Remember the company Whitefish?
It had only two employees, and then it got a $300 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's electrical grid following the damage from hurricane Maria.
They had ties to the Trump campaign and Interior Secretary Zinke.
Well, one of their first jobs, a high power transmission line, just failed, cutting power coverage from 40% to 18%.
So not a surprise.
For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall.
The company, Whitefish Energy, said last week that it had signed a $300 million contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to repair and reconstruct large portions of the island’s electrical infrastructure. The contract is the biggest yet issued in the troubled relief effort.
Whitefish said Monday that it has 280 workers in the territory, using linemen from across the country, most of them as subcontractors, and that the number grows on average from 10 to 20 people a day. It said it was close to completing infrastructure work that will energize some of the key industrial facilities that are critical to restarting the local economy.
The power authority, also known as PREPA, opted to hire Whitefish rather than activate the “mutual aid” arrangements it has with other utilities. For many years, such agreements have helped U.S. utilities — including those in Florida and Texas recently — to recover quickly after natural disasters.
The unusual decision to instead hire a tiny for-profit company is drawing scrutiny from Congress and comes amid concerns about bankrupt Puerto Rico’s spending as it seeks to provide relief to its 3.4 million residents, the great majority of whom remain without power a month after the storm.
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Whitefish Energy is based in Whitefish, Mont., the home town of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Its chief executive, Andy Techmanski, and Zinke acknowledge knowing one another — but only, Zinke’s office said in an email, because Whitefish is a small town where “everybody knows everybody.” One of Zinke’s sons “joined a friend who worked a summer job” at one of Techmanski’s construction sites, the email said. Whitefish said he worked as a “flagger.”
Zinke’s office said he had no role in Whitefish securing the contract for work in Puerto Rico. Techmanski also said Zinke was not involved.
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The scale of the disaster in Puerto Rico is far larger than anything Whitefish has handled. The company has won two contracts from the Energy Department, including $172,000 to replace a metal pole structure and splice in three miles of new conductor and overhead ground wire in Arizona.
Shortly before Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, Whitefish landed its largest federal contract, a $1.3 million deal to replace and upgrade parts of a 4.8-mile transmission line in Arizona. The company — which was listed in procurement documents as having annual revenue of $1 million — was given 11 months to complete the work, records show.
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Kent McNellie, an investment professional at HBC, the Texas investment firm that is now the largest financier of Whitefish, said the company’s experience reconstructing a one-mile power line destroyed in a wildfire in Washington state was more relevant to Puerto Rico’s needs than is the experience of many companies on the mainland. The span in Washington included an elevation change of about 5,000 feet, and the terrain required crews and equipment to be delivered by helicopter.
The private-equity firm that finances Whitefish, HBC Investments, was founded by Joe Colonnetta, who serves as its general partner.(emphasis mine)
Federal Elections Commission data compiled by The Daily Beast shows Colonnetta contributed $20,000 to the Trump Victory PAC during the general election, $2,700 to Trump’s primary election campaign (then the maximum amount permitted), $2,700 to Trump’s general election campaign (also the maximum), and a total of $30,700 to the Republican National Committee in 2016 alone. Colonnetta’s wife, Kimberly, is no stranger to Republican politics either; shortly after Trump’s victory, she gave $33,400 to the Republican National Committee, the maximum contribution permitted for party committees in 2016.
Well, authorities are now looking at the potential cause of the devastating fires in northern California.
At the top of the list is tree branches hitting power-lines.
The power-lines in the area are operated by Pacific Gas and Electric, and PG&E has a very long history of short changing basic maintenance to improve the bottom line for shareholders.
This resulted in it being hit with significant fines for (quick Google) the Butte Fire (2015), the Rough and Ready fire (1994), the San Bruno gas explosion (2010), and (of course) poisoning people in Hinkley with toxic waste. (the movie Erin Brokovich was based on this)
The fires started almost simultaneously with reports of power outages around the origin points.
As the first reports came in Sunday night of numerous fires that would grow into one of the most destructive wildfire disasters in California history, emergency dispatchers in Sonoma County received multiple calls of power lines falling down and electrical transformers exploding.PG&E claims that these winds were "hurricane force", which is a lie.
In all, according to a review of emergency radio traffic by the Bay Area News Group, Sonoma County dispatchers sent out fire crews to at least 10 different locations across the county over a 90-minute period starting at 9:22 pm to respond to 911 calls and other reports of sparking wires and problems with the county’s electrical system amid high winds.
State fire officials said Tuesday that they are still investigating the cause of the blazes, which as of late Tuesday had killed 17 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in Sonoma, Napa and other Northern California counties.
But the reports of the power equipment failures began to turn the spotlight on PG&E, the giant San Francisco-based utility, raising questions about how well it maintained its equipment in the area and whether it adequately cut back trees from power lines to reduce fire risk — as required by state law.
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PG&E and other large utilities in California have a long history of being found responsible for major wildfires because of inadequate maintenance of their power lines.
In April, the state Public Utilities Commission fined PG&E $8.3 million for failing to maintain a power line that sparked the Butte Fire in Amador County in September 2015. That fire burned for 22 days, killing two people, destroying 549 homes and charring 70,868 acres.
CalFire announced last year that it will seek to force PG&E to pay $90 million in firefighting costs. More than 1,000 lawsuits and claims are still pending against the utility.
“It was more than just a lack of maintenance. It was a complete disregard for their requirements of vegetation management in rural areas,” said Burlingame attorney Frank Pitre, who sued on behalf of the victims.
There was an uncontained engine failure on Airbus A380 on a Paris to London flight:
An Air France A380 superjumbo jetliner taking more than 500 people from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in Canada on Saturday following “serious damage” to one of its four engines, the airline said.Glad not to be on that flight.
“Flight 066 landed without further damage at the Goose Bay military airport in Canada and all of the 520 people on board were evacuated with no injuries,” an Air France spokesman in Paris said.
The Airbus double-decker, wide body aircraft was rerouted as it passed over Greenland, landing in Goose Bay in eastern Canada, the spokesman said.
The landing went off with no problems for the jetliner carrying 496 passengers and 24 crew members, the spokesman said. The airline was exploring options to get the passengers to the US.
I am not quite sure why this happened, but I got a warning about a gas leak about 15 miles away from where I was working.
The basic story was rather straightforward, chlorosulfonic acid leaked from a chemical plant, but I am unclear who pulled the trigger on the emergency text that got sent out to a whole lot of people.
It was definitely surreal.
Houston City Councilman Dave Martin is telling people not to donate to the Red Cross:
Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.
"I beg you not to send them a penny," he said at Wednesday's council meeting. "They are the most inept unorganized organization I've ever experienced."
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"Don't waste your money," said Martin. "Give it to another cause."
Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross' response to Harvey.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.
"The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn't have had the wherewithal to do it," Emmett said. "Don't get me wrong, they're out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly."
The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city's two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd is threatening to jail wanted people seeking shelter due to Hurricane Irma.When looking at bullies like this, corruption generally accompanies this sort of behavior, because they think that they are above the law they profess to enforce.
The sheriff, who is known for his outspoken comments, made the threat in a series of posts to Twitter.
“If you go to a shelter for #Irma and you have a warrant, we'll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail,” Judd tweeted to his nearly 66,000 followers on Twitter.
Judd also posted that officers would be at every shelter checking IDs and that sex offenders and sex predators would not be allowed inside.
When checking IDs, if an officer sees that someone has a warrant, that person will be taken into custody, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Carrie Horstman said.
Horstman added officers don't have a way of seeing what crime the warrant is for, so it’s possible those with non-violent misdemeanor offenses could be arrested.
“Officers are legally obligated to take a person into custody if they have a warrant,” she said.
Judd said in preparation for the hurricane, fugitives should turn themselves into the jail because “it’s a secure location.”
Our response to the dangerous #HurricaneIrma tweets of @PolkCoSheriff Grady Judd, threatening arrests for people seeking shelter. pic.twitter.com/V4MKC9nfTw— ACLU of Florida (@ACLUFL) September 6, 2017
I am referring, of course, to Mao's mass executions of landlords.
I am aware that the later leader of the PRC has a life that is drenched in blood, but when I read about Houston landlords demanding rent for flooded homes, I have an insight into why the peasants might be inclined to support such a policy:
Rocio Fuentes weighed up the cost of getting some new sofas for her new apartment in Pasadena, Texas, and decided the family budget could just about stretch to it. Just one month after moving in, Hurricane Harvey swept through and the Fuenteses were left not only with the ruined furniture but also an ongoing rental demand for a dwelling they had to flee.We need to send Jimmy "The Rent is Too Damn High" McMillan down there to kick some landlord butt.
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But while everything has changed for this family, they are still expected to pay for their abandoned home.
“Our landlords say we have to pay rent and late fees and every day it is going up,” Fuentes said. “We are paying rent for somewhere we can’t live in. They said ‘you aren’t the only ones in this situation’, but what are we supposed to do? We don’t have any money. We don’t have anything.”
An acute housing crisis is starting to grip thousands of other families in south-east Texas as the floodwaters ebb away, with a death toll put at 60 on Monday. More than 180,000 houses in the Houston area have been badly damaged, with only a fraction of occupants owning any flood insurance. And under Texas law, rent must still be paid on damaged dwellings, unless they are deemed completely uninhabitable.
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Under the Texas property code, if a rental premises is “totally unusable” due to an external disaster then either the landlord or tenant can terminate the lease through written notice. But if the property is “partially unusable” because of a disaster, a tenant may only get a reduction in rent determined by a county or district court.
Rule #2 is to refer to rule #1.
Pro Publica has some quick tips for donating after a disaster in response to the massive flooding in the Houston area from hurricane Harvey, and the lede paragraph mentions the American Red Cross mismanagement in Haiti.
The comments mention their mismanagement of the super storm Sandy.
On a more personal level, I was in the Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage in 1964 (No memories, I was less than 2), and my father has vivid recollections of the general uselessness of the Red Cross, he was involved on some of the (ultimately ignored) after incident analysis and recommendations.
He recalls that the Salvation Army did a much better job than the ARC.
Just don't give to them. It will end up going to new carpets in their Washington, DC offices.
H/t naked capitalismPeter @BrookesTimes nails the week in one image pic.twitter.com/8JWZkZX7XN— Tim Shipman (@ShippersUnbound) June 16, 2017
A week ago, I wrote admiringly of Jeremy Corbyn's proposal to house people displaced by the fire at the Grenfell in empty luxury flats in the area.
Though I did not describe it as such, I felt that this proposal was a world class, and well deserved, troll, but that this would never happen.
I was wrong. The troll has become reality:
Sixty-eight flats in a luxury apartment complex where prices start at £1.6m are being made available to families displaced by the Grenfell Tower fire.My theory is that Coebyn's proposal scared the hell out of the real estate community, for whom empty buildings purchased by mobsters, despots, and other money launderers that is their bread and butter.
Families who escaped the tower blaze will be able to take up permanent occupation in July and August in the apartments in the Kensington Row scheme about 1.5 miles south of Grenfell, where last Wednesday’s blaze left 79 people dead and missing and presumed dead.
The homes are within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea but in the more affluent south end of the borough. They have been purchased by the Corporation of London and will become part of its social housing stock.
Grenfell Tower fire: death toll raised to 79 as minute's silence held
Read more
The most luxurious four-bedroom apartments are currently on sale in the development for £8.5m but the homes being released to Grenfell residents are part of the affordable quota being built and feature a more “straightforward” internal specification, but have the same build quality.
The complex includes a 24-hour concierge, swimming pool, sauna and spa and private cinema.
It is not yet clear if the Grenfell residents will have access to the facilities, which are normally not included for those in affordable housing.
“We’ve got to start by finding each of them a home,” said Tony Pidgley, chairman of the Berkeley Group, which built the homes. “Somewhere safe and supportive, close to their friends and the places they know, so they can start to rebuild their lives. We will work night and day to get these homes ready.”
The move follows calls by Jeremy Corbyn for luxury homes in the borough to be requisitioned.
Last week he said: “Kensington is a tale of two cities. The south part of Kensington is incredibly wealthy, it’s the wealthiest part of the whole country. The ward where this fire took place is, I think, the poorest ward in the whole country and properties must be found – requisitioned if necessary – to make sure those residents do get rehoused locally.”
Empty flats in North Kensington should be "requisitioned if necessary" for people left homeless by the Grenfell Tower fire, Jeremy Corbyn says.It a good solution, and it is precisely the sort of action that makes Tory heads explode, which makes it even more delicious.
The Labour leader has also said he is "very angry" that so many lives were lost in a deadly tower block fire.
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And he told MPs on Thursday: "The south part of Kensington is incredibly wealthy, it's the wealthiest part of the country.
"The ward where this fire took place is, I think the poorest ward in the whole country.
"And properties must be found, requisitioned if necessary, in order to make sure those residents do get re-housed locally.
"It cannot be acceptable that in London you have luxury buildings and luxury flats kept as land banking for the future while the homeless and the poor look for somewhere to live."
Theresa May has officially begun the Brexit process:
Theresa May has told parliament that she accepts Brexit will carry consequences for the UK, as a letter delivered to Brussels began a two-year countdown to Britain’s departure from the EU.This is going to be a bumpy ride.
The prime minister made a speech on triggering article 50 minutes after the European council president, Donald Tusk, confirmed he had received notification. He declared that “the UK has delivered Brexit” nine months after a bruising referendum campaign.
“We understand that there will be consequences for the UK of leaving the EU. We know that we will lose influence over the rules that affect the European economy. We know that UK companies that trade with the EU will have to align with rules agreed by institutions of which we are no longer a part, just as we do in other overseas markets. We accept that,” she said.
A number of MPs congratulated the prime minister on the tone of her letter to Tusk, which stressed Britain’s commitment to the continent as a close friend and ally. But others accused her of issuing a “blatant threat” to withdraw security cooperation if the EU27 fail to deliver on a trade agreement. The letter suggests that the government hopes to roll the separate issues together, claiming no deal will mean WTO rules but also that “our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened”. May’s spokesman repeatedly insisted placing security and trade relations alongside each other in the letter to Tusk was not intended as a threat. “It’s a simple statement of fact that if we leave the EU without a deal, then the arrangements we have as part of our EU membership will lapse,” he said.
It looks like we are sending ground troops into Syria, specifically Marines artillery and armored vehicles, which is a significant escalation from the special forces previously in Syria:
The United States, feeling confident enough about its war on the totalitarian Islamic State, has upped the stakes by deploying a detachment of Marine artillery into Syria.This will not end well.
To be sure, U.S. troops are certainly in combat in Syria, although the deployment of artillery is a step further than Special Operations Forces working with local U.S. allies in the country. Commandos often travel in smaller numbers, can move faster and do not need as much security as artillery units.
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Pentagon officials stated that the deployment of the troops and their 155-millimeter M-777 howitzers, summoned from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has “been in the works for sometime,” according to The Washington Post.
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Meanwhile, in a highly visible — and deliberately visible — move, U.S. soldiers riding in Stryker armored vehicles flying American flags drove into the Syrian city of Manbij to prevent a clash between the SDF and the Turkish-backed FSA brigades.
Greek PM Alex Tsipras is insisting that he will go no further with austerity.
While I agree with his sentiments, Angela Merkel and her Evil Minions™ have turned Greece into the world's largest debtor's prison, Tsipras has been saying this for years now, and when push comes to shove, he folds:
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras dug in against creditor demands for more pension cuts and tax increases before a meeting of euro-area finance ministers to unblock the country’s bailout review.The IMF will make noises about the unsustainability of the program, but will then break its own rules and go along.
“There is no way we are going to legislate even one euro more than what was agreed in the bailout,” Tsipras said in an interview with Efimerida ton Syntakton, to mark the two-year anniversary since he was elected on an anti-austerity platform. “The demand to legislate more measures, and contingent ones, no less, is alien not just to the Greek Constitution but to democratic norms.”
Euro-area finance ministers will discuss Greece when they meet in Brussels on Thursday, with Greece and officials representing the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the European Stability Mechanism and the International Monetary Fund locked in a stand-off over how to complete the country’s second bailout review, now a year behind schedule. The IMF, in particular, views the projections shared by Greece and the European creditors that the country can reach a primary budget surplus of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2018 as too optimistic.
An iceberg expected to be one of the 10 largest ever recorded is ready to break away from Antarctica, scientists say.2½ inches (10 cm) may not sound like a lot, but this is just one incident.
A long-running rift in the Larsen C ice shelf grew suddenly in December and now just 20km of ice is keeping the 5,000 sq km piece from floating away.
Larsen C is the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica.
Researchers based in Swansea say the loss of a piece a quarter of the size of Wales will leave the whole shelf vulnerable to future break-up.
Larsen C is about 350m thick and floats on the seas at the edge of West Antarctica, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.
Researchers have been tracking the rift in Larsen C for many years, watching it with some trepidation after the collapse of Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the sudden break-up of the Larsen B shelf in 2002.
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But in December the speed of the rift went into overdrive, growing by a further 18km in just a couple of weeks. What will become a massive iceberg now hangs on to the shelf by a thread just 20km long.
"If it doesn't go in the next few months, I'll be amazed," project leader Prof Adrian Luckman, from Swansea University, told BBC News.
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It is believed that climate warming has brought forward the likely separation of the iceberg but the scientists say they have no direct evidence to support this.
However, they are concerned about how any break-off will impact the rest of the ice shelf, given that its neighbour, Larsen B, disintegrated spectacularly in 2002 following a similar large calving event.
"We are convinced, although others are not, that the remaining ice shelf will be less stable than the present one," said Prof Luckman.
"We would expect in the ensuing months to years further calving events, and maybe an eventual collapse - but it's a very hard thing to predict, and our models say it will be less stable; not that it will immediately collapse or anything like that."
As it floats on the sea, the resulting iceberg from the shelf will not raise sea levels. But if the shelf breaks up even more, it could result in glaciers that flow off the land behind it to speed up their passage towards the ocean. This non-floating ice would have an impact on sea levels.
According to estimates, if all the ice that the Larsen C shelf currently holds back entered the sea, global waters would rise by 10cm.
#NYCExplosion causes residents to attempt to get home. #Uber taking total advantage of chaos and surcharging passengers 1.4 to 1.8 times.— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) September 18, 2016
Passengers attempting to hail Uber cars during New York City's explosion on Saturday night hammered the ride sharing service for its pricing policies, accusing the company of gouging customers during a dangerous incident.They announced that "surge pricing" was suspended, but reports from Twitter indicate otherwise.
As news broke that a device had detonated in the city's Chelsea section, scared passengers attempted to use their Uber apps to hail a ride home—only to be hit with notifications that demand was "off the charts."
Furious users took to Twitter to vent their frustration, which was first reported by The Sun UK. Shortly after the blast, Uber announced on the social network that it had suspended its "surge pricing," a system that has been criticized in the past by some riders.
While the urban areas of California may find a way to deal with this, but the agriculture sector of the state is completely f%$#ed.
The study, published today in the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports, looked at how natural climatic forces contributed to centuries-long and even millennia-long periods of dryness in California during the past 10,000 years. These phenomena—sun spots, a slightly different earth orbit, a decrease in volcanic activity—intermittently warmed the region through a process called radiative forcing, and recently have been joined by a new force: greenhouse gases.
As long as warming forces like greenhouse gases are present, the resulting radiative forcing can extend drought-like conditions more or less indefinitely, said MacDonald, a distinguished professor of geography and of ecology and evolutionary biology.
"Radiative forcing in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts," said MacDonald, an international authority on drought and climate change. "When you have arid periods that persist for 60 years, as we did in the 12th century, or for millennia, as we did from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., that's not really a 'drought.' That aridity is the new normal."
Researchers tracked California's historic and prehistoric climate and water conditions by taking a sediment core in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They pulled a 2-inch-wide, 10-foot-deep cylinder of sediment from the bottom of Kirman Lake and analyzed it in third-of-an-inch sections, creating the most detailed and continuous paleoenvironmental record of California.
The team correlated their findings with other studies of California climate history, and for the first time, united all the studies and cross-referenced them with histories of the Pacific Ocean's temperature taken from marine sediment cores and other sources.
What they found was not only that periods of increased radiative forcing could produce drought-like conditions that extended indefinitely, but that these conditions were closely tied to prolonged changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures.
It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:
As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.
Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.
When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.
Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.
“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.
Much like Chernobyl and the DMZ in Korea, it turns out that the Fukushima exclusion zone has become one f%$# of nature preserve:
A stunning new photo project offers unprecedented insight into the wild and desolate exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima nuclear power plant - where tonnes of contaminated soil lie untouched and overgrown forest is engulfing hundreds of abandoned vehicles and homes.The photographer sees a stunning tableau of the forest swallowing the works of man.
The 12.5-mile exclusion zone around the nuclear plant now resembles post-apocalyptic scenes from The Walking Dead after it was instantly abandoned following the 2011 nuclear disaster.
People deserted the area after warnings of dangerous levels of radioactivity, leaving cars, classrooms and libraries to be swallowed by the overgrown wilderness in stark scenes reminiscent of those seen in the show, in which entire towns have been left in stasis after zombies overran the earth.
