The Tonka Report

May 3, 2010: Dan Joling and Mark Thiessen / Associated Press (AP) – May 3, 2010

CORDOVA, Alaska – Communities along the Gulf Coast wondering about what kind of legacy the monstrous oil slick will leave can look no further than the towns along the Alaska coastline that were ravaged by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Crude oil from the tanker still lingers on some beaches a full 21 years later. Some marine species never recovered. Families and bank accounts were shattered. Alcoholism, suicide and domestic violence rates all rose in hard-hit towns.

“As far as what’s ahead, we have a feeling that we kind of know what those communities and individuals are going to go through, and it’s absolutely tragic,” said Stan Jones, spokesman for the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.

On March 23, 1989, the 987-foot supertanker left the port in Valdez loaded with 53 million gallons of North Slope crude from the trans-Alaska pipeline. The ship hit a reef three hours later, rupturing eight of its 11 cargo tanks and dumping 10.8 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound.

About 1,300 miles of Alaska shoreline was affected by the spill, including 200 miles that were heavily contaminated, according to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council. Responders found carcasses of more than 35,000 birds and 1,000 sea otters. That was considered to be a fraction of the bird and animal death toll because carcasses usually sink to the seabed. The council estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 killer whales died along with billions of salmon and herring eggs.

Exxon said it spent $2.1 billion on a cleanup, but in a testament to the persistence of crude, oil a few inches below the surface remains on isolated beaches. Students on field trips to islands in Prince William Sound devastated by the spill often uncover rocks soiled in oil with little effort. An estimated 20,000 gallons of oil remain from the spill. “It just smells like a gas station,” Kate Alexander of the Prince William Sound Science Center in Cordova said of the lingering remnants of the spill. “It’s a very disturbing experience, but very real.”

Alaskans also see uncomfortable parallels as BP takes heat for allegedly downplaying the initial threat of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico after a drilling rig exploded. A similar scenario unfolded in 1989 after the Valdez disaster. “There were promises made that it was manageable, containable, that it could be cleaned up,” said Jones, whose group is dedicated to preventing future oil spills. “It turned out the oil industry was just not capable of doing that. That seems to be what’s happening in the gulf.”

It is still too early to know what the lasting effects of the Gulf Coast spill will be. The well is spewing an estimated 200,000 gallons of oil a day and is on pace to quickly eclipse the Exxon Valdez spill as the worst oil disaster in U.S. history.

The environmental effects of the current spill will be different in some ways from what happened in Alaska. The warmer temperatures in the Gulf will help the oil degrade faster, and marsh and sand in Louisiana may react differently than Alaska’s gravel and rock beaches. But coastal towns no doubt will clearly feel the pain of a spill. The coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico rely heavily on shrimp, oyster and other types of fishing just like Alaska towns rely on salmon and herring.

“I was watching the news the other day and I saw the fishermen in the gymnasium, and I went, “Yep, that was us, day three or four,’” said longtime Alaska fisherman RJ Kopchack. “I saw the guys filling out the paperwork to get their first claims processed, and I said, ‘Yep, that was us, post spill, day five or six.’”

Exxon Valdez oil in recent years has shown up in sea otters and harlequin ducks. Some species never recovered. Though it was never definitively proven that killer whales were affected by the spill, “They dramatically lost abundance right during the spill and after the spill,” said Craig Tillery, a member of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council who has worked on the spill since the week it happened. Pacific herring, which spawned in heavily contaminated areas, were hard hit. Herring made a short comeback, but remain classified as “not recovering.”

Jones’ group commissioned studies to see how the spill affected people in small communities where fishing gives people their identity. Cordova was probably the most painful example because its fishing industry was hurt so much by the spill. “The community exhibited every kind of social stress you can imagine,” Jones said. “Alcoholism went up. Suicide went up. Family violence went up. Divorces went up. Of course, bankruptcies and various kinds of financial failures went up with the attendant stress on families.”

Those who lived through the Valdez catastrophe said they felt enormous sorrow for the Gulf Coast because they know how painful it will all be, especially once the prolonged legal battles begin over compensation. The Valdez dispute was agonizingly slow and marked by several frustrating appeals.

Like many in the Alaska fishing business who feel burned after the U.S. Supreme Court slashed the jury award, Lynden O’Toole cautioned those on the Gulf Coast to not pin any hopes on a settlement. “Don’t sit around and wait for somebody, for the justice system, for instance, to come and rescue you because in our experience, that’s not going to happen,” said O’Toole, who had just gotten into the commercial fishing business when the spill happened. “What’s going to happen is they are going to end up exhausted,” Kopchack added. “And eight or 10 years from now, they’re still going to be fighting this.”

Still, Alaska came away from the disaster with some valuable lessons. The state is much more prepared to deal with a future disaster because it has a huge response apparatus still in place. The system involves a flotilla of fishermen ready to go in the case of another disaster, including 350 vessels under contract ready to participate in a response. “Some of them are under contract to be ready within six hours, out of port and deploying boom within six hours of the notice, and others come in within 24 hours, and then others are just kind of on a list to be called up as the oil gets farther and farther out of the sound,” said Jones.

And Jones’ group published a guide for how to cope with disasters like this. “It’s not how to clean oiled birds,” Jones said. “It’s how to help the human beings that are in the way of one of these disasters.”

Oil Spill In Gulf Of Mexico Reaches US Gulf Coast

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: Again, WTF expertize do Department of Interior SWAT teams have to deal with a massive oil spill? This could completely devastate not only the wildlife, but the fishing and tourism industries throughout the entire US Gulf coast. Here in west-central Florida we are bracing for the worst… – SJH

Link to original article below…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100503/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_alaska

May 3, 2010: Tom Hays and Deepti Hajela / Associated Press (AP) – May 2, 2010

NEW YORK – Police investigating a terror attack that could have set off a deadly fireball in Times Square focused Sunday on finding a man who was videotaped shedding his shirt near the SUV where the bomb was found.

Police said the gasoline and propane bomb was crude but could have sprayed shrapnel and metal parts with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows on one of America’s busiest streets, full of Broadway theaters and restaurants on a Saturday night. The bomb “looks like it would have caused a significant fireball” had it fully detonated, police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. A large amount of fertilizer rigged with wires and fireworks was found with the bomb, but police said it was not the ammonium nitrate grade that can explode.

The surveillance video shows an unidentified white man apparently in his 40s slipping down an alley and taking off a shirt, revealing another underneath. In the same clip, he’s seen looking back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively putting the first shirt in a bag, Kelly said.

The homemade bomb was made largely with ordinary items, including three barbecue grill-sized propane tanks, two 5 gallon gasoline containers, store-bought fireworks and cheap alarm clocks attached to wires. “Clearly it was the intent of whoever did this to cause mayhem, to create casualties,” Kelly said. Authorities didn’t know how deadly the bomb could have been, how it failed or who was responsible.

Police had already identified the registered owner of the 1993 Nissan Pathfinder — which didn’t have an easily visible vehicle identification number and had license plates from another car — and were looking to interview him. Police also were searching more video, believed to be in the possession of a Pennsylvania tourist, of a person spotted near the car. The bomb at Times Square, one of the flashiest and best-known places on Earth, was found at the height of dinner hour before theatergoers headed to Saturday night shows.

Timers were connected to a 16-ounce can filled with fireworks, which were apparently intended to set the gas cans and propane afire, Kelly said. The vehicle would have been “cut in half” by an explosion, and people nearby could have been sprayed by shrapnel and killed, he said. Police had feared that another component — a metal rifle cabinet packed with a fertilizer-like substance and rigged with wires and more fireworks — could have made the device even more devastating. Test results late Sunday showed that it was indeed fertilizer — but the New York Police Department’s bomb experts believe it was not a type volatile enough to explode like the ammonium nitrate grade fertilizer used in previous terror attacks, said police spokesman Paul Browne. The exact amount of fertilizer was unknown. Police estimated the cabinet — with a manufacturer-listed weight of 78 pounds — weighed 200 to 250 pounds when they pulled it from the vehicle.

New York’s busiest streets, choked with taxis and people on one of the first summer-like days of the year, were shut down for 10 hours, unnerving thousands of tourists attending Broadway shows, museums and other city sights. Detectives took the stage at the end of some shows to announce to theatergoers that they were looking for witnesses in a bombing attempt. “No more New York,” said Crysta Salinas. The 28-year-old Houston woman was stuck waiting in a deli until 2 a.m. because part of a Marriott hotel was evacuated because of the bomb.

A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the failed attack in a 1-minute video. Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however, said police have no evidence to support the claims, and noted that the same group had falsely taken credit for previous attacks on U.S. soil. The commissioner also cast doubt on an e-mail to a news outlet claiming responsibility. Bloomberg noted that the investigation was in its early stages but said, “So far, there is no evidence that any of this has anything to do with one of the recognized terrorist organizations.”

The NYPD and FBI were also examining “hundreds of hours” of security videotape from around Times Square, Kelly said. Police released a photograph of the dark-colored SUV as it crossed an intersection at 6:28 p.m. Saturday. A vendor pointed the SUV out to an officer about two minutes later. The license plate found on the vehicle did not belong to the SUV; police said it came from a car found in a repair shop in Connecticut.

Duane Jackson, a 58-year-old handbag vendor from Buchanan, N.Y., said he noticed the car and wondered who had left it there in a no-standing zone. Jackson said he looked in the car and saw keys in the ignition with 19 or 20 keys on a ring. He said he alerted a passing mounted police officer. They were looking in the car “when the smoke started coming out and then we heard the little pop-pop-pop like firecrackers going out and that’s when everybody scattered and ran back,” he said. “Now that I saw the propane tanks and the gasoline, what if that would have ignited?” Jackson said. “I’m less than 8 feet away from the car.”

Times Square lies about four miles north of where terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, then destroyed it on Sept. 11, 2001. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility in a video posted on the Internet on Sunday, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. SITE, a U.S.-based terrorist tracking organization, first uncovered the video on YouTube; it later appeared to have been removed from the website. In a copy of the video provided by SITE, an unidentified voice speaking in Urdu, the primary language in Pakistan, says the group takes “full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA.” The video does not mention any details about Saturday’s attack.

The militant group said the attack was revenge for the death of its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and the recent slaying of al-Qaida leaders in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who were killed by U.S. and Iraqi troops last month north of Baghdad. The video also mentioned Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who was convicted in a U.S. court in New York in February of trying to kill American service personnel after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008.

If the claim is genuine, it would be the first time the Pakistani Taliban has struck outside South Asia. It has no known global infrastructure like al-Qaida. In at least one past instance, the Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for an attack it played no role in. Mehsud reportedly said his men were behind a mass shooting in March 2009 at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, N.Y., in April 2009. That claim turned out to be false. The last terror threat in New York came last fall when air shuttle driver Najibullah Zazi admitted to a foiled homemade bomb plot aimed at the city subway system. The theater district in London was the target of a propane bomb attack in 2007. No one was injured when police discovered two vehicles loaded with nails packed around canisters of propane and gasoline.

SUV Bomb Scare Shuts Down Times Square May 1, 2010

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: SITE Intelligence, like MEMRI, is an Israeli propaganda operation used as a primary source for intelligence by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA… - SJH

Special Report: Is Israel Controlling Phoney Terror News?

http://houston.craigslist.org/pol/1696334777.html

Link to original article below…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_times_square_car_bomb