When an earthquake strikes

The following is from Congressman Rush Holt's newsletter:

When an earthquake struck the mid-Atlantic coast at 1:51 p.m. on August 23, 2011, tens of thousands of people reported their experiences in the speediest, most effective way they knew: via Twitter. This led to a strange phenomenon. Earthquakes travel through the earth very quickly: about three to five kilometers every second. But tweets travel through electronic networks nearly 100,000 times faster. As such, the first tweets about the earthquake, sent from towns near the quake’s epicenter in Virginia, reached New Jersey sooner than the earthquake itself.


If you happened to be monitoring Twitter at the time, you might well have had a half-minute’s warning of the impending earthquake.

How might governments take advantage of this kind of early warning? As experts testified at a hearing of my Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources this week, a network of seismometers along the west coast could detect major quakes and send advance warning to nearby cities, offering perhaps five minutes’ warning to major urban areas. Five minutes isn’t much time, but it would enable officials to stop trains, alert critical infrastructure, and warn people to take cover.

A major earthquake in a modern urban area could cost $250 billion and countless lives. Even so, lawmakers have failed to invest the $16 million per year that the U.S. Geological Survey estimates would be necessary to operate such an early-warning system.

Instead, the current Congress, over my objections, continues to slash much-needed investments in research and infrastructure.

A Lost Opportunity

In January I wrote to you about an opportunity for New Jersey to invest in our citizens’ health: the federal government had offered $7.6 million to help New Jerseyans gain access to affordable health care. At the time Gov. Christie was, for ideological reasons, refusing to accept the money.

In May this story reached an unfortunate and troubling end when, after years of inaction by the Christie Administration, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally rescinded the grant offer.

If Gov. Christie had accepted the money, about 95,000 more New Jerseyans would have health coverage today.


Rush Holt
Member of Congress

Wastewater Well in Ohio Triggered Quakes in Ohio; Is Fracking To Blame?

Did fracking cause the 4.o magnitude earthquake that rocked Northeastern Ohio on Saturday? Experts are begining to think so:

CLEVELAND (AP) — A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Ashtabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

Thousands of gallons of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.

After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking....

Read more ...Here

The evidence seems to be piling up on the harmful and potential cataclysmic effects that fracking can have on the environment, is there any good reason now to oppose a moratorium on this process of energy recovery until the consequences of this process is fully known?

Learn what you can do by stop fracking by going to the website for Food & Water Watch, get educated and sign their petition to congress.

There is also a move afoot to ban fracking in NJ, by overwhelming bipartisan support our State Legislature passed a ban on fracking last year, only to have Gov. Christie veto the bill.

Food and Water Watch is urging Senate President Stephen Sweeney to hold a vote to override the Governor's veto and are asking residents to call his office and ask that he do so by calling 856-251-9081.

Residents can also sign-on to a letter asking Senator Sweeney to hold a vote to override
Governor Christie's veto of NJ's fracking ban by contacting Rachel Dawn, NJ's organizer for Food and Water Watch at RDawn@fwwlocal.org before tomorrow, January 5th

Did You Feel It? Earthquake Hits Middletown

Just a few minutes ago my house shook slightly, I didn't think much about it until the kids also felt the house shake. My wife had just pulled into the driveway and said the car shook but didn't think much about it because it was the car.

I went to the Internet and there are already dozens of reports stating that a 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered near Mineral,Virginia was felt as far away as Ohio,New England and Toronto Canada.

I haven't heard from anyone locally if there was any damage to report but I would suspect that there wasn't other than a few mentions of cell phone disruptions.

I wonder when the local environmentalists will start to say that this quake could have been caused by FRACKING (hydro fracturing shale formations to release natural gas).

NJ Congressman (and Physicist) Rush Holt Discusses Japanese Nuclear Meltdown With Rachel Maddow

Many people forget or don't know that NJ Congressman Rush Holt (D-12) is also a nuclear physicist. He appeared in a segment on tonight's episode of the Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

Holt talked about whether or not the U.S has taken the threat of natural disasters seriously enough and what lessons the U.S can take from the mistakes in Japan after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Wednesday Weirdness: Haiti's voodoo priests object to mass burials

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's voodoo priests are objecting to anonymous mass burials as an improper way to handle the tens of thousands of dead from the earthquake -- and have taken their complaint to President Rene Preval.

Dumping the dead in hurriedly excavated mass graves without proper rites is seen as desecration in a country where many believe in zombies -- dead bodies brought back to life by supernatural forces who could persecute the living.

Haitian officials say so far at least 50,000 bodies have been dumped in mass graves outside the shattered capital, Port-au-Prince, in what they view as the most efficient way to dispose of the fast-rotting corpses from Tuesday's disaster.

"It is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion," Haiti's main voodoo leader, Max Beauvoir, said in a meeting with Preval.

Local radio is broadcasting messages for Haitians to put bodies recovered from under the rubble of collapsed buildings on the street for collection by garbage and other trucks.

"The conditions in which bodies are being buried is not respecting the dignity of these people," Beauvoir, who was educated at City College of New York and the Sorbonne in Paris, said in the Preval meeting this weekend.

More than half of Haiti's 9 million people are believed to practice voodoo, a religion with roots in Africa. Some 80 percent also are Catholic and most Haitians see no conflict between the two.

Five days after the earthquake, scores of untouched corpses, now bloated and stinking, remain on streets. Red Cross officials have repeatedly said no one should fear disease from dead bodies after the earthquake that is believed to have killed up to 200,000 people.

"I don't understand why everyone is worried about a disease risk," Haitian Red Cross President Michaelle Amedee Gedeon told Reuters. "Do we have cholera in Haiti? No. Do we have the plague in Haiti? No. Rodents, water will not get contaminated. The only bad effect from the corpses is the smell."

On Sunday, more bodies appeared overnight, with locals saying they were thieves burned and shot by lynch-mobs, gangs and police. They said about 20 people were killed like that.