Chemical Plants??

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

While I was in School, I read a case study on Charleston West Virginia. I found that the city has 8 or so Major Chemical Plants. The case study was about the city performing contingency plans and worst case scenereo for disasters resulting from these Chemical spills.

Last time I drove through it dawned on me that if anyone wanted to cripple this country, Charleston West Virginia has 8 major chemical plants, all located on some river that flows into the Ohio River that flows into the Mississippi. Basically a disaster in Charleston could cause havok on the rest of the midwest south's water supply.

Given that, has anyone heard of how the Chemical plants are doing on their Y2k Work?

MB

-- Matthew Bonner (Bonnermc@hotmail.com), January 11, 1999

Answers

Mathew, Thanks for the heads up.

-- Bin Laden (waiting@charlestown.Wva), January 11, 1999.

That river is the Kanawha. 30 years ago the effluents into the river and the atmosphere in the Charleston/Dunbar/Nitro area was really horrific. I came down off the W. Va. turnpike one night about 2 AM, right into the smog. All the auto headlights coming toward me were red. Bad air, that was.

The chem plants have cleaned up their act considerably since then.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), January 11, 1999.


There was an announcement in a couple months ago that EPA would not be making public the status of Y2K remediation at facilities where failure to remediate could create a public hazard so as not to invite terroristic attacks. This will make it more difficult to find out the status of a particular plant unless it voluntarily releases that information. More info may be available at EPA's Y2K site, but I didn't notice anything company-specific. Gary anticipates that environmental groups will be looking to shut various facilities down (not just nuclear plants) if it can't be guaranteed that they can operate safely, especially in the absence of outside power.

http://www.epa.gov/year2000/problem.htm

-- Brooks (brooksbie@hotmail.com), January 11, 1999.


Matthew,

your post brings to mind something else I've been wondering about - German soft serve icecream manufacturers - wonder what their y2k remediation looks like? reason I ask is that last time I looked (about 10 years ago) they were using a special sort of plastic to enhance the 'loft' of their soft serve, and increase the time it took to melt. The interesting part of this is that the plastic was so inert (when someone eats it, the plastic has no effect at all on them) that it required a rather caustic agent to synergize the bonding reaction with the icecream. The reagent then (and I believe still) in use was phosgene...if that word sounds a bit familiar it's because back during the first world war phosgene was used as a weapon - otherwise known as mustard gas.

in other words the we in the US aren't the only ones who could end up having interesting problems due to advanced chemistry...

Arlin Adams

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), January 11, 1999.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ