Throughout the last week, America has focused on unsafe bridges. But that is just part of the worn infrastructure story.
The Columbus Dispatch found that the state of Ohio has failed to inspect 1,200 dams in five years. Clearly, there is a story in this for you.
The paper reports:
Since 1900, nearly 1,600 people nationwide have died in dam breaks, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials says.
The most recent deaths occurred last year in Hawaii, when heavy rains broke the Kaloko Reservoir Dam, releasing more than 300 million gallons of water. Seven people were killed.
"Dam failure is kind of like a nuclear failure, I think," said Lori Spragens, executive director of the association. "It rarely happens, but when it does happen, it typically is devastating."
According to state records, central Ohio is home to 107 dams that were not checked during the recent five-year inspection cycle. The list includes 13 high-hazard, or Class I, dams.
Tools and Resources for Dam Safety Stories:
Just as many of you turned to the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR) last week to get bridge safety records, you can also use NICAR to help you with dam safety records for your state or locality.
Click here to connect to the NICAR page, where you can read dozens of dam safety stories from around the country.
The Association of Dam Safety Officials says:
Driving every other issue and all activities within the dam safety community is the risk of dam failure. Although the majority of dams in the U.S. have responsible owners and are properly maintained, still many dams fail every year. In the past several years, there have been hundreds of documented failures across the nation (this includes 250 after the Georgia Flood of 1994). A life was recently lost in New Hampshire as a result of a dam failure. Dam and downstream repair costs resulting from failures in 23 states reporting in one recent year totaled $54.3 million.
Dam failures are most likely to happen for one of five reasons:
- Overtopping caused by water spilling over the top of a dam
- Structural failure of materials used in dam construction
- Cracking caused by movements like the natural settling of a dam
- Inadequate maintenance and upkeep
- Piping—when seepage through a dam is not properly filtered and soil particles continue to progress and form sink holes in the dam
Historically, dams that failed had some deficiency, as characterized above, which caused the failure. These dams are typically termed "unsafe." Currently, there are about 2,000 "unsafe" dams in the U.S. There are unsafe dams in almost every state. (A majority of states and federal agencies define an "unsafe" dam as one that has been found to have deficiencies that leave it more susceptible to failure.)
The Dangers of Retreat Mining
The coal mine executive in charge of the Utah mine where six miners are trapped now says the mine was not using the "retrieve" or retreat mining method that so many media reports have said were being used when the mine collapsed. I suppose we will have to sort that one out over time.
The Washington Post explains just how dangerous retreat mining is:
According to the American Society of Safety Engineers, retreat mining requires very precise planning and sequencing to ensure roof stability while the pillars supporting the roof are removed.
The reason the practice is used is that it pays off: The last bit of coal taken from pillars is pure profit, Oppegard said. Plus, if someone violates rules during pillar removal and there is a collapse, the evidence of rule violations are gone, he said.
Retreat pillar mining is one of the biggest causes of mine roof collapse deaths, according to studies done by the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health.
Three of the nine roof fatalities in 2001 were from retreat mining, according to a 2003 NIOSH paper. Between 1992 and 2001, 100 miners died in roof collapses, 27 of them during retreat mining the study found.
Yet that type of mining only provides 10 percent of underground coal production, the report said, concluding "mathematically a coal miner on a pillar recovery section was more than three times as likely to be fatally injured" in a roof collapse than colleagues in other parts of a mine.
"Pillar recovery continues to be one of the most hazardous activities in underground mining," the report said. A NIOSH study six years earlier found the same thing.
Was it an Earthquake?
Coal mine officials also insisted that the mine collapse was caused by an earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey said the earth's movement is consistent with mining-induced earthquakes. In other words, it is likely that the mining collapse produced the movement, although the movement could have produced the collapse. There have been earthquakes nearby before. In 1988, a magnitude 5.2 earthquake occurred 40 km southeast of this mine collapse.
Bike Thieves Keep Active
It's no wonder bikes are so attractive to thieves. They are easy to steal, they can be worth a lot of money these days and they are easy to sell to places like pawnshops. Police often don't spend much time investigating the crime, so the chances of getting caught are small. This would make for a fairly easy story to personalize in your town.
In Denmark, police have announced they won't spend much time on bike thefts, but will instead focus on more serious crime. An estimated 80,000 bikes are stolen in Denmark each year. If you figure there are three months a year when bikes are not frequently used in Denmark, this would mean that more than 10,000 bikes a month — a few thousand or so a week — are stolen.
Hard-Core Drinkers and Drivers Cause 55 percent of DUI Wrecks
The NTSB reports:
In 2005, people identified as "hard core drinking drivers" — those with high blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels of 0.15 percent or greater or who are repeat offenders with a drunk driving arrest or conviction in the past 10 years — were involved in almost 55 percent of the alcohol-related fatalities and more than 21 percent of the total highway deaths.
Between 1983 and 2005, more than 183,000 people died in crashes involving hard-core drinking drivers.
Repeat offenders represent about one-third of all drivers arrested or convicted of driving while intoxicated or under the influence of alcohol.
The NTSB says states should disallow plea bargains on DUIs, or at least if there if a plea bargain, the alcohol-related offense should show up in whatever is plead to. There are so many interesting angles to look into here. What percentage of DUIs that come to your courts actually end in a DUI conviction rather than a plea to a lesser charge? The NTSB is particularly against diversion programs. Here are some of NTSB's recommendations:
- Define a repeat offender as anyone arrested of a DWI offense within 10 years of a prior arrest for DWI. One DWI arrest is indicative of a substance abuse problem.
- Impose tougher penalties, assessment and treatment for DWI offenders arrested with a BAC level of 0.15 percent or higher. The estimated relative fatality risk of drivers in single-vehicle crashes with a high BAC is 385 times that of a zero BAC driver.
- Use administrative license revocation, which reduces involvement of adult drivers in fatal crashes by 13 percent to 19 percent.
- Prohibit plea-bargaining. Alternatively, require that the original alcohol-related charge be listed in court and motor vehicle licensing records.
- Prohibit diversion programs. Diverted offenders repeat their offense faster and often receive multiple diversions, despite legislated limits on the use of this measure.
- Establish individualized court-based sanction programs, such as DWI courts, with frequent offender contact, unannounced testing, mandatory assessment, treatment, and long-term follow-up.
- Use vehicle sanctions, such as license plate impoundment, ignition interlock devices, vehicle immobilization, vehicle impoundment, and vehicle forfeiture.
- Implement alternatives to jail confinement such as home detention with electronic monitoring; intensive supervision probation; or jail-treatment facilities, especially for multiple DWI offenders.
- Require DWI offenders to maintain a zero BAC level. Such measures have resulted in a 25 percent reduction in the proportion of repeat offenders involved in fatal crashes.
Shield Law Moves Forward
The federal Shield Law is heading to the U.S. House of Representatives floor. It cleared the House Judiciary Committee. No federal shield bills have made it this far. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press explains that the bill has lots of loopholes:
The bill would protect reporters from being forced to divulge their confidential sources, with exceptions for information needed to prevent terrorism or significant harm to national security, information that would prevent "imminent death" or significant bodily injury, information relating to a significant trade secret, or information relating to leaks of personal or financial information revealed in violation of existing federal laws.
If one of these four exceptions applies, the bill would require a court to balance the public interesting in compelled disclosure against the interest in newsgathering.
The bill, which is called the "Free Flow of Information Act 2007," attempts to define journalists this way:
Journalism is "the gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public."
You can track the bill here and read the bill here.
Baby Boomers Need Glasses
The New York Times zeroed in on an issue near to my eyes. As boomers age, the reading glasses business is flourishing. Some restaurants even keep spares at the hostess stand.
Fonts are a big deal these days, especially when we need to see our tiny cell phone screens. Does your newsroom's Web site give the user a choice of font size online? Is it easy to use?
The Times story points out that tiny font is probably most problematic when those of us with fading eyesight try to buy medicine.
Prescription and over-the-counter drugs can cause many problems.
The type-size on a bottle of Aleve, for instance, is 4.5 point, with around 50 to 55 characters an inch. This is smaller than the fine print in the stock listings of newspapers and much smaller than the average newspaper text typeface.
The Times reports:
"There’s a fight between bureaucracy's desire to put more information on the container and the size of type required to get it on," said Charles Bigelow, a professor of typography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
One conspicuous exception has been Target's Clear RX packaging for its prescription bottles. Each bottle has the patient's name displayed at the very top. Below, in boldface capital letters, is the name of the medication. Below that are the dosage instructions.
It makes me wonder how often people who buy drugstore reading glasses get the wrong strength. It also makes me wonder if using the wrong glasses harms eyes even more. A nice "how to" buy the right reading glasses piece would be helpful.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
