August 25, 2010 by admin.

Journal of Commerce

August 25, 2010

Enbridge plans regional pipeline expansion from Fort McMurray, Alberta

RICHARD GILBERT, staff writer

Enbridge is making plans to invest more than $400 million in the expansion of a regional pipeline from Fort McMurray….

The Waupisoo Pipeline is a system that takes about 280,000 barrels per day of oilsands crude from Enbridge’s Cheecham Terminal to Edmonton via the Stonefell terminal near Bruderheim, Alberta. …

(Full Story)

Note: The article contains a map showing the route the pipeline will be taking.

Posted in Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

August 23, 2010 by admin.

Financial Post

Mike De Souza, Postmedia News · Monday, Aug. 23, 2010

OTTAWA — Sustained cuts to Environment Canada weather-service programs have compromised the government’s ability to assess climate change and left it with a “profoundly disturbing” quality of information in its data network, says a newly released internal government report.The stinging assessment, obtained through an access-to-information request, suggests that Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.

“Environment Canada is on the road to junior partner status with respect to other agencies, both provincial and international, in the area of climate data gathering, quality control and archiving,” said the report, released to the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental research group.

The analysis — Degradation in Environment Canada’s Climate Network, Quality Control and Data Storage Practices: A Call to Repair the Damage — noted the lack of data on climate conditions can affect decisions on major infrastructure such as roads, buildings and sewers as well as a number of “real-life” decisions made by Canadians every day….

Full Story

It is a good thing that the Pembina Institute made the Freedom of Information Act request, because very few of the rest of us mortals can.  However, the Pembina Institute puts its own political spin on the causes of the calamity by blaming Stephen Harper and his party instead of John Chretien and the Liberal Party, the real culprit responsible for the budget cuts, while the elephant in the room goes unnoticed.

Perhaps the report contained no information on what the elephant is.  If so, it is amazing that neither the author of the Financial Post article nor the Pembina Institute were sufficiently astute to notice the biggest problem of all, which is that the vast majority of Canada’s weather stations that once regularly reported on weather conditions now no longer exists.

One could argue that weather satellites eliminated the need for ground-based temperature measurements, but that would be far too simple a reaction. Weather satellites do not measure local conditions such as rainfall-and snowfall amounts, wind-speed and -direction, relative humidity and hours of sunshine — all absolute necessary not only for climate change modelling but also for accurately forecasting the weather.

The deterioration of the weather services programs was not only caused on account of automation, as claimed in the report, but primarily on account of closing down hundreds and perhaps thousands of weather stations.  That was done many years before Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada made it into Ottawa and even before the Conservative Party of Canada even came into existence.  The fault for the severe cutbacks to the data-collection network lies squarely with the Liberal Party.  It did not happen by accident.  It happened because it was a deliberate policy of the Liberal government.

Have a look at some pertinent comments on the report (at wattsupwiththat.com)

• MaxL says: August 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm

• Dave in Exile says: August 23, 2010 at 3:16 pm

• Dennis Nikols, P Geol. says: August 23, 2010 at 4:37 pm

One of those comments (the first on the list) was made by a Canadian weather forecaster.  It seems to be obvious that no other commenters either at the FP article or at the wattsupwithtthat.com posting have any appreciation of what is necessary to produce accurate weatherforecasts.  It even seems that most of the commenters see no need for accurate weather forecasts, which makes me wonder why they bother to comment on the article except to complain that funding for weather-forecasting is a waste of money.

Many of the commenters see the Environment Canada report as a cry to stimulate more funding, somewhat justifiably surmising that the bureaucrats responsible falsely feel that if we only throw more money at the problem, the quality of  the data produced by the Canadian weather services programs will be improved.  It is very doubtful that will any improvement will happen, although all extra funding will doubtlessly be used up.  After all, Environment Canada’s size grew within a relatively short time from an office with with about 15 employees to become a large employer with a workforce that grew to very large proportions.

Environment Canada is a federal government department with approximately 4,700 employees located in 100 communities. (Source: Environment Canada, “What We Do: Key Facts and Figures,” About Us, 31 March 2003, <http://www.ec.gc.ca/introec/keyfacts.htm> , 13 May 2004)

The Wikipedia entry for Environment Canada presently shows an employment figure of ~6,000, although I have no idea how old that figures is, while it seems to me that not very long ago I read an article that put the total number of Environment Canada employees at 10,000.  Darn it, I did not bookmark that.

Regardless of how much money is being thrown at that problem, even with the best intentions, the quality of the data outputs of the weather service programs cannot be better than the quality of the data that is being input: garbage in = garbage out.

Posted in Weather, Climate Change, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

August 19, 2010 by admin.

Winalta sells land for $1.6M

By Journal Staff, August 18, 2010

EDMONTON — A court has approved the sale of insolvent modular home builder Winalta Inc.’s sale of land in Drayton Valley and Bruderheim for a total of $1.6 million….(Full Story)

Posted in Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

August 3, 2010 by admin.

From U.S. Senator Inhofe EPW Press Blog, August 2, 2010

Posted by Matt Dempsey Matt_Dempsey@epw.senate.gov

News9.com OKC  

EPA to Crack Down on Farm Dust

August 01, 2010

By Jacqueline Sit

Watch: Farmers Call Possible EPA Crack Down on Farm Dust ‘Ridiculous’

Link to Article

Comment on the Story on Inhofe Facebook Page

Posted in Alarmist Insanity, Climate Change, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

August 1, 2010 by admin.

Greenpeace and other Greens have for decades promoted an atmosphere of alarmism that has been the major cause of wide-spread bans on the development of nuclear power generation in many developed nations, while at the same time far more deadly, damaging and excessively-costly alternative energy-generation schemes were rammed through development.

The hype and hysteria fueling that alarmism is being brought to a well-reasoned and practical end in Belarus.

Belarus to Repopulate Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
by Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski
July 28, 2010

On July 23, Novosti, Interfax, Interia, other Belarusian, Russian, and Polish news agencies announced that the government of Belarus decided to resettle hundreds of thousands of people back into the 2,000 ghost-villages in the Chernobyl exclusion zone from which they had been hastily removed 24 years ago.  (Full Story, PDF file, 82kB)

Dr. Jaworowski identifies in his article that,

Calculating by unit of energy produced, the Chernobyl catastrophe caused 0.86 deaths per gigawatt-year of electricity produced, which is 47 times less than for hydroelectric power stations (40 deaths per GWe-year), including the 230,000 fatalities caused by the 1975 collapse of the dam on the Banqiao river in China.

(More on the negative aspects of alternative sources of energy)

Posted in Energy Issues, Propaganda debunked, Alternative Energy Sources, Community & Industry, Explosions & Fires, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

July 8, 2010 by admin.

The Town of Bruderheim has a telephone answering service.  The answering service, accessible 24/7, is staffed by two involuntary volunteers and provides redirection to intended clients for the Town Office, cheerfully and always ready to serve.

The Bruderheim Town Office is aware of that going on, and has been aware for quite some time, but so far have offered no solution to what is truly an imposition on the involuntary volunteers saddled with the task of providing service to prospective Town Office clients who ask for all sort of things, such as whether we can provide “contact details for Bruce Trucking” or whether we “still operate the bulk-water-terminal.”

The more bizarre such information requests appear to be, the more likely it is that a given party making it is simply looking for the Bruderheim Town Office.

How can it possibly be that our telephone number became the tool whereby Town Office clients find their way to constructive and accurate information offered by office staff paid to provide it, whereas we, my wife and I, get paid sweet tweet, for being always cheerful and eager to provide friendly service to all sort of calls that number anywhere between one and up to five or more a day?  Our telephone number is not even remotely similar to the telephone number used by the Bruderheim Town Office (whose number is 780.796.3731).

For many years, the website of the Town of Bruderheim seriously ailed. It contained, for example, links that ostensibly were to lead to information on current town council members but led instead to a welcoming message by a now former mayor, even long after that mayor had become history for more than a year.  On the other hand, the promised information about the composition of the Bruderheim Town Council remained successfully hidden from all comers.

Still, anyone sufficiently astute in using Internet searches for specific websites and willing to spend the time required to find information on the Town Council’s composition could find it, but relatively few people are that astute.

The Town Office has been aware for years that the glaring deficiencies of its website existed.  Their solution was to hire someone to redesign their website, while the redesigning did nothing to address those deficiencies.

Even after the much-advertised redesigning of their website, the website still showed, for example, a member of the Town Council who years ago had left the Council because he had intended to move away, Marcel Mann.  That was until about half a year ago.

About half a year ago or earlier, the Town Office deigned to announce the launching of another revamping of their website.  They got everyone’s attention by removing all of their web pages and replacing them with a web page that states:

Town of Bruderheim

This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.

That is were things remain as of now.  What you see there is all that remains of the consequences of the last major redesign of the website of the Town of Bruderheim. Of course, the creation of absence of useful information is an unsatisfactory problem solution.  As you can see from the full text of that web page, the information provided there is useless for anyone trying to glean something as simple as instructions on how the Bruderheim Town Office can be contacted either by e-mail, snail-mail or telephone.

The reason why we have been forced into providing answering services for the Town Office is that prospective clients keep on searching for better information than that offered by the Bruderheim Town Office.  All who succeed in that effort are then rewarded by reaching the best possible alternative, the website of About Bruderheim, where they can obtain our telephone number, call us and get helpful advice, such as to call 780.796.3731 during standard government-bureaucracy operating hours from 9 a.m to 4 p.m.

When we paid our increased property taxes last June, we suggested to the Town Office staff that it would be a practical solution to add contact information to their cryptic message at their website, but other than that they verified that such information was absent from their website and that they told us that we would probably be very interested in “the roll-out of the newly redesigned Town Office website at their next Town Council meeting,” absolutely nothing was done to improve the quality of the service they provide to their clients.  They persist in hiding their identity and location, even though the required update of their website would not require more than a few seconds of work.

Sorry people, but that is not good enough, not for as long as Town Office staff feel that a “roll-out” is as or more important than a practical and useful update of the Town Office website and to put it online for all to see and use.  The general public and your constituents expect nothing less!

Posted in Town of Bruderheim, Taxes, Organizational News, Community & Industry | Print | 2 Comments »

July 3, 2010 by admin.

The following graph shows sulphur-price trends over time.

People asked me a few times during the past few weeks about what is happening with the feared construction of the HAZCO sulphur-storage, -forming and -shipping facility that HAZCO so eagerly and urgently wanted to build not quite two miles east of Bruderheim, at the junction of Highway 45 and RR 202.

Well, the NRCB hearing last year decided to give HAZCO the go-ahead on that; against the wishes of many opponents.

It seems that HAZCO’s sense of urgency that drove their application evaporated in consequence of the collapse of the sulphur-price-bubble that had emerged in 2007 and popped by the end of 2008.

For most of 2009 plant-gate sulphur prices were below $0.00/LT and even as as low as -$29.52/LT.  That means that sulphur sources would have paid as much as $28.52/LT to selected “purchasers” just to have excess sulphur taken off their hands.

In other words, for as long as sulphur requires a subsidy to be leaving plant gates, to which then still the cost of forming and shipping the sulphur to Vancouver must be added before it can be injected into the saturated world market, it is not likely that producers or HAZCO will make a profit on selling, forming and shipping of sulphur.

It seems that common sense in standard business practices applies.  For now the sulphur business that HAZCO wanted to engage in at a profit is a bust and will not generate the revenues required for the cost of constructing the HAZCO sulphur facility, aside from the cost of forming and shipping of sulphur.

However, I am not the expert.  Perhaps it is possible to obtain better information from HAZCO or from the Lamont county planners who are busy having the infra-structure built from our tax money with which they hope to attract industries that will pay back what they invest.

Mind you, losses are not a great concern for the county planners or for the NRCB.  Whatever losses they cause will be paid for by the taxpayers.  It’s a no-risk business for planners and for the NRCB, although the taxpayers will lose a great deal even if the HAZCO facility will not be built.

The whole deal is not worth it to me to spend more time on.  I am through worrying about bubbles, and it likely that another bubble will not pop up for quite some years.  The last bubble we had pop up in the same place, before this one, popped up about 40 years ago.  Perhaps it will now be another 40 years before the next one pops up and then bursts.

Posted in Taxes, Town of Bruderheim, Community & Industry, World Sulphur Glut, Sulphur Logistics, Sulphur-Related Construction Costs | Print | No Comments »

June 6, 2010 by admin.

EurActive

Impoverished SE Europeans turn to wood for heating

Published: 03 June 2010 | Updated: 04 June 2010

Rising electricity prices are increasing the use of wood for heating in South Eastern Europe to alarming levels, posing a serious threat to health and the environment, experts warned….(Full Story)

Posted in Alternative Energy Sources, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

April 28, 2010 by admin.

Today I heard about a problem with scabies in at least one camp in Fort McMurray.

From what I heard, the workers being housed in the affected camp are asking that the spread of scabies could be halted or controlled if they would not be assigned new quarters after returning to work after an absence.

The operators of the camp claim that scabies is being spread due to workers in Fort McMurray not keeping clean, while the workers claim that scabies is highly contagious, and that the spread of scabies could be halted by having their living quarters not reassigned to others during their absence from work for whatever reasons.

Wikipedia has a good description of the circumstances and treatment of scabies.

Going by that description, it is obvious that it is quite possible that the spread of scabies can take place anywhere and not necessarily only through improperly cleaned living quarters.

Scabies infestations can easily be cured and controlled in livestock and pets.  They can just as easily be cured and controlled if they involve people, even though an effective cure requires perseverance and diligence.

Update 2010 04 29:

Any of the workers in Fort McMurray who find themselves to be afflicted by a scabies infestation could find themselves facing isolation, discrimination, somewhat lengthy medical treatment, and loss of wages. It would be well worth their while to consider the acquisition of a scabies infestation to be a work-related injury.

The media, all in a tiff over the deaths of 1,500 ducks on a tailings pond in Fort McMurray, inexplicably does not seem to deem the outbreak of scabies in Fort McMurray to be worthy of much coverage.  Probably that is for no other reason than that the media successfully dethroned mankind as the crown of creation.  It would not do to draw too much attention to the fact that mankind experiences any suffering.

A search for “scabies Fort McMurray” through Google.com contained 4 entries on the search return list, dating from 24 04 2010 to 27 04 2010.  The search-return list for a comparable search through bing.com contained five entries, also dating from 24 04 2010 to 27 04 2010.

Although the news articles that an Internet search will find assert that the spread of scabies infestations is a result of sharing “contaminated clothes, gloves or bed linens,” according to Dr. Brent Friesen of Alberta Health Services, Dr. Friesen also advises that “This is something people can easily protect themselves against by making sure they’re not sharing clothing, coveralls or gloves. Sometimes, when the weather gets hot, people under their coveralls are not really wearing a lot of other layers of clothing and, in that case, it’s really an opportune time for someone who has got the infection to spread it to someone else.”

Unfortunately, prevention of the spread of infestations is not so simple in the real world. It would seem obvious that Dr. Friesen never worked under the conditions that any of the workers threatened by scabies infestations must endure.  Workers are people, too, people just like Dr. Friesen, but, unlike Dr. Friesen’s speculation, it is extremely unlikely that any workers would share coveralls, no more so than that Dr. Friesen would share his underwear with someone else.

However, contrary to Dr. Friesen’s unwarranted and unproven speculation, other things easily aid the spread of scabies infestations, things that can be prevented through a number of common-sense practices:

Public health and prevention strategies

There is no vaccine available for scabies, nor are there any proven causative risk factors. Therefore, most strategies focus on preventing re-infection. All family and close contacts should be treated at the same time, even if asymptomatic. Cleaning of environment should occur simultaneously, as there is a risk of reinfection. Therefore it is recommended to wash and hot iron all material (such as clothes, bedding, and towels) that has been in contact with scabies infestation.

Cleaning the environment should include:

• Treatment of furniture and bedding.
• Vacuuming floors, carpets, and rugs.
• Disinfecting floor and bathroom surfaces by mopping.
• Cleaning the shower/bath tub after each use.
• Daily washing of recently worn clothes, towels and bedding in hot water, drying in a hot dryer and steam ironing. (Source: Wikipedia)

It is apparent that the much-praised health practices in use in the affected camps most definitely do not measure up to most of the ones contained in the preceding list of required measures.  In the mean time, Dr. Friesen would be well advised to accept that scabies can be spread not only through skin contact and the extremely unlikely “sharing of coveralls” but also through transfer of mites and their eggs from any contaminated item on a list that includes far more than merely the alleged sharing of coveralls.

Posted in Health issues, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

March 21, 2010 by admin.

National Post

March 17, 2010
Ross McKitrick, Air pollution, University of Guelph

Models that predict thousands of smog-related hospitalizations in Toronto don’t hold up

By Ross McKitrick

For many years we have heard that air pollution in Canada is responsible for thousands of annual deaths and hospitalizations. In 2004 Toronto Public Health claimed that 1,700 premature deaths and 6,000 hospitalizations occur each year in Toronto alone, due to air pollution. The Ontario Medical Association, provincial and federal governments, lung associations and other groups regularly cite these kinds of figures in support of calls for new regulatory initiatives. These death and hospitalization rates are astonishing. It is like suffering a 9/11-sized terrorist attack every 10 months.

But is it really true?….(Full Story)

_____________
Note: At the end of the National Post Article is a link to a file that is supposed to contain the full study report on which Dr. McKitrick’s article is based.  The link does not function and returns a 404 error.  Here is a functioning link to the study report at Dr. McKitricks web page.

Posted in Community & Industry, Pollution: Health Issues, Nitrogen-Oxides, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »