Incinerator

During the past several months, we've seen members of the Vista Women's Club and other citizens from the communities of Vista, San Marcos and Oceanside proudly sporting YIMBY (yes in my back yard) placards to demonstrate their support for the proposed incinerator at the San Marcos landfill. The incinerator would have put more than 4 tons of pollutants into the air every day, and generated more than 14 tons of potentially toxic ash every year. In light of this, it was interesting to see the YIMBYs avidly support this project and claim that it was their back yard when the closest YIMBY actually lives more than 6 miles from the site.

Every day across Afghanistan, rural people crowd aboard rickety communal taxis that ply the roads linking remote towns and villages. And every day, they run the risk of what happened Thursday morning in Helmand province. A roadside bomb ripped through a minibus in the Nahr-e-Saraj district of east-central Helmand, incinerating the vehicle and killing 14 people, including men, women and children. The Taliban and other insurgent groups routinely seed roads that run through battle zones with explosives in hopes of killing and maiming Western troops ?

A man who disliked banks put his life savings in a suitcase for a weekend fishing trip, but he left it in the driveway, garbage men took it to the incinerator and only fast-acting firemen saved the money. This is how police explained it Monday, without revealing the man's identity: An elderly fisherman put his life savings of $21,750 into a suitcase to take it fishing with him.

The Obama administration on Friday proposed reducing mercury emissions by more than 50% from industrial boilers, process heaters and solid waste incinerators by December. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the plan would yield at least $18 billion worth of health benefits annually and prevent as many as 5,200 premature deaths and about 36,000 asthma attacks a year. The EPA estimates it would cost $3.6 billion to install and maintain pollution controls at the estimated 200,000 units across the country.

A proposal to build California's first commercial incinerator for disposal of a broad range of hazardous wastes could be thwarted by a City Council decision this week to prepare an ordinance requiring city approval of the controversial facility. Before about 100 residents opposed to the facility, the council unanimously approved writing an urgency ordinance that, in effect, will prohibit Carson's Stauffer Chemical Co.

They are known as the badlands--260 square miles of parched, buckled earth and rocky canyons straddling the San Jacinto Fault about 15 miles east of Riverside. In one of the myriad box canyons of this ancient home for rattlesnakes and cactus, Peter Wolfskill Anderson--a member of one of California's oldest clans, the Wolfskill family--hopes to build the latest in hazardous waste treatment facilities.

The City Council voted unanimously last week to oppose the construction of waste-to-energy plants in the San Gabriel Valley, becoming the 10th city in the area to voice objections to trash incinerators. The vote was part of a resolution rejecting the March, 1984, revision of the Los Angeles County solid waste management plan, regarding disposal of non-hazardous waste.

Atlantic Richfield Co. was assessed $23,500 in fines and penalties Thursday after pleading no contest to a complaint that it negligently discharged air contaminants from its Carson refinery in May. Compton Municipal Court Judge Carlos Moreno also ordered Arco to make repairs to prevent a repeat of the discharge, which occurred when black smoke belched from a coke heater and gas unit incinerator for five minutes May 29.

Responding to growing public opposition, the San Diego City Council has unanimously granted itself a veto over any move to step up operations of an experimental hazardous-waste incinerator in La Jolla. An emergency ordinance passed late Tuesday requires that anyone operating an experimental hazardous-waste treatment or disposal plant apply to the city Planning Department for a conditional use permit and receive the approval of the council.

This is in response to your editorial ("Propositions H and J Should Be Defeated") of Oct. 4. SANDER, unfortunately, is not dead but is being held in a state of suspended animation by the city staff. Advocates of mass burning wastes are still alive and kicking. San Diego's air pollution ranks as fifth highest among the cities of the nation. Trash burners can only worsen our air quality. Nor is air pollution the only problem with these plants. The ash residues from a large scale incinerator such as SANDER amount to tens of thousands of tons annually.

milwaukee -- Don't be so quick to throw out that expired blood pressure medication. Drug disposal companies are taking outdated or recalled prescription drugs from pharmacies and manufacturers and incinerating them, generating energy. Milwaukee-based Capital Returns Inc. last year created enough energy to power more than 220 homes for a year. To do that, it incinerated 6.5 million pounds of pills and other pharmaceuticals, which are sent from pharmacies and drug manufacturers around the country.

A Florida county plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads -- all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than parts of the sun. The $425-million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County would use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-hard material. It would be the first such plant in the nation and the largest in the world.

A newspaper publisher and politician who had been one of the most outspoken critics of Syrian interference in Lebanon was assassinated Monday by a car bomb as he drove through the hills of Beirut. Gibran Tueni, a third-generation newspaperman and newly elected lawmaker, had returned to Lebanon the previous day from France, where he had taken refuge over the summer, saying his name was at the top of an assassination list in Lebanon.

A discussion here of backyard trash incinerators, which were banned in L.A. in the mid-1950s, brought this note from Pat Wilson of Corona. "We had an incinerator," she recalled of her childhood, "and before I burned my worn-out paper dolls, I would cut their little heads off so they wouldn't feel the fire." Added Wilson: "The joke's on me. Paper doll sets from the '40s and '50s now sell for $100-plus." Oooh L.A. L.A.

An incinerator operator got the go-ahead from the state Environmental Quality Commission to start destroying part of the nation's stockpile of Cold War-era chemical weapons. Rockets loaded with the nerve agent GB sarin are scheduled to be removed from a storage igloo at the Umatilla Chemical Depot outside Hermiston beginning Wednesday and destroyed in the adjoining incinerator, U.S. Army spokeswoman Mary Binder said.

The Army temporarily shut down a chemical weapons incinerator in Alabama on Thursday after an alarm detected what the Army said were minute traces of a chemical agent in an observation corridor. Officials did not identify the substance but said there had been no threat to the $1-billion facility, which destroys deadly nerve agents such as sarin, or to the surrounding community. "No one at the site was injured," said Timothy Garrett, the site's project manager.

Three days after he was diagnosed with liver cancer, Lin Wen-piao mixed a deadly dose of pesticide with milk and yogurt and fed it to his young son and two daughters before drinking some of the mixture himself. Splashed across the island's front pages, their deaths a few weeks ago shocked Taiwanese.

Miller Brewing Co. suffered several legislative setbacks last week in its drive to derail a $395-million waste-to-energy plant proposed near its Irwindale brewery. Miller and other opponents of the high-tech incinerator contend that it will emit potentially dangerous pollutants. The most severe blow came when the Senate Local Government Committee, during an unusual night session Wednesday, rejected a Miller-sponsored bill by Sen. Edward R. Royce (R-Anaheim).

Three days after he was diagnosed with liver cancer, Lin Wen-piao mixed a deadly dose of pesticide with milk and yogurt and fed it to his young son and two daughters before drinking some of the mixture himself. Splashed across the island's front pages, their deaths a few weeks ago shocked Taiwanese.

Sit me down in a SHADY SPOT OUT HERE, lay out the tale of how these strange stacks of granite and gneiss took shape more than a billion years ago, and I will pay attention. It's interesting, in a Precambrian sort of way. To really get my attention, however, just walk me around to the backside of that same formation and point out the rock niche that someone has splattered with purple, orange and yellow graffiti.