Washington Air Quality Worst In The World

The past several days I have been hearing from multiple people in the Pacific Northwest zone reporting that the smoke from multiple wildfires is the likes of which no one has previously experienced in the lowlands of Western Washington.

The above screen cap is from an email from my Favorite Nephew Jason, subject line: "Struggling for fresh air in the PNW" with email's text saying...

"DO NOT travel to Birch Bay today.  Whatcom County has the worst air quality on the entire planet right now.  We are being advised to stay indoors today.   I have already sneezed many times this morning".

I had not planned on traveling to Birch Bay today. 

And then, yesterday, Linda Lou sent this to my phone...

With text saying, "On the Francis Road headed toward Mount Vernon: a view of our smoked filled valley. It is very bad".

And then we have this screen cap from today's online version of the Seattle Times.

One of the links goes to an article titled "Seattle air quality among worst in world."

In all my years living in Western Washington I recollect many wildfires in the Cascades. I do not remember those wildfires ever resulting in thick smoke reaching the flatlands of the Puget Sound zone.

I Want Some Chesapeake Energy Mailbox Money & Fracking Air Quality Testing Done To The Air That I Breathe

This morning I read a disturbing bit of info in Fort Worth Weekly's Static titled Migraines and Mailbox Money.

A Fort Worth mom, Mandy Mobley, was in real good shape, slender and healthy. And then she started not to feel so good.

Headaches, dizzy spells, fatigued.

Visits to doctors provided no answers.

Then, Mandy Mobeley attended a North Texas Communities Alliance meeting where a video was shown showing the chemical stew spewing from a Chesapeake Energy Barnett Shale gas fracking operation.

Just like me, Mandy Mobley has a Chesapeake Energy gas fracking operation nearby.

Unlike me, Mandy Mobley leased her mineral rights to Chesapeake Energy, for which she gets paltry royalty checks.

I have been having some of Mandy Mobley's symptoms for months now. In September and October I thought the woes were allergies. I had not been an allergy prone person prior to this.

Then in early December came down with what seemed like a cold, which I later decided might have been the flu. Coughing, restricted breathing, feeling queasy.

Now I realize my bout of misery which began in early December began soon after Chesapeake Energy amped up their fracking operation in my neighborhood, with fumes of some sort clearly spewing forth, visible to the naked eye, at times.

Below is my local purveyor of fracking fumes. You can't see the fumes in the photo. When you can see the fumes they are fuming from a couple vents on top of the red boxcar like device.

The first time I ever experienced bad air pollution, and smog, was as a kid, the first time my mom and dad took us to Disneyland. The air of Southern California was so incredibly bad back then. The worst of it was when we went to Universal Studios. At that location the air was so bad it made my eyes sting and leak. It was so bad I can remember it like it was yesterday, even though this was decades ago.

The past month, or so, whatever it is my eyes are being burned by, the sensation is very similar, though much less severe, than what I experienced long ago in Southern California.

I wish Texas had not seceded, again, from the Union, and that that powerful United States agency known as the Environmental Protection Agency, still operated here. Maybe Texas should start up its own version of the EPA.

It could be called the Texas Environmental Protection Agency.

TEPA.

Does that not have a nice ring to it?

Everybody In Fort Worth Loves That New Rig Smell

Yesterday I was shocked, shocked I tell you, when Someone Else opined, via a blog comment, that he or she felt I was perennially negative about the city that calls itself Fort Worth, even though there is no fort in Fort Worth, which is just one more example of how the town tends to misrepresent itself.

Gone looking for Sundance Square lately in downtown Fort Worth?

The fact of the matter, regarding Fort Worth, is that there are some things that go on in this town that, when one describes them accurately, it really can not be done in a positive way, if you want to be truthful.

Take the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle, for example. A billion dollar public works project that the public has not voted on. A public works project of very dubious value, destroying river levees that have functioned well for over a half a century, replacing the levees with an un-needed flood diversion channel and adding a little lake to the north side of downtown Fort Worth, where currently the Clear and West forks of the Trinity River merge.

And to give Fort Worth Congresswoman, Kay Granger's son, J.D., a job running the project, with that job currently being America's worst example of nepotism.

And then we have Fort Worth being the world's big city test tube experiment for allowing thousands of holes to be poked in its ground to fracture shale to produce natural gas, and then move that un-odorized natural gas, under the city, in hundreds of miles of pipeline.

Last night I got an email from Don Young which I imagine Someone Else would characterize as being negative about Fort Worth, when in reality the message is actually a plea for civic sanity from a lifelong Fort Worth citizen who is appalled at what he sees happening to the town he lives  in.

Below is what Don Young had to say, along with 3 links to what some other people had to say about that which goes on in Fort Worth....

Only in Fort Worth would such an arrogant message via a giant billboard sprout in the heart of downtown.

The people that run Fort Worth (FW), Texas, the 16th most populous city in the USA, are hell bent on helping FW become the dumbest large city in the USA. Here's a short list of their accomplishments:

- FW was the first large city in the USA to allow natural gas (NG) drilling in all neighborhoods regardless of zoning class.

- FW has more UN-ODORIZED NG pipelines in neighborhoods than any large city in the USA.

- FW is the first large city in the USA to allow an UN-ODORIZED NG pipeline in the downtown corridor.

This new billboard in the downtown FW, just a few hundred feet from I-30, reinforces the fact that Fort Worth is out of touch with reality as Chesapeake completes installation of the downtown pipeline. 

The real dangers and risks to public health and the environment are well known as these recent reports confirm. Please educate yourself, raise hell and/or move out of the shale patch, if you can.

An Exploratory Study of Air Quality Near NG Operations

Filming Dirty Air

Flowback: How the Texas NG Boom Affects Health and Safety

DY

Driving North To Hurst On The Last Day Of September Thinking About Getting Shaken By The Irving Earthquake

In the picture you are looking at the view out of my motorized vehicular transport, mid-morning, on the last day of September, looking north towards my destination of Hurst, on the on ramp on to the I-820 freeway.

That dark thing at an angle across the windshield is a rain wiper.

This morning it is barely drizzling, not like the copious amount of wet that fell yesterday, but still enough wetness to require the window wiping device to be activated.

Yesterday's rain added a couple more inches of water to my swimming pool. This morning's swim was very pleasant, with the water being warmer than the air, which was being chilled to barely above 60 degrees.

It seems to my well functioning breathing tubes that the rain has swept the air clean of all that which has vexed my respiratory system. I have my windows open.

Yesterday the earth moved again in the D/FW Metroplex. This time it was Irving that was shaken by an earthquake, shaking somewhere between 3 and 4 on the Richter Scale. If you are near the epicenter of an earthquake of this magnitude, you definitely feel it.

Prior to my move to Texas I got to experience multiple small quakes epicentered a couple miles to the east of my abode, in what is called the Big Lake area. The strongest of these shakers was in the 3.0 range. One of the quakes cracked the tile on my kitchen floor. Another time I was laying on my water bed when a quake struck, creating a rough water on the ocean effect. Another one of those quakes I was sitting in my living room, the windows all flexed and the tall evergreens swayed.

I suspect a lot of people in the Irving zone felt the earth move yesterday. It can be very unsettling.