9/11
kkrisberg | September 12, 2017At the Huffington Post, Dave Jamieson reports that labor unions are stepping up to help protect increasingly vulnerable immigrant workers from deportation. In fact, Jamieson writes that in many instances, labor unions have become “de facto immigrants rights groups,” educating workers on their rights and teaching immigrants how to best handle encounters with immigration officials.
Jamieson’s story begins:
Yahaira Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March. Vivares, who fled Colombia and…
gregladen | September 11, 2016This is a piece I wrote in 2011, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (Originally posted here.)
I believe that the sauntering I refer to has diminished. But instead of sauntering, our local and county police departments seem to have taken up a different hobby: Shooting unarmed people of color. I think the problems underscored in this essay are mostly worse now than they were five years ago, and the argument I make here for what happened since 9/11/2001 is stronger, more clearly demonstrated by event. Also, the link between 9/11 and the Donald Trump candidacy is as clear as a brand…
gregladen | October 5, 2014We really only know things work when we test them to the limit and see what it takes to make them fail, or nearly fail. All those air planes and space ships and regular shops and nice cars that usually don't fail have a pedigree of prototypes or prototypes of parts that were pushed until they broke. Chickens fired into running Boeing 757 engines with a special Chicken Cannon. Crash dummies driving vehicles into specially built walls. Rocket engines exploding on test ranges. But many systems are never tested that way, and really can't be. We build the systems and convince those who need…
dr. dolittle | September 11, 2014 Image of Bretagne from www.eonline.com
On this anniversary of 9/11 we remember not only the victims but also the heroes of that fateful day including countless first responders as well as their rescue animals that searched tirelessly for victims. The last known living rescue dog from 9/11 is Bretagne, a 15-year old golden retriever who returned to the memorial site with her handler Denise Corliss. She was only 2 years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
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According to veterinarian Dr. Cindy Otto who took care of the…
gregladen | March 26, 2014Trigger warning: Explicit video of a homeless man being executed by the cops.
I strongly recommend that you don't call the police. If you do, because for some reason you have to, get the hell out of there before they arrive. Why? Because our Post-9/11 first responder philosophy is not the first responder philosophy you grew up with. First responders have one primary directive: Protect themselves, at all costs. Your safety is the cost. For firefighters and the like this means running the other way when there is danger, because of 9/11. Recently, a New York City fire chief was quoted as…
dr. dolittle | September 12, 2013I came across this video showing thousands of migratory birds circling the Tribute in Lights yesterday. The birds were migrating along the Atlantic Flyway and were disoriented by the lights. Other birds may have been attracted to the large number of insects and smaller birds caught up in the lights as prey (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). To reportedly help re-orient the birds and prevent exhaustion, volunteers from the NYC Audubon turned off the spotlights temporarily.
Video taken by: Shervin Pishevar
The lights are xenon searchlights in lower Manhattan arranged by artist Gustavo Bonevardi to…
gregladen | September 11, 2012A young woman was driving along the road, at night, and needed to focus her attention on a cell phone call, so she pulled into an open parking lot of a closed restaurant along side the road and visible to passing motorists. She pulled her car into a parking space, switched it off, and made the call.
A passing police officer noticed the young woman alone in her car talking on the cell phone. He pulled into the parking lot and switched on his emergency lights, got out of his police cruiser and approached her. He started asking her questions about what she was doing, who she was talking to,…
egrossman | September 23, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
It's now ten years since the streets of lower Manhattan roiled with clouds of toxic dust and debris from the horrific events of September 11, 2001, but it was clear from discussions and presentations at the September 16 conference hosted by the New York Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) that the dust has not yet settled when it comes to issues of protecting worker and community health from environmental hazards of a disaster - nor from the ongoing impacts of 9/11. In the course of the day-long meeting held on lower Broadway a few blocks from the World…
lborkowski | September 12, 2011As Jori Lewis notes in the case study about World Trade Center recovery workers' health and safety, those who showed up at Ground Zero on the days and weeks after 9/11 got some misleading information about the risks they faced. Most notably, the EPA issued reassuring statements about the air quality - when, according to a 2003 EPA Inspector General report, the agency had insufficient data and analyses to support calling the air there safe. More accurate information might have increased the use of respirators and delayed people's return to homes and offices in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Now…
lborkowski | September 11, 2011Among the victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks are workers who responded to the scene of the disaster and suffered severe - in some cases, fatal - health problems as a result. Those who showed up at the World Trade Center site for rescue, recovery, and cleanup operations were exposed to a range of toxic and mechanical hazards, as well as psychological trauma. Many of the estimated 40,000 workers have since developed respiratory, mental health, and other medical conditions.
Celeste and I asked freelance journalist Jori Lewis (whose reporting you might have heard on PRI's The World…
lborkowski | September 7, 2011American Public Media's Marketplace program is taking a look at "the economic legacy of 9/11" this week, and this morning's story focused on security spending in the private sector. Marketplace's Jeff Horwich highlighted an unexpected example: security for grain elevators.
For you city-folk, grain elevators are America's rural skyscrapers. Farmers dump their corn, wheat, soybeans. Trucks haul it out to feed the country. Even though elevators are mostly in the middle of nowhere, Bob Zelenka of the Minnesota Grain and Feed Association says you never know.
Bob Zelenka: It's on the edge of town…
lborkowski | September 2, 2011A study just published in The Lancet compares the incidence rates of cancers in firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center site during and after the 9/11 attacks to the rates in firefighters not exposed to the disaster or its aftermath. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center and the New York Fire Department's Bureau of Health Services found that WTC firefighters had an overall cancer incidence ratio about 10% higher than that of a general population with similar demographics and 32% higher than that of non-WTC firefighters.
Firefighters who…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
terrasig | September 11, 2009[Here is why I will always remember. This was posted here originally on 11 September 2006.]
Let me tell you about John Michael Griffin, Jr.
Griff, as he was known in high school, was a friend of mine.
Late in the first half of our lives, he stood up for me physically and philosophically, for being a science geek. John's endorsement was the first time I was ever deemed cool for wanting to be a scientist.
Griff died an engineer and hero in the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers five [eight] years ago today.
We lost touch almost twenty years before, but his kindness and…