Midland Resource Recovery chemical operations in WV

Chemical Safety Board launches probe of fatal Barbour County explosion

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, May 25, 2017

Even as President Donald Trump tries to defund the small agency, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board announced Thursday it was sending a team of investigators to Barbour County to look into the explosion a day earlier that killed two workers and critically injured a third at an industrial tank cleaning operation outside of Philippi.

CSB officials announced the deployment, as local, state and other federal authorities continued the investigation of the fatal blast at Midland Resource Recovery’s facility.

Killed in the explosion were Jan Strmen, an owner of the Canadian-based Midland Resource Recovery, and Justin Marsh, a 19-year-old Barbour County resident, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. the injured worker was also identified as a Barbour County resident, but his name was not released by local officials.

Details on the condition of the injured worker, who was flown to West Virginia University’s Ruby Memorial Hospital, were not available, but Barbour County Chief Deputy Brett Carpenter said the man was previously listed in critical condition and had “pretty substantial injuries.”

Carpenter said that all three men were involved in cleaning a mercaptan tank when the explosion occurred and also revealed that authorities suspect that some sort of electrical tool may have been involved in the blast.

Mercaptan is most commonly thought of as the rotten egg-smelling chemical that is added to odorless natural gas for safety purposes, so that leaks can easily be noticed. Products like mercaptan are known as odorants. Midland Resource Recovery bills itself as “the leading natural gas odorization company in North America.” The company has not responded to numerous requests for comment on the explosion.

Carpenter said that authorities are hoping to be able to talk to the injured worker at some point, but that Barbour County officials are turning the investigation over to the state Fire Marshal’s office.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also investigating and has agency officials at the site.

Leni Uddyback-Fortson, an OSHA spokeswoman, said that the Midland Resource Recovery facility brings in old odorant tanks from gas companies and cleans and decommissions them. She confirmed that the owner of the facility was one of the two fatalities.

Over the years, the CSB has been praised by citizen groups and others for investigations into other fatal chemical leaks, fires and explosions in West Virginia, but has recently been criticized for the lack of regulatory recommendations and other weaknesses in its report on the January 2014 Freedom Industries chemical spill on the Elk River.

The CSB’s deployment to Barbour County also comes as President Donald Trump submitted a budget proposal to Congress that suggests doing away with the board. The Trump administration says closing down the board — with its $11 million annual budget and just 43 employees — is part of its effort “to move the nation towards fiscal responsibility and to redefine the proper role of the federal government.”

Trump’s effort to gut the eliminate the CSB follows a rocky period in which then-President Obama in March 2015 pushed out then-CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso amid industry criticism of board proposals for tougher regulation of chemical plants and Republican-led hearings that focused on complaints Moure-Eraso had created a “toxic work environment” at the CSB.

As an independent agency, the CSB’s new leadership this week submitted its own budget proposal, which asks lawmakers for a nearly 6 percent increase in funding.

“The continued funding of the CSB is an investment in the safety and security of the American people,” the CSB’s budget proposal says. “No other organizations, public or private, are able to conduct truly independent, non-regulatory investigations that can also hold federal and state regulators or other parties accountable.”

Chemical Storage Tanks -- Elk River

EQB upholds WV-DEP chemical tank designations

From an Article by Ken Ward, Charleston Gazette, April 26, 2016

The state Environmental Quality Board has upheld decisions by state regulators about which chemical storage tanks would be covered by new safety standards passed to try to prevent a repeat of the January 2014 Freedom Industries spill that contaminated drinking water for thousands of people in Charleston and surrounding communities.

In a 10-page order, board members said that the state Department of Environmental Protection had legal authority to make the designations.

Lawyers for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia and three related companies, C.I. McKown and Son Inc.; Pocono Energy Corp.; and Tempest Energy Corp., had appealed the WV-DEP designations and a formula the agency used to make them.

At issue in the case were decisions the WV-DEP made about which tanks are within two different zones within certain distances and stream-flow times from sites where public drinking water intakes are located. Under the law, originally passed in 2014 and then rolled back significantly last year, the WV-DEP designations — of “zones of critical concern” or “zones of peripheral concern” near intakes — determine what level of regulation applies to different tanks.

Natural gas lobbyists had tried to have their industry exempted entirely from the chemical tank legislation, but lawmakers declined to adopt that proposal.

Among other things, the gas industry appeal argued that the WV-DEP wrongly did not make its zone designations through a separate rulemaking that would have been subject to public review and comment, and that in making tank decisions, agency officials used “arbitrary and capricious” assumptions.

Board members said that the Legislature had required the WV-DEP to use the rulemaking process for certain parts of its implementation of the chemical tank law, such as setting fees and spelling out inspection procedures, but did not require that for other matters — such as the formula for determining tank designations.

“The Legislature did not state that a rule was required for making the mathematical model,” the board ruling said. “The board refrains from reading more into the statute than is expressly provided.”

Board members also said that the WV-DEP’s model “was essentially an invention required by law” and put together by the agency “with limited funds” in a six-month period, requiring “innovation, assumptions, and acceptance of limitations.”

“This is especially understandable given no alternative has ever been presented,” the board said.

The board did rule that the WV-DEP had wrongly implemented a 1,320-foot buffer zone for the Ohio River, adopted from the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission, rather than using the 1,000-foot buffer mandated by the Legislature.

Board members, ruling after a hearing in January, also ruled that it was right to allow two citizen groups, the West Virginia Citizen Action Group and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, to intervene in the case.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Jeff Mullin, Enid News & Eagle, OK

Who has time for God these days? Distractify has Answers . . .

From an Opinion Article by Jeff Mullin, Enid News & Eagle (Oklahoma), August 23, 2014

Thanks for taking the time to read this little ditty. I know how valuable everyone’s time is. After all, I barely found time to write it.

No one in authority has let us in on this, but I contend time has been altered somehow. It’s kind of like inflation, except with time. Just as a dollar doesn’t go near as far as it used to, neither does a minute. I figure minutes are really only about 45 seconds long now, and days last a mere 22 hours or so.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it seem that as soon as you get up in the morning and get ready for your day, it’s time to go to bed again? And just as soon as you get your Christmas decorations put away, darned if it isn’t time to put them up again. We are busy, busy, busy.

The website distractify.com has determined that the average American spends 25 years of their life sleeping, 10.3 years working and 48 days having sex, which means we have our priorities all screwed up. Speaking of work, the average office worker spends five years sitting at a desk and two years in meetings. Kill me now.

Women will spend nearly a year of their lives deciding what to wear, 17 years trying to lose weight and 1.5 years doing their hair, largely because men spend a full year of their lives staring at women. We spend 3.66 years of our lives eating, and over the course of a lifetime will consume close to 35 tons of food. No wonder my pants are too tight.

There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Between working, sleeping, commuting, eating and using the bathroom, we hardly have time left for surfing the Web or messing around with our smartphones.

The average American will spend nearly 27 hours per month online and more than 34 hours on their smartphones. In an average day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans sleep for 7.6 hours, work for 8.6, eat and drink for 1.1, perform household activities for 1.1, care for others for 1.2, and engage in leisure and sports for 2.6.

That leaves 1.8 hours, which probably includes bathroom time, unless that is included in household activities. All of which leaves precious little time for God.

A 2013 Gallup Poll tells us that roughly 40 percent of Americans attend church, synagogue or mosque in any given week. In Oklahoma, that number is closer to 49 percent, making our state the 10th most religious in the nation, again according to Gallup.

Going to church takes time. Depending on the denomination, services can run from an hour, to an hour and a half, or longer. According to the website www.americanpreachers.com, one of the top 10 reasons that people give for not going to church is that they don’t have time.

A church in Illinois is trying to address that, guaranteeing services that last only 30 minutes. Trinity Memorial Lutheran Church in Merrillville, Ill., advertises a half-hour service. “We’re able to do church within 30 minutes, and no one feels cheated,” the Rev. Richard Boshoven told the Chicago Tribune. “It doesn’t feel rushed. You can leave wanting more.” The service at Trinity Memorial consists of one song and an opening prayer. Rev. Boshoven then reads a story from the Bible and the congregation talks about it, there is another prayer and they are out the door. Boshoven said his cellphone is set to vibrate when his 30 minutes are up.

Would shorter services draw more people to church? What if you went to church and never had to leave your car? In Florida, the Daytona Beach Drive-In Church has been delivering its own unique brand of worship since 1953. The pastor’s voice is broadcast to each car over a special FM frequency, but otherwise the service is pretty conventional, featuring scripture readings and a choir singing hymns.

Congregants at Woodland Drive-In Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., have been praising the Lord behind the wheel since 1970. The church bills itself as “Reaching out to those who don’t come in.”

I wonder if either church has a snack bar? If you don’t even want to take time for a drive-in church service, consider drive-through prayer. A church in south Florida, Estero United Methodist Church, offers drive-through prayer services every Wednesday from 5-6:30 p.m.

Drivers pull into the church’s parking lot during their evening commute home and members of a volunteer group who call themselves the Prayer Warriors gather around each car and join the motorist in prayer. “After we pray over them and bless them, they leave,” drive-through prayer leader Pam Sebby told ABC News. And as for those uber-busy drivers who simply honk as they drive past? “We pray for them, too,” said Sebby.

In the end it doesn’t matter how, how long or where you choose to worship, only that you do.

>> NOTE: Does anyone have time for protection of the environment? Can WV-DEP process thousands of chemical storage tank permits by the end of the year? Could the State provide a drive-thru permitting process to speed things up? Actually, I cannot find the time to finish this message as I am going on vacation! You are on your own for a couple of weeks, hopefully God is at your side! DGN <<

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