nearly 100 cars derailed underneath a bridge in 2014. While all the cars were left intact and there was no public safety risk, according to officials, the incident underscored the potential for disaster. And that potential is huge: Last year, a KOMO News investigation captured video of more than a hundred train cars filled with oil rolling past the Seattle Seahawks football stadium as 32,000 fans watched a game inside. The Seattle City Council has called for railroads to curb oil train shipments through the city, but the companies have refused to comply, or even to release train schedules. And there’s no law that requires them to.

“The railroads are bringing weapons of mass destruction through our cities,” Fred Millar, oil safety and hazardous materials expert, tells Grist, and the only thing firefighters can do in the event of an explosion is to back off and let it burn.

As for Mosier, all evacuees have been allowed to return home, but their ordeal is far from over. The city’s wastewater treatment plant is offline, residents have a boil advisory for drinking water, and the full oil cars are still sitting there beside the tracks.

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Oregon explosion reminds us that oil trains are “weapons of mass destruction”

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Here’s the Price Tag for CAP’s New Child Care Program: About $100 Billion

by DonnaSidhu928 Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Center for American Progress—aka “Hillary’s Think Tank”—has released “A New Vision for Child Care in the United States.” But it’s not really very new. It’s just a tax credit that varies with income. If you’re at the poverty level, you’d get a tax credit of about $13,000 paid directly to the child care facility of your choice. If you make more, the tax credit would be less. The maximum out-of-pocket expense for families would range from 2 percent at the low end to 12 percent at the high end.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it bears a strong family resemblance to Obamacare.

But it might be a good idea regardless of how new it really is. I’m certainly a fan of both preschool and subsidized child care. The big question is going to be how much it costs, and that’s something the authors don’t address. There’s probably a reason for that. My very rough horseback calculation suggests it could run up a tab of $100 billion per year. Maybe more.1See update below.

That’s a lot of money. How’s it going to be paid for? Danielle Paquet asked CAP about this, and was told vaguely that “restructuring the tax system” and “closing wasteful loopholes” might do the trick. I dunno. That’s a lot of wasteful loopholes.

Needless to say, this is one of the downsides of taking public policy seriously. If you’re Donald Trump, you just tell everyone not to worry. “I’m going to be great for the kids,” and he’ll take care of it from there. But if you’re a Democrat, you normally feel obliged to present an actual plan that can actually work in the real world—and that means people can attach a price to it. And that, in turn, means you can be badgered about how you’re going to pay for it.

Politically speaking, this is something that Democrats will need to be careful about. There’s a temptation among liberals to be the anti-Trump, tossing out dozens of detailed white papers to solve all the world’s problems. But this gives conservatives an opening to add up the cost of all those white papers and start bellowing about how their very own proposals prove that Democrats want to bankrupt the country and tax millionaires into insolvency. It’s best to tread carefully here.

On the other hand, maybe Hillary could benefit from a small dose of Trumpism. Maybe she should adopt CAP’s proposal and just declare that she’s going to soak the rich to pay for it. Why pussyfoot around it? After all, polls show that taxing the rich at higher rates is a pretty popular idea. Maybe it’s time to go bullroar populist and just beat the tar out of the malefactors of great wealth.

Then again, maybe not. That doesn’t really sound much like Hillary, does it?

1The program is for kids aged 0-4. My estimate is based on about 20 million kids qualifying, with an average tax credit in the neighborhood of $8,000 each. That’s $160 billion. If two-thirds of all families take advantage of this tax credit, that comes to about $100 billion. Needless to say, more detailed cost estimates are welcome.

UPDATE: I am mistaken. CAP estimates a cost of $40 billion for their proposal, which they believe would not just help working families, but also stimulate the economy:

The economy as a whole benefits from policies that help working families. As an example, the Canadian province of Quebec developed a nearly universal child care assistance program, and economists at the University of Quebec and the University of Sherbrooke estimate that the program boosted women’s labor force participation by nearly 4 percentage points, which in turn boosted GDP by 1.7 percentage points.

I’m habitually skeptical of claims that social programs will recoup all or part of their costs by boosting the economy, but it’s probably true in this case. The effect of increased employment on GDP is pretty straightforward. The policy question, of course, is how much this will offset the program costs. But then, that’s always the policy question, isn’t it?

In any case, I’m not sure how CAP gets to $40 billion, and it strikes me as a little low. But it might be right. It would be interesting to see an estimate from a reliable third-party source.

Continue at source – 

Here’s the Price Tag for CAP’s New Child Care Program: About $100 Billion

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Trains Hauling Crude Oil Across North America Just Keep Exploding.

by LouellaNewcomer Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

A train hauling more than 100 tankers from North Dakota’s booming oil fields derailed during a snowstorm on Monday in West Virginia. The accident sparked massive explosions that prompted the evacuation of two nearby towns, and an oil spill that threatened the water supply of thousands of local residents. The train was heading to Yorktown, Virginia, and came off its tracks 33 miles southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. A state of emergency was declared.

Oil spilled into the Kanawha River, and one home was destroyed during the inferno that continued for 10 hours after the derailment, according to CNN. One person was injured. Dramatic footage shows fire and smoke billowing through the snowy sky:

Bakken crude is regarded as potentially more flammable than traditional crude, thus posing an increased hazard. And since the derailment of a train hauling Bakken crude killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013, the type of tankers involved in these accidents has become the subject of intense scrutiny. Both Canada and the United States have called for tougher safety standards, including upgrading the tankers. In mid-January, Canada announced it would take older tankers, known as the “DOT-111”, off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

Here’s a diagram of the weaknesses in the older DOT-111 model tanker, which is still in operation across the network:

Chris Philpot

You can read an in-depth Mother Jones report about the DOT-111 tankers here.

The train operator, CSX, has said that the train was not pulling DOT-111 tankers. Instead, the company says it was using a tougher, newer model, the “CPC 1232”, according to Reuters.

But even newer cars like these are evidently not invincible: when a 105-car CSX train derailed in Lynchburg, Va., last April, a fiery CPC-1232 tanker careened into the James River and spilled 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil. And Washington state regulators are investigating CPC-1232 tankers, after a BNSF train carrying Bakken crude oil across Idaho and Washington in January was found to have leaking cars. The CPC-1232 also doesn’t quite live up to the US regulators’ proposed rules to upgrade the system, according to Bloomberg, which reports that:

The draft rule also would require that new cars be built with steel shells that are 9/16th of an inch thick, people familiar with the plan said. The walls of the current cars, both DOT-111s and the newer CPC-1232 models, are 7/16th of an inch thick.

The West Virginia accident on Monday is the second major derailment in three days across North America’s booming oil-by-rail network. A Canadian National Railway train detailed northern Ontario, Canada, on Saturday night, again resulting in an inferno and an oil spill: 29 railway cars in the 100-car train derailed. Seven caught fire, according to CTV.

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Trains Hauling Crude Oil Across North America Just Keep Exploding.

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

by BerryKDPPmmpcp Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a strange corner of YouTube where train-spotters post their conquests in exhaustive detail. It’s one of the weirder YouTube holes I’ve been down in a while. But…oddly comforting. This video—of a Canadian National Railway locomotive making a meal out of snow drifts left by major blizzards in New Brunswick—is like something directly out of Snowpiercer, the 2013 dystopian ice age thriller set in a climate-altered future.

While certainly mesmerizing, there’s an important issue to note that has gone unremarked upon since the video went viral. It’s unclear what precisely the locomotive is carrying, but it’s definitely pulling tankers. Its cargo may very well be oil, given that its destination is St John, New Brunswick, the location of Canada’s biggest oil refinery, the Irving Oil Refinery. That refinery was the destination for the train laden with Bakken oil that derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013. The Lac-Mégantic accident killed 47 people and prompted calls across Canada and the United States for tougher safety standards for the booming oil-by-rail network.

Mark Hallman, director of communications for Canadian National Railway, refused to give specifics about the types of cargo being pulled by the train in the YouTube clip, calling it a “mixed freight” service. But Jayni Foley Hein, an expert on energy and transportation at the Institute for Policy Integrity, says crude is one likely possibility. “Its carrying the type of tankers that generally carry oil, and given its proximity to this refinery, it’s certainly a reasonable prediction,” she said.

Despite the soaring plumes of snow, Hallman told me that the train in the video was “totally safely operated,” adding, “That’s winter in Canada. That’s what we have to deal with.” The railway’s own “Customer Safety Handbook” says that operators should take special care in wintry, snowy conditions: “Many of the service disruptions center on accumulations of snow and ice,” says the handbook. “On the track, snow mostly constitutes a problem in switches, as well as at crossings—so once the snow is cleared, the problem is solved.” In general, winter hits railway lines hard, contracting the tracks and making fractures more likely, according to Canadian National Railway.

A 10-year US Department of Transportation analysis of weather-related train accidents in America, from 1995 to 2005, found that the accidents related to snow and ice, when they did occur, often resulted in dangerous derailments. “During the winter months of December through March, the highest accident numbers arose from preexisting snow and ice conditions such as buildups that cause malfunctioning switches and derailments,” the report found.

After the Lac-Mégantic disaster, both the United States and Canada agreed to get rid of the older and more dangerous versions of the tanker involved in that tragedy, the “DOT-111.” (We covered the cons of this tanker extensively last May.) In mid-January, Canada announced it would take the tankers off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

The dangers of carrying oil by rail have fueled a key aspect to the ongoing debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. When the US State Department issued its long-awaited environmental-impact statement on the project last year, one of its most significant findings was that if the controversial pipeline wasn’t built, oil-laden rail cars would pick up the slack. “Rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed,” it argued. (More recently, falling oil prices have led the EPA to question that line of reasoning.)

NBC recently reported that in America, trains spilled crude oil more often in 2014 than in any year since the government began collecting data in 1975.

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

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Scotland Should Plan On Having Its Own Currency

by Tabitha92B Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

When provinces propose a split with the mother country, they usually insist that they’ll continue to use the old currency. This is odd on its face since having your own money is usually considered one of the key attributes of a sovereign state. So what’s the appeal of keeping the old country’s currency? Greg Ip ponders the question:

Facilitating trade and capital movements is only one part of the story. Another, I think, is political and emotional. Forming a new country is fraught with risk. For savers, in particular the elderly, one risk looms especially large: that one’s retirement savings are suddenly redenominated in a new currency whose value is then inflated away. In both Quebec and Scotland, independence is mostly a movement of the left, and a separate currency would create the ever-present temptation to use the printing press to accommodate fiscal expansion and industrial policy. By promising to keep the old currency, separatists are reassuring savers that they will not succumb to the temptation of inflation.

I wonder if this is true? I hope it’s not. I don’t have a strong opinion about Scottish independence, but I do have a strong opinion about this. Here it is: if you favor independence, but only if Scotland holds onto the British pound, you’re an idiot. If you don’t trust a Scottish government to run its own monetary policy, then you don’t trust a Scottish government. Period.

There are other arguments for currency union, of course, but I don’t think they add up to much. Nor do I truly believe them. They mostly seem like post hoc rationalizations to provide people with a more palatable reason for keeping the British pound than fear of a reckless Scottish monetary authority. Generally speaking, the history of currency unions is simply too fraught for anyone who’s paying attention to really think it’s a good idea. And as Ip points out, they rarely last very long anyway.

An independent Scotland should have its own currency and its own monetary policy. If this makes you nervous, then the whole idea of independence should make you nervous.

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Scotland Should Plan On Having Its Own Currency

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North Dakota’s oil is more flammable than other crudes, feds warn

by JaniStanton Posted on January 3, 2014

North Dakota’s oil is more flammable than other crudes, feds warn

By

Vectomart

The oil that’s being fracked out of North Dakota and Montana may pose a “significant fire risk,” federal regulators warned yesterday.

This news comes after three trains carrying crude oil from Bakken shale formation derailed and exploded last year. The most deadly derailment occurred last summer in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. Then, in November, there was a fiery crash of rail cars into an Alabama wetlands area. And finally, this week brought an accident in eastern North Dakota, which lead to the evacuation of the nearby town of Casselton.

“[R]ecent derailments and resulting fires indicate that the type of crude oil being transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude oil,” the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wrote in a safety alert released Thursday.

Stock markets took the warning seriously. From Reuters:

Shares of Whiting Petroleum Corp , Continental Resources Inc and other top crude oil producers in the Bakken shale formation plunged on Thursday after the U.S. government said oil produced there may be extra flammable.

Here’s more on the hazards of Bakken crude from the Associated Press:

Light, sweet crude oil generally has higher levels of lighter hydrocarbons, which have a tendency to become gaseous and are more easily flammable, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor of engineering and chief energy officer at the University of Houston. Analysis of oil from the Bakken Shale shows high levels of light hydrocarbons like propane, butane and pentane, which are highly flammable, Krishnamoorti said.

The composition of the crude is similar to other types of light crude oil, he said. Heavy crude oil, such as that from Canada’s oil sands fields, is much less flammable. …

Companies could reduce the risks involved with moving the oil by putting it through an additional processing step before loading it onto rail cars, he said. That step would separate out some of the lighter hydrocarbons that could become gaseous and more easily flammable in the incident of a crash or derailment, Krishnamoorti said.

“Perhaps just adding an extra separating step might help lower the gas or vapor concentration, or the vapor forming components, and that can automatically lower the flammability of the crude,” he said.

The agency said it would continue to collect samples of Bakken crude and measure their explosiveness and other chemical properties, with an eye to publishing additional information in the future.


Source
Preliminary Guidance from OPERATION CLASSIFICATION, U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration
Train explosions prompt regulator warning on Bakken oil flammability, AP
Shares of Bakken oil producers plunge after U.S. warning, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Leak-prone oil tankers to remain on American train tracks for now

by biglermyrta910 Posted on July 30, 2013

Leak-prone oil tankers to remain on American train tracks for now

By John Upton

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Flickr account

A pile of DOT-111 oil tankers in Lac-Mégantic following the July 6 derailment and explosion.

Soda can–shaped rail cars like those that exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, earlier this month shouldn’t be on America’s train tracks. They are prone to rupture in accidents.

Yet these so-called DOT-111 railway cars will continue to haul most of the oil that’s moved through the U.S. by rail at least into next year and likely beyond.

After an investigation into a deadly 2009 explosion of an ethanol-laden train in Illinois, the National Transportation Safety Board called for a redesign or replacement of DOT-111 cars, noting that their thin steel shells can easily puncture and that valves can break during rollovers.

The Obama administration has been working on rules to reduce the hazards of the dangerous railway cars, but those rules have been delayed by nearly a year, the AP reports. And it’s unclear whether new regulations would apply to an estimated 40,000 older DOT-111′s now in use or only to newer ones.

As the North American oil boom fills up pipeline systems, oil companies are turning to rail to move their combustible product across Canada and the U.S., particularly in DOT-111 oil tankers. From the AP article:

A proposed rule to beef up rail-car safety was initially scheduled to be put in place last October, but it has been delayed until late September at the earliest. A final rule isn’t expected until next year.

The [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] said in a report this month that the latest delay was needed to allow “additional coordination” among officials and interested groups, including industry representatives who have resisted calls to retrofit existing cars, citing the expense and technical challenges such a requirement would pose.

In the first half of this year, U.S. railroads moved 178,000 carloads of crude oil. That’s double the number during the same period last year and 33 times more than during the same period in 2009.

The railroad and oil industries claim that retrofitting the nation’s entire fleet of DOT-111 tanker cars would cost more than $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Canadian press outlets are reporting that it could yet be weeks before we get a full assessment of the damages caused by the deadly explosion that destroyed the downtown area of Lac-Mégantic.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Quebec oil-train tragedy triggered oil spill that threatens water supplies

by JuliaPage Posted on July 9, 2013

Quebec oil-train tragedy triggered oil spill that threatens water supplies

By John Upton

The deadly oil-train explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, on Saturday also sparked an environmental disaster. An oil sheen has stretched more than 60 miles down a river that’s used as a source of drinking water.

By Tuesday morning, 13 people had been confirmed dead and some 37 were still missing after runaway train cars loaded with fracked crude from North Dakota derailed in the town and ignited. Lac-Mégantic’s fire chief said the fire is now under control, but a small area of town is still off limits for safety reasons. Emergency crews continue to search for bodies of the missing. Officials are urging relatives to provide them with DNA, such as on toothbrushes, to help them identify the dead, and are warning that some of the bodies may never be identified.

Meanwhile, water and environment officials are facing up to a crisis of their own. An estimated 26,000 gallons of oil that spilled from the rail cars flowed into the Chaudière River. Residents downstream are being asked to conserve water as municipalities switch to backup sources. From CBC News:

Quebec Environment Minister Yves-François Blanchet told CBC’s Quebec AM that he flew over the Chaudière River Sunday to see the extent of the damage caused by the oil spilled from the derailed tankers.

“What we have is a small, very fine, very thin layer of oil which, however, covers almost entirely the river for something like 100 kilometres from Lac-Mégantic to St-Georges-de-Beauce,” he said.

“This is contained at St-Georges-de-Beauce for the time being, most of it, or almost entirely, and we are very confident we will be in a position to be able to pump most of it out of the river. However, there will be some impact.”

From the BBC:

A spokesman for Quebec’s environmental ministry says floating barriers and other tools are being used to block the oil from heading downstream.

But the pollution has already reached the nearby town of Saint-Georges, prompting fears oil could flow into the St Lawrence River.

Air quality in the town is also a concern. Officials say the air is safe, but an odor may remain.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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