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The Environmental Spectator
Henny-Penny and the Oily Water
“It’s those wonderful environmental regulators in the Obama Administration,” she clucks.
The excited telephone voice was Henny-Penny’s. I hadn’t heard from the founder and Recording Secretary of The Holy Order of The Sky Is Falling (THOOTSIF) in weeks, so was anxious to learn why she was so enthusiastic.
H-P: It’s those wonderful environmental regulators in the Obama Administration. I was thrilled to learn that they agree with me that, when it comes to the environment, we can never be too safe.”
Me: What is it this time?
H-P: When the Dutch offered to lend some of their skimmer boats to soak up oil from the big spill, the Obama people declined because the boats discharged water with some oil still in it.
You see, the regulations require that the discharged water be 99.9985 percent pure, and these boats didn’t quite match that.
Me: We’re talking about sea water, Ms. H-P. That level of purity was intended for the bilge pump of a ship.
H-P: Just the same, you can never be too safe. The government finally did accept the skimmers, but it required them to be dismantled from Dutch ships and installed on American ships. Of course, our own crews had to be trained to use them.
Me: So, the White House dithered while thousands upon thousands of gallons of oil per day were coming out of that well at the bottom of the sea. Some foresight. Did you know that Obama could have waived that water-discharge rule with the snap of his fingers? And, the only reason his Administration required the skimmers to be taken off Dutch ships and remounted on American ones was to appease some unions which insisted there be no waiver of the Jones Act which requires American crews on American ships in American waters. I don’t know which is worse, the incompetence of the Administration or its kowtowing to a special interest. Together, this made a bad situation worse.
H-P: Just the same, we can never be too safe when it comes to the environment.
Me: You must be kidding. It will take years for Mother Nature to heal all the damage that has been done from over two months of oil spilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Every minute’s delay makes it worse. The Obama Administration has been behind the curve from (to use their own phrase) “Day One.”
H-P: You’re such a skeptic. First it was global warm—-er—climate change, and now it’s the oil spill cleanup. Can’t the government do anything right?
Me: Not this one. Speaking of your beloved “climate change,” there is some good news. Thanks to it, the Western United States had the wettest winter and coolest spring in a decade. California, for example, with a Mediterranean climate (virtually no precipitation between May and October). Its hills and forests are usually very dry by now. That means June is the beginning of the wild fire season. So far, though, there have been only 642 fires that have burned 3,246 acres, compared with 1,343 files covering 49,410 acres by this time last year. You can pass that on to your beloved THOOTSIF Pontiff, Al Gore.
H-P: I will, I will. What can be done to cut the number of fires even more?
Me: Ask your Pontiff to talk to Mother Nature about her lightning and to careless campers who leave campfire embers smoldering.
About the Author
Peter Hannaford was closely associated for a number of years with the late President Reagan, beginning in the California Governor’s office. His latest book is Presidential Retreats.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (15) | Leave a comment
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owyheewine| 7.2.10 @ 10:50AM
This article makes a humerous point about the mindless production and enforcements of federal rules and regulations by seemingly brain dead bureaucrats. It also should help wake us all up about how federal bureaucracy has extended tentacles into every part of our daiy lives. State and local governments and private businesses spend billions of dollars to comply with federal rules that have been produced by these unaccountable bureaucrats. Thousands of pages of new regulations are produced every year, costing untold dollars to produce and multiples of that to comply with. We really need to sunset these bureaucratic agencies and their rules after a certain time, subject to a congressional vote to extend them.
Harlan J.| 7.2.10 @ 4:13PM
Don't forget all of the skimmer boats sitting idle in various parts of our own country forced by the bureaucracy to remain on station wherever they are because there might be a localized spill to which they would need to attend, instead of being down here working on an actual problem.
Ken Roberts| 7.3.10 @ 7:19AM
Reminds me of the branch of a tree that will not bend, it breaks . The big time item here is common sense , no one in the green area of life knows how to bend they are by far the worst at it . Even a judge will temper justice with mercy for if they did not we would have public hangings as the norm. The regulations the environmentalists have instituted are hurting everyone though out the entire world . The African people can thank them for the loss of DDT which is now in use again because nothing will control the skeeters like it will , Millions died when DDT was banned . the inventor off DDT would drink it in front of people to show it was safe , I don't know if he died or not, but I have ingested my fair share of DDT , I am now 66 and very much alive . DDT along with R12 was banned and found to be ok after that and not to be shown up they did not allow it to come back, can't have egg on one's face you know. make sure every one has a life jacket now!
Oldefarte| 7.3.10 @ 1:39PM
'HENNY PENNY' reminded me of an old one: Q. Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? A. So he could look FOR CHICKS!!!!!!!!
FTM| 7.3.10 @ 7:48PM
I used to, once upon a time, be responsible for "environmental compliance" in an automotive sheet metal stamping plant. I got into a knock down, drag out with a state EPA compliance officer lady one time. The problem was that the company had to have a plan to improve the quality of the water leaving the plant. I wanted to know what the goal was, she was evasive. To make a long story short after a morning spent trying to pry the information out of this woman the truth of the matter finally arrived at was that there was no goal, by hook or crook, one way or another the water quality leaving the plant this year had to be better than the quality of the water leaving the year before.
What had started this was that the company had installed a reverse osmosis filtration system to clean the water before putting the water down the public sanitary sewer. The waste caught by the RO filter was shipped off to a waste treatment plant for further processing. Kind of idiotic because the water going down the sewer was going to a waste treatment processing plant for further treatment before the advent of the RO filtration system.
Anyway, the water going down the sewer from the RO filtration system was cleaner than the water that was supplied by the city. I bottled up some tap water and some effluent water and sent the samples off to three different testing labs. Blind test, the lab didn't know which sample was which. The turbidity of the water from the RO filtration system was lower than the water coming from the city water plant. The rub came in that we, the company, had no plan for improving the quality of the water for the next year. The fact that the effluent water was for all practical intents and purposes chemically pure didn't matter to this government idiot one whit. The plant manager finally told the lady to contact the company's lawyer and that was the last I ever saw of that moron. Typical government employee, radically overpaid and pitifully uneducated.
One more wart story and I'll quit.
Same sheet metal plant, there were huge bag house filtration systems that filtered the air leaving the plant. We had to send the used filters out to a lab for testing to make sure that the company wasn't exhausting metal fines from the plant. The allowance for iron was something like 500 milligrams per year.
The fact that the soil here locally is red from the amount of iron in it doesn't matter to the state tree-hugger types.
Anyway, up the road is a town that I call "Loserville." Every year the folks have a big fireworks show that I call "Blunder over Loserville." One of the red firework bursts blasts more iron into the atmosphere than I could exhaust from the plant in a year. That's not to mention the copper that makes the green color and the magnesium that makes the white color and so on. The "Blunder over Loserville" fireworks show blasts more metal oxides into the air in an hour and a half than I could exhaust from the factory in a century.
Now, my idea, and my idea only is that most of these enviromental compliance laws are nothing more than a government shakedown. Just another government con game that "employs" useless people in a useless endevor and every once in a while generates some revenue. The same collection of half-wits wonder why manufacturing businesses have all located overseas. Takes a missile scientist to figure that one out.
Tenn Slim| 7.4.10 @ 9:54AM
My story of a Metal Fab plant followed the same steps of a Local EPA bueracrat. Sad, uneducated, bent on simply being aggressive, and dedicated to a set of idiotic principles.
We finaly ended up leasing the site to a particle belching truck firm.
end
Semper Fi
FTM| 7.4.10 @ 6:36PM
Figures. Bureaucrats included in specific, the rest of the population at large in general, you just can't fix stupid.
John II| 7.3.10 @ 8:32PM
It's not just your idea, FTM, or not merely an idea--whichever you intend by the modest conclusion. It's a fact. And it's not new as a socio-political phenomenon. Just ask any honest and productive building contractor about the experiences he's had with inspectors. We need building codes, of course, or every housing development would turn into a shanty-town within a generation. But notice the kinds of people who get into the racket of inspecting: generally they are failed contractors, either because they're too damn lazy or because they're too damn stupid.
So there we have the Great Political Divide in a nutshell: on the one side are those who know how to do things, and so do them; on the other are those who don't know their asses from holes in the ground, and try to make up for their inadequacy by becoming incompetent busybodies telling the doers what and how to do.
Guess which side of the Great Divide is inhabited by the Obamanation.
FTM| 7.4.10 @ 4:55AM
If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, coach. If you can't coach, council. If you can't council, administer. Yeah, been there, done that.
All of my father's family were school teachers. If I'd had sense to pound sand I'd have been a school teacher too. Retire after twenty years, cash in on your accumulated sick time and get a check for over a hundred grand then go back to work as a teacher, an aunt and an uncle went back as principals, get paid and draw a check from the first retirement. Then after twenty more years retire again and draw two retirement checks a month. What a racket.
On top of all that you get a chance to whine about how underpaid school teachers are. I advised both of my kids to become school teachers. The daughter is doing her semester of student teaching next semester then she graduates. Son is in the pipeline.
Teaching, government service in general, is a great con, a perfect haven for the lazy, stupid and unable. It's also a great haven for the predator. My kids are predators, the name of the game is payday. I wish that I had been smart enough to get in on the gravy train. Of course now all the states that have these Cadillac retirement plans are foundering financially, the obvious outcome of paying the incompetant to reproduce.
FTM| 7.4.10 @ 5:16AM
Building contactors.
I worked in a spiffy new automotive assembly plany in the National Socialist People's Republic of Illinois one time. A Jack-Booted Government Thug Police State if there ever was one.
The local powers that be decided that all of the electrical wiring jobs in the factory over and above original construction had to be inspected by the city electrical inspector.
When this plant was built it was the most heavily automated automotive assembly plant in the world. There were parts of the plant that ran in the dark because there was nothing in those parts of the plant but robots.
We had a project to replace a resolver controlled conveyor positioning system with an optical encoder. The resolver was analog and the encoder was digital, long story, I won't bore you with the details.
The day came and the electrical inspector from the city came out to the plant amidst great fanfare. This was the first time that a city inspector had been in the plant and everybody wanted to make sure that the guy was pacified. My boss and my boss' boss were all in the entourage.
We went out on the shop floor, Super A transfer presses make the ground shake when they're running. Lots of people are afraid to go near one. I love those machines, big greasy monsters, I wish I had one in my living room. I showed the inspector the encoder package on the press and then we wen't down into a pit/tunnel network under the press, while it was running (very loud) to check out the cable trays then we went up onto a mezzinine deck to check out the Control Enclosure and PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) wiring, high speed counter and the like.
At the end of the grand tour the inspector had a strange look on his face and I asked him if anything were wrong. He said that he'd never seen an electrical application that had more than four wires before. (Two way light switch in a house.) And thus was the first and last "electrical" inspection in the factory.
Tenn Slim| 7.4.10 @ 9:58AM
Opine
Neat. The Boss, etal certainly knew how to coerce this "Inspector". Presses, Hydraulic and Pnuematic, make a H... of a noise.
end
Semper FI