Today’s arrivals—Neotropical migrants found in a streamside thicket in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed this morning…
Big Flight Last Night
The Layover
After nearly a full week of record-breaking cold, including two nights with a widespread freeze, warm weather has returned. Today, for the first time this year, the temperature was above eighty degrees Fahrenheit throughout the lower Susquehanna region. Not only can the growing season now resume, but the northward movement of Neotropical birds can again take flight—much to our delight.
A rainy day on Friday, May 8, preceded the arrival of a cold arctic air mass in the eastern United States. It initiated a sustained layover for many migrating birds.
Freeze warnings were issued for five of the next six mornings. The nocturnal flights of migrating birds, most of them consisting of Neotropical species by now, appeared to be impacted. Even on clear moonlit nights, these birds wisely remained grounded. Unlike the more hardy species that moved north during the preceding weeks, Neotropical birds rely heavily on insects as a food source. For them, burning excessive energy by flying through cold air into areas that may be void of food upon arrival could be a death sentence. So they wait.
Today throughout the lower Susquehanna region, bird songs again fill the air and it seems to be mid-May as we remember it. The flights have resumed.
Happy Mother’s Day
Some of the newest mothers in the lower Susquehanna valley—nurturing their young.
And a soon-to-be mother making the necessary preparations to bring a new generation into the world.
Have a Happy Mother’s Day!
The Colorful Birds Are Here
You need to get outside and go for a walk. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. It’s prime time to see wildlife in all its glory. The songs and colors of spring are upon us!
If you’re not up to a walk and you just want to go for a slow drive, why not take a trip to Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area and visit the managed grasslands on the north side of the refuge. To those of us over fifty, it’s a reminder of how Susquehanna valley farmlands were before the advent of high-intensity agriculture. Take a look at the birds found there right now.
And remember, if you happen to own land and aren’t growing crops on it, put it to good use. Mow less, live more. Mow less, more lives.
I Can’t Take Another Earth Day
And now, a few words from the old watersnake who happens to live down along the creek where last spring’s Earth Day events were held.
Hey! You! Yeah You! I heard that there won’t be an Earth Day celebration down here this week. What a ssshame!
Remember how much fun we had last year. All those kids ssscrambling down along the creek bank throwing ssstones and ssscreaming and yelling like they’re gonna sssack a city. I ssshould have had the sssense to ssslither away. But no, I just curled up and played it cool. But sssure enough, one of the little brats found me and bellowed out loud enough for the whole countryside to hear, “SSSNAAAAKE!”
Ah nuts. That’s all it took. Here they come. Poking me with a ssstick. Taunting and ssstabbing. Don’t you know that hurts? What did I ever do to you, you rotten little apes? I’m telling ya, I get no respect.
Think that’s bad? It got worse. Don’t you remember? After a dozen of the runny-nosed monsters had me sssurrounded, one of the brain-dead adults yelled, “…it might be poisonous!”
That’s all it took. The ssstones got hurled my way and the poking with a ssstick became beatings. Those rats tried to kill me! On Earth Day! I ssslid into deep water and barely escaped with my life.
Now I want to tell you a few things—let’s get ’em ssstraight right now. I’m not, nor is any other watersnake in the SSSusquehanna valley, poisonous. Ssso don’t go villainizing me and those like me just because you have a monkey-like fear of us and need a sssocially acceptable reason to exercise your murderous instincts. Yeah, we know all about your manly tall tales of conquest that you ssshamelessly tell your friends and family after you kill a sssnake. Wanna be a hero? Then leave us alone! We and all of the native sssnakes of the SSSusquehanna valley, including the venomous copperheads and Timber Rattlesnakes, are minding our own business and just want to be left alone. Get it? Leave us alone! Don’t beat us with a ssshovel, mow over us, drive your car or truck over us, or ssshoot us. We have it bad enough as it is. You already buggered up most of our homes building your roads, houses, and lawns you know—so have a little respect. And one more thing, we don’t want be part of your pet menagerie. There’s no way we’ll “love you” or want anything to do with you, even if you do imprison us and make us sssubmissive to you for food, you sssick fascists. And that goes for you obsessive collector types too. We know you’re hoarding animals like us and calling your cruel little pet penitentiary a “rescue”. Yeah, we’re wise to that con too.
Ssso we’ve heard you won’t be coming down to the creek to terrorize us this year. No Earth Day event, huh. Well good, because I can’t take another Earth Day. Let the sssquirrels and the birds plant the trees, they do a better job than you anyway. Ssstay at home where you belong—watching television or twit-facing your B.F.F. on that magic box you carry around. And if you absolutely feel the urge to be upset by a sssnake in your midst, go visit that neighbor with the “reptile rescue”, I’m sssure he has a cobra or some other non-native sssnake in his collection that really ought to give you worry—especially when it finally escapes that prison.
Coronaphobes
It’s interesting to watch germophobes—and now coronaphobes—in action.
Some germophobes are very sanitary. They’ve practiced aseptic measures for most of their lives and have learned how clean and disinfect themselves and their surroundings quite well. Good for them.
Then there are those germophobes who are really bad at it. They’ve had years and years of practice, but they still can’t get it right. The public restroom is their absolute worst terror. They’ll empty the soap and sanitizer bottles into the mounds of paper towels they’ve stripped from the dispensers on the wall. Then they’ll wipe and scrub the privacy walls, flushable fixture, counter top, and sink they intend to use. (They don’t seem to bother with cleaning the mirrors though; I guess they’re too busy.) The puddles of dripped water leave a trail from the sink to their chosen stall of comfort. Then more paper towels are hauled off to try to dry the sloppy mess they’ve made. Then comes the clincher—not daring to get near a dirty trash can, they flush the giant wad of paper down the toilet and clog it. In frustration, they flush again and again until finally, they flood the entire restroom with sewer water. Then they panic and scurry away without ever finishing the business they started, if you know what I mean. How does your editor know these things? Well, for several years your friendly editor was a repairman in a series of very busy travel terminals, and it was he who got the call to undo the damage. It was an absolute nightmare, and it happened almost every day.
Now that we’re under don’t-call-it-martial-law-martial-law and compliant types are wearing masks while they work or cure their uncontrollable cravings to shop, it’s getting difficult to separate the germophobes from all these coronaphobes and other mask newbies.
I suspect that the handful of people I see in public using a mask as it was designed and then disposing of it properly upon removal have had some sort of medical or laboratory experience sometime in their lives—or they’re one of the skilled master germophobes. Good for them.
The real challenge comes when trying to separate the bumbling germophobe from the new recruits—the sloppy coronaphobes and the not-so-inspired mask-wearers who have been coerced into donning a rag so that they can work or get food. They all share a set of common practices that make telling them apart impossible. First, they’re fussing with the mask. They’ve got their hands on it. They’re pulling it up. Then they’re pulling it down, moving it to their left, then to their right. Crud on their hands gets on the mask, and the creepy crawlies from the mask get on their hands. Mask to hands to everything they touch. It’s almost the equivalent of having their hands in their mouth before pulling them out to grab the door handle, merchandise, or money. Then there’s this common sight—they pull the mask down around their neck for a while, just to smear the stuff that’s inside the mask onto the outside surface, and vice versa. It’s a microbiologists dream (or nightmare) by now. Then they’ll walk around with the mask down over their mouth without it covering their nose, maybe for a half hour or so. Breathing all over the outside before reaching up and pulling it over their nose again. On and on this goes, sometimes for hours or maybe even the whole day. Best of all though is the removal of the mask. It doesn’t go into the trash. Nope, might need it again sooner or later. It’s on the desk, the papers, and the keyboard. Then, it’s hanging over the chair for a while to dry off a little bit. It’s on the dashboard, the car seat, or hanging around the rear view mirror. Look, the dog’s playing with it. Isn’t that cute. Yeah, swell. It might even end up in the grocery bag, but never ever in the trash. And for the life of me, I can’t tell if I’m watching a really fouled-up germophobe or a new amateur in action.
Let’s face it—the use of masks by the general public is a placebo. They aren’t being used correctly and because of it, they offer minimal, if any, protection. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, people wearing masks voluntarily wear them in an attempt to protect themselves, number one, numero uno. These are the coronaphobes. They want to coerce others into wearing masks so that they themselves might be protected. The Republicrats, Democans, bureaucrats, and corporations running “Operation Boxer Shorts” (Objective: cover your @&&) have ignored the advice of researchers on the matter to go along with this silliness—to protect and/or further their own enterprise no doubt. The Centers for Disease Control say they reversed their own advice on masks-for-all not because there’s sound evidence that their effect outweighs their misuse, but because asymptomatic cases of Wuhan flu were discovered. As Foster Brooks used to say, “cockypop!” But okay, fine, so we’ll wear a mask, even though it’s more of a placebo than a prophylactic. We’ll do it just to make you happy. But could you at least pick up after yourself and wash your hands? Oh, and put the masks and gloves in the trash, don’t flush em’ down the commode. Thanks!
I keep wondering how all of this is gonna shake out in Sweden. You know, Sweden, where they didn’t have a lock-down to eviscerate small business and labor while fighting the flu. Yeah, Sweden, where they’re trying a defensive-offensive strategy—protect the most vulnerable (the defense) while allowing natural resistance to develop among enough members of the population to cripple transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the offense). I’ve been very interested in that strategy. I’ll be watching.
Just in case anybody feels the need, here, again, are the sources on mask wearing.
SOURCES THAT APPARENTLY NOBODY READS
Broseau, Lisa M., and Margaret Seitsema. 2020. “Commentary: Masks-for-all for COVID-19 Not Based on Sound Data”. University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Policy https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data Accessed April 10, 2020.
Davies, Anna, Katy-Anne Thompson, Karthika Giri, George Kafatos, Jimmy Walker, and Alan Bennett. 2013. “Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic?”. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. 7:4. pp. 413-418.
MacIntyre, C. Raina, Holly Seale, Tham Chi Dung, Nguyen Tran Hien, Phan Thi Nga, Abrar Ahmad Chughtai, Bayzidur Rahman, Dominic E. Dwyer, and Quanyi Wang. 2015. A Cluster Randomized Trial of Cloth Masks Compared with Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers. BMJ Open. 5:e006577. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577.
Rocket Science
Fifty years ago, the world’s attention was fixed on the fate of the Apollo 13 astronauts—Commander Jim Lovell, Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, and Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert—after an explosion disabled their spacecraft and changed a mission to explore the moon into an improvised operation to return them safely to the earth. Perhaps this anniversary comes at a fortuitous time. The story of Apollo 13 may have parallels and lessons pertinent to present-day events and the concerns of people in America and around the world.
In April, 1970, Jack Swigert was a last-minute replacement for the original Apollo 13 Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly after Mattingly was exposed to German measles (rubella) prior to the mission. Mattingly had been training with fellow backup crew members John Young and Charles Duke when Duke came down with the disease after he and his family had visited friends whose three-year-old son was suffering the effects of the infection. NASA was wary of contagions that could spread among the astronauts while isolated in a space capsule during a lengthy journey, possibly incapacitating the entire crew. Tests on the astronauts found that Mattingly, like Duke, had lacked antibodies to the rubella virus and could therefore become ill during the flight. Mattingly alone could get sick—Lovell and Haise, possessing resistance to rubella, could not. Nevertheless, the decision was made to substitute Swigert for Mattingly. Swigert proved competent for the late change partly because he had developed many of the emergency procedures for operating the Command Module. Mattingly, who never did get measles, along with Duke and Young, would be the crew for the Apollo 16 moon landing in April, 1972.
Apollo 13 was launched as scheduled on April 11, 1970, at 2:13 P.M. E.S.T. and was on its way to a planned third landing on the lunar surface.
After two successful landings, network television found no sensation in the story of yet another trip to the moon. There was little coverage of the mission’s first fifty-five hours. Then, fifty-five hours and just more than fifty-five minutes into the flight, and just two minutes after fulfilling Mission Control’s request to turn on fans to stir the oxygen tanks so that their contents could be measured, Jack Swigert radioed, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Then Lovell repeated his message, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Within a minute, Fred Haise was listing some metering anomalies and alarm activations for Mission Control and added, “And we had a pretty large bang associated with the caution and warning there.” Apollo 13 was about 205,000 miles from earth—it was just after 10 P.M. E.S.T., April 13, 1970.
Thirteen minutes after the “bang”, Lovell radioed Mission Control while looking out the capsule’s window, “We are venting something out into the…into space.” Apollo 13 was losing it’s oxygen, and its electric supplies. They didn’t know it at the time, but oxygen tank number two had exploded and damaged either a valve or tubing on tank number one—the Command Module’s only other source of oxygen—and both were losing their contents into space. Two of the three fuel cells had failed as well. Without oxygen, the remaining fuel cell in the Service Module would fail to make electricity for operation of the Command Module. Worse yet, the astronauts would not be able to breathe. Without delay, engineers and scientists on the ground went into action to develop alternatives to the original flight plan.
Power in the Command Module had to be conserved for reentry, so with just fifteen minutes of electricity remaining, Lovell and Haise moved into the “lifeboat”, the Lunar Module, and began powering it up while Swigert finished shutting down the systems aboard Odyssey to conserve its remaining energy for the end of the mission. Haise, who had spent fourteen months at Grumman’s manufacturing facility on Long Island, was intimately familiar with the Lunar Module’s operating systems. He powered-up essential systems and began calculating whether the consumables on Aquarius would last for the time it would take to go around the moon and “slingshot” back to earth.
To change the course of Apollo 13 from a moon orbit trajectory to one that would whip around the back of the moon and send them home, Lovell used the Lunar Module’s descent engine to perform a 35-second-long course correction burn. This burn commenced five hours after the explosion at 3:43 A.M. E.S.T. on the morning of April 14. Apollo 13 was then on a free-return trajectory to loop around the moon and return to earth.
Haise had in his possession notes from previous missions which he consulted to determine that they would run out of water about five hours before returning to earth. Fortunately, his notes also showed that the spacecraft’s mechanical systems could remain viable without water cooling for seven or eight hours. Astronauts reduced their water intake to six ounces a day, one fifth of normal, and attempted to compensate by drinking fruit juices and eating wet-packed hot dogs and similar foods. Their efforts to conserve water succeeded, but did lead to the crew becoming dehydrated.
For breathing, there was a sufficient supply of oxygen in the Lunar Module ascent stage where the astronauts would be taking refuge for the remaining four days of the journey. As a backup, there was oxygen in the two suits that were intended for the moonwalk and two more tanks in the ascent stage of Aquarius. Less than half of the oxygen supply was used during the return trip.
Procedures worked out by engineers and tested in a simulator on the ground allowed the crew to use only one fifth of the power normally required during the Lunar Module’s intended forty-five hours of useful life, thus enabling its batteries to last for a ninety-hour-long return trip and add charge to the Command Module batteries—with some energy to spare. To make it back to earth within the ninety-hour time window, the return trip would need to be shortened by nine hours.
The trajectory of Apollo 13’s loop behind the moon had carried them further away from earth than any other humans have ever gone. Two hours after swinging around the moon, Lovell prepared to perform a second burn with the Lunar Module’s descent engine—five minutes in duration—to increase Apollo 13’s return speed and shorten the time it would take to get back home. For navigational alignment during the burn maneuver, debris around the spacecraft made using the sextant to sight stars impossible. Scientists on the ground came up with coordinates allowing Lovell to use the sun as a navigation reference instead. The burn was a success.
Lithium hydroxide canisters remove the carbon dioxide gas, which is continuously produced by the respiration of the astronauts, from the atmosphere of a spacecraft. The Lunar Module’s canisters were designed to protect two astronauts for two days. Because it was being used as a “lifeboat”, Aquarius was hosting three astronauts for four days. After one and a half days of use by three men, an alarm warned that the carbon dioxide levels in the Lunar Module were getting dangerously high. Spare canisters from Odyssey could be used, but there was a problem—they were square, those used on Aquarius were round.
Engineers on the ground went to work using materials that would be available aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft to improvise a solution. They came up with an adapter design using duct tape, a plastic bag, and cardboard to fabricate a “mailbox” that would attach square lithium hydroxide canisters to the round air handling tubes in the Lunar Module. After testing on the ground, the detailed verbal instructions for constructing the life-saving invention were radioed by Joe Kerwin from Mission Control to Aquarius. Haise and Swigert assembled and installed two of the life-saving devices. Carbon dioxide levels soon dropped back within acceptable parameters.
The astronauts endured a lack of sleep, heat, water, and food during the trip home. All were dehydrated and collectively they lost over thirty pounds of body weight. As they approached earth, the crew prepared to implement the new procedures for re-energizing the cold damp systems of the Command Module. Ground personnel had drafted and tested this set of startup instructions in just three days instead of the thirty days that such work usually requires. It was critical that the circuits that were energized did not collectively exceed the amperage available from the batteries on Odyssey.
Jack Swigert carefully brought Odyssey back to life using the new procedures, which were radioed, step by step, from Mission Control. Short circuits, feared due to the moisture that had condensed on all the cold surfaces in the Command Module, were not a problem. Improvements to the insulation on the wiring and electrical components throughout the interior of the space capsules following the Apollo 1 fire is believed to have safeguarded against any mishaps.
Four hours before reentry, at 8:15 A.M. E.S.T. on April 17, 1970, the Service Module was jettisoned and photographed as the crew got its first look at the damage caused by the explosion. Just an hour before reentry, Lovell and Haise joined Swigert in the Command Module. At 11:43, the Lunar Module was jettisoned and drifted away.
Apollo 13 reentered earth’s atmosphere and experienced the usual communications blackout as the capsule sizzled through an envelope of ionized air. Mission Control and the world rejoiced as cameras televised images of deployed parachutes and a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean less than four miles from the recovery ship, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, at 1:08 P.M. E.S.T. Possibly as many as one billion people were watching.
The families of the astronauts had traveled aboard Air Force One along with President Richard Nixon to Honolulu, Hawaii, and were waiting for the Apollo 13 crew when they arrived there from American Samoa on April 18. Nixon presented the men with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“…The men of Apollo 13, by their poise and skill under the most intense kind of pressure, epitomize the character that accepts danger and surmounts it…Theirs is the spirit that built America.”
Among the greatest legacies of the earth orbit and moon missions were the scientific and technological achievements that allowed people to live and travel in space using a minimum of resources. Apollo 13 took these minimums to the extreme—using everything as effectively and efficiently as possible. It was one of the pinnacle achievements of the manned spaceflight program.
Fifty years later, are we embracing these and more recent innovations to live comfortably but wisely?
President John F. Kennedy, in his 1962 speech at Rice University, beckoned Americans to strive for a seemingly unreachable goal. A goal that would motivate a people to determine their own destiny and not have destiny determined for them.
“…We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone…”
Kennedy urged his country to take the risk and go to the moon. Despite the dangers, despite the hesitations of the medical community, and in spite of the naysayers, they accepted the challenge and succeeded.
Have Americans lost the will to shape their own destiny? Are they content with blind obedience, mediocrity, and shopping with a dirty rag over their face? Let your friendly editor give you a hint. The people who happen to be front and center in the news today, fifty years after Apollo 13, aren’t rocket scientists. In fact, they have a hard time swallowing anything science has to offer, unless, of course, it can be twisted to back up their sneaky little schemes. But they’re the leadership—elected dimwits and entrenched bureaucrats—and they rule by consent of the governed. So the matter is decided. Look at the bright side though, at least the creeps have a career to protect, so we’ll always be certain of their motivation.
SOURCES
Lovell, James A. 1975. “Houston, We’ve Had A Problem; A Crippled Bird Limps Safely Home”. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, DC. pp. 247-263.
SOURCES THAT APPARENTLY NOBODY READS
Broseau, Lisa M., and Margaret Seitsema. 2020. “Commentary: Masks-for-all for COVID-19 Not Based on Sound Data”. University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Policy https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data Accessed April 10, 2020.
Davies, Anna, Katy-Anne Thompson, Karthika Giri, George Kafatos, Jimmy Walker, and Alan Bennett. 2013. “Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic?”. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. 7:4. pp. 413-418.
MacIntyre, C. Raina, Holly Seale, Tham Chi Dung, Nguyen Tran Hien, Phan Thi Nga, Abrar Ahmad Chughtai, Bayzidur Rahman, Dominic E. Dwyer, and Quanyi Wang. 2015. A Cluster Randomized Trial of Cloth Masks Compared with Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers. BMJ Open. 5:e006577. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577.
Get Away From It All
For those of you who dare to shed that filthy contaminated rag you’ve been told to breathe through so that you might instead get out and enjoy some clean air in a cherished place of solitude, here’s what’s around—go have a look.
The springtime show on the water continues…
Hey, what are those showy flowers?
Wasn’t that refreshing? Now go take a walk.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update
As a public service to our susquehannawildlife.net visitors, Uncle Tyler Dyer has agreed to give us a summary of the news. Uncle Ty is currently in self-imposed quarantine and will continue to remain in isolation until the threat from SARS-CoV-2 passes. Despite his age, he’s not particularly concerned about exposure to the virus or the Wuhan flu; he’s worried about getting bit by one of the “friendly” dogs that are presently dragging their owners down the sidewalks and recreation trails throughout the Susquehanna valley on a daily basis. Worse yet, he dreads the thought of winding up in the E.R. because he got bit by one of their kids. So until the subdivision dwellers go back to work and school, Uncle Ty will remain, like always, out of sight.
To get the latest scoop, be assured that Uncle Ty will poll his many exclusive sources, most of them unavailable to mainstream news reporters. He not only knows people in high places, he knows high people in places.
Here’s the news.
Hey man, I’m Ty Dyer and here’s what’s happening.
The Flat Earth Coalition of Environmental Scientists is advising the public to be alert for an impending threat posed to those who exercise “social distancing”. According to a forthcoming report, if everyone were to maintain a distance of six feet between themselves and all other individuals, those persons around the physical periphery of the mass of humanity will be dangerously close to the horizon’s end. Despite the effects of COVID-19, the world population is still growing by more than 200,000 persons each day. Soon, the earth will become overcrowded and people will begin falling off the planet, possibly within the next several weeks. A spokesperson warned that pushing, shoving, and name-calling could precede the eventual dumping of the weakest from the crowd over the side to make more space. F.E.C.E.S. would not speculate on the fate of those who take the dump; however, those living near the rim are advised to wear a face mask and a parachute while doing their business. Critics were quoted as saying, “The F.E.C.E.S. movement is full of it.”
Meanwhile, the Face Mask Manufacturers Alliance is asking those who are not sick, are not healthcare workers, or have not been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 to stop misusing their products, particularly while there is a severe supply shortage. They warn users that their masks are designed to prevent those who have been exposed to the flu virus or another contagion from transmitting it to others by capturing the aerosols produced by breathing, speaking, coughing, or sneezing. For those who have no flu symptoms or other evidence of exposure, but who insist upon wearing a mask to prevent contracting the virus despite that use being an application inverse to its design, the manufacturers ask that you please turn the mask inside out before donning. To alert others of your status, you are requested to wear your outer garments inside out as well. If you are exposed to SARS-CoV-2, test positive for the virus, or have symptoms of the flu or other contagious illness, you are instructed to wear a mask as designed, right-side out, to prevent contaminating those around you. You can also then turn your clothing right-side out as well.
There is controversy in several northeastern cities today after police officers arrested dozens of people for failing to practice safe “social distancing”. Each of those cited was quickly released to avoid crowding of the precinct houses. The controversy arose when representatives of the cities’ vice squads insisted that enforcing “social distancing” laws comes under their jurisdiction. They reminded city officials that after all, it was the vice squads who for decades have made it clear that violations of “social distancing” laws are not victimless crimes. They then accused city governments of underfunding their operations in an attempt to force them to surrender “social distancing” enforcement to patrol officers while the limited resources of the vice squads deal with the lingering jumbo soda epidemic.
Astronomers today released a statement saying that in deference to the importance of safe “social distancing”, they would eliminate using Gemini as the name of a well-known constellation until further notice. The stars comprising the Gemini twins will now be divided among two new constellations called Hank and Marty. Scientists pointed out that the stars comprising Hank and Marty are actually many light-years apart; it is our vantage point on earth that makes the two men appear to be violating the practice of safe “social distancing”. Nevertheless, they didn’t want Gemini setting a bad example.
Radio broadcasters have announced that many classic rock and pop recordings have been edited and remastered to reflect increased awareness of safe “social distancing”. Here are a few of the slightly amended hits you’ll be hearing on the airwaves soon.
The Beatles—I Want To Hold Your Hand (But My Arms Ain’t Long Enough)
The Beatles with Billy Preston—Get Back (To The Tape Mark On The Floor)
The Beatles—(This Really Isn’t A Good Time To) Come Together
The Captain & Tennille—Love Will Keep Us Together (But You Better Stand Over There)
The Carpenters —(Not So) Close To You
The Jackson 5—I’ll Be There (Or Better Yet Over Here)
Michael Jackson—Beat It (extended remix)
Bette Midler—From A Distance (Remastered)
Olivia Newton-John—(This Is No Time To Get) Physical
Pink Floyd—Comfortably Numb (You Best Skedaddle)
The Police—Don’t Stand So Close To Me (32 minute extended remix)
The Police—Every Breath You Take (You’re Suckin’ In What I Just Exhaled)
Elvis Presley—Love Me Tender (From Over There)
The Rolling Stones—Get Off Of My Cloud (And Outta My Space)
Diana Ross & The Supremes—Someday We’ll Be Together (But Not Right Now)
The Temptations—I Can’t Get Next To You (Remix)
And that’s what’s going on for April 1, 2020. Ty Dyer saying stay home, don’t get strung up in the puppet show, and remember, there are two different Amazons out there, and the only good one is a river.
The Fallout Continues
Fog and mist lingered throughout the day, as did the migratory water birds on the river and lakes in the lower Susquehanna valley. As a continuation of yesterday’s post on the fallout, here’s a photo tour of some of the sites where ducks, loons, grebes, and other birds have gathered.
Stormy weather certainly is a birder’s delight.
Fallout in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed
Local birders enjoy going to the Atlantic coast of New Jersey and Delmarva in the winter. The towns and beaches host far fewer people than birds, and many of the species seen are unlikely to be found anywhere else in the region. Unusual rarities add to the excitement.
The regular seaside attraction in winter is the variety of diving ducks and similar water birds that feed in the ocean surf and in the saltwater bays. Most of these birds breed in Canada and many stealthily cross over the landmass of the northeastern United States during their migrations. If an inland birder wants to see these coastal specialties, a trip to the shore in winter or a much longer journey to Canada in the summer is normally necessary—unless there is a fallout.
Migrating birds can show up in strange places when a storm interrupts their flight. Forest songbirds like thrushes and warblers frequently take temporary refuge in a wooded backyard or even in a city park when forced down by inclement weather. Loons have been found in shopping center parking lots after mistaking the wet asphalt for a lake. Fortunately though, loons, ducks, and other water birds usually find suitable ponds, lakes, and rivers as places of refuge when forced down. For inland birders, a fallout like this can provide an opportunity to observe these coastal species close to home.
Not so coincidentally, it has rained throughout much of today in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed, apparently interrupting a large movement of migrating birds. There is, at the time of this writing, a significant fallout of coastal water birds here. Hundreds of diving ducks and other benthic feeders are on the Susquehanna River and on some of the clearer lakes and ponds in the region. They can be expected to remain until the storm passes and visibility improves—then they’ll promptly commence their exodus.
The following photographs were taken during today’s late afternoon thundershower at Memorial Lake State Park at Fort Indiantown Gap, Lebanon County.
Migrating land birds have also been forced down by the persistent rains.
Why not get out and take a slow quiet walk on a rainy day. It may be the best time of all for viewing certain birds and other wildlife.
Three Mile Island Anniversary Cancelled
To avoid any theft of the limelight from the country’s miscreants who are currently using the year’s most worrisome virus strain , SARS-CoV-2, as a cover for wealth realignment and self-promotion, this week’s 41st anniversary observance of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island has been cancelled. The planned community reenactment festivities will not be held this year.
We will not be recreating the run on the stores or the hoarding of toilet paper, ammunition, food, booze, smokes, prophylactics, and pet treats. Though not sanctioned by the official event, undocumented pharmaceutical distributors will still be vending product to the self-medicated at the usual locations, reminiscent of 1979 commerce.
The Friday night disco get-together featuring authentic vintage 8-track tape music is called off, which of course means that commemorative T.M.I.-2 anniversary t-shirts will not be available for sale this year. If you were thinking of attending, be assured that you can find audio of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” on the internet and play it three times just like it would have been repeated at the dance. You can find other event favorites online too, including the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno”.
The annual “evacuation excursion” to the mountains of Pennsylvania led by the gasoline and gunpowder gang to terrorize the countryside with four-wheel drive trucks, all-terrain vehicles, fireworks, and random weapon discharges is scrubbed. The traditional trash burning in the fire pit on Saturday afternoon and weenie roast scheduled for Saturday night are nixed. Regular participants will have to inhale and ingest their dose of dioxins somewhere else this year.
The consortium of local college drama clubs will not be presenting their popular horror play “It’s Gonna Blow Up”, featuring authentic rumors and supposition from actual news media reports about the 1979 accident. Mock briefings featuring posturing politicians trying to patronize their donors without endangering their reelection prospects will not be held and have been eliminated from the slate of activities—they seem too familiar to be of any interest. A slapstick comedy interpretation of bureaucrats trying to assume authoritarian power to implement an emergency plan that never existed has been postponed until a future event.
Speakers due to share their insights at this year’s gathering have been asked to return next time. We’re pleased that each has agreed. It’s a splendid roster of advocates both for and against nuclear energy, each of whom has shamelessly abandoned their integrity to sustain a do-nothing career that protects them from ever breaking into a sweat. As usual, these appearances will be scheduled as the final feature of the weekend to assure a prompt dispersal of the crowd.
We hope to see you all sometime soon. In the meantime, please remember to use the euphemism “essential workers” when referring to the expendable labor that is out there protecting public health and assuring that everyone can keep shopping. We as a nation would hate for them to realize their worth—they may expect to be better compensated.
A Coronal Mass Ejection
As spring begins, our thoughts often turn, if only briefly, to the sun and the welcome effect its higher angle in the sky and the lengthening hours of daylight will have on our winter-weary lives. Soon, spring thunderstorms and warm humid air will make our crops thrive. Plant buds will open to reveal flowers and leaves, and wildlife will hurry to raise a new generation. We’re reminded that the sun is the source of earth’s life—and is its ongoing benefactor.
Coincidentally, there was, during the first full day of spring, an explosion of plasma from the sun—a Coronal Mass Ejection. It happened to occur on the side of the sun currently facing away from earth, so the enormous cloud of magnetic energy won’t be affecting radio communications or electric transmission here.
Friday’s Coronal Mass Ejection can be seen in the following series of images. To protect the camera’s sensor, the direct light of the sun was blocked by an occulter at the center of each picture. The location of the sun’s disk is indicated by the white circle. In this set, the ejected plasma appears as a cloud emerging from behind the left side of the shield and racing millions of miles into space. The speed of a plasma cloud produced by a Coronal Mass Ejection varies. When directed at earth, some can reach our planet in less than a day—others may take several days to arrive.
Currently though, the term “Coronal Mass Ejection” may cause one to bristle and think of concerns other than the cosmos—Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the Wuhan flu chief among them.
Well, perhaps the promise of warming weather and humid days will help assuage our anxieties.
Colds and flu are certainly more prevalent in winter than during the other seasons of the year. Cases of these diseases begin creeping through schools and workplaces just in time for the year-end holidays. They persist into early spring each year. Then, as we spend more time outdoors in the sunshine and fresh air of April and May, their incidence wanes. Soon the sneezing and coughing is mostly pollen-related and less often the result of transmitted viruses.
In addition to our liberation from buildings crowded with people, spring heat introduces another factor that is apparently responsible for subduing the rapid transmission of viruses—humidity. February and March are typically the driest months of the year in the lower Susquehanna valley. The air outside is cold and dry. The air inside a heated building can be worse.
Researchers have found that viruses in aerosols produced by coughing, sneezing, breathing, and talking survive longer in drier air than in humid air. A NIOSH and CDC funded study (Noti, et al., 2013) mechanically “coughed” aerosols containing H1N1 virus into a simulated examination room. They discovered that “…one hour after coughing, ∼5 times more virus remains infectious at 7-23% RH (relative humidity) than at ≥43% RH.” This is a significant discovery and may shed light on why the end of heating season and the arrival of warmer humid springtime air coincides with the end of cold and flu season. The study’s analysis determined that “Total virus collected for 60 minutes retained 70.6-77.3% infectivity at relative humidity ≤23%, but only 14.6-22.2% at relative humidity ≥43%.” Specifically, they found that the greatest effect of higher relative humidity occurs during the first fifteen minutes after the cough, and that virus in droplets exceeding 4μM in diameter had the most significant reduction in that time—ninety percent.
It looks like a little global warming wouldn’t hurt right now.
So remember, respect the sun—fear asteroids.
SOURCES
Burnham, Robert, Alan Dyer, Robert A. Garfinkle, Martin George, Jeff Kanipe, and David H. Levy. 2006. The Nature Companions Practical Skywatching. Fog City Press. San Francisco, CA.
Noti, J.D., F. M. Blachere, C. M. McMillen, W. G. Lindsley, M. L. Kashon, D. R. Slaughter, et al. 2013. “High Humidity Leads to Loss of Infectious Influenza Virus from Simulated Coughs”. PLoS ONE. 8:2 e57485. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0057485
A Springtime Quiz
The mild winter has apparently minimized weather-related mortality for the local Green Frog population. With temperatures in the seventies throughout the lower Susquehanna valley for this first full day of spring, many recently emerged adults could be seen and, on occasion, heard. Yellow-throated males tested their mating calls—reminding the listener of the sound made by the plucking of a loose banjo string.
If you venture out, keep alert for the migrating birds of late winter and early spring.
If you’re staying close to home, be sure to check out the changing appearance of the birds you see nearby. Some species are losing their drab winter basic plumage and attaining a more colorful summer breeding alternate plumage.
So just how many Green Frogs were there in that first photograph? Here’s the answer.
Happy Spring. For the benefit of everyone’s health, let’s hope that it’s a hot and humid one!
Snow Goose X 100,000
According to the most recent Pennsylvania Game Commission estimate, there are presently more than 100,000 Snow Geese at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area (W.M.A.) in Lancaster and Lebanon Counties. It’s a spectacular sight.
If you go to see these and other birds at Middle Creek, it’s important to remember that you are visiting them in a “wildlife refuge” set aside for, believe it or not, wildlife. “Wildlife refuge”, many would be surprised to learn, is short for “terrestrial or aquatic habitat where wildlife can find refuge and protection from all the meddlesome and murderous things people do”.
Really Bad Poetry
Nothing says Happy Valentine’s Day like a really bad poem, so here it is…
FOR THE LOVE OF DUCKS
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
My neighbors are complainin’
I can hear them talk
The mallards eat their garden
Let surprises on their walk
Dung stains on the carpets
They tracked it in the house
It’s from those ducks and not the pets
Can’t blame it on the spouse
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
Tamed with bread and crackers
I gave them as a treat
I soon found maimed dead quackers
Lying in the street
A driver who intended
To miss the hens and drakes
Had their car rear-ended
When they hit the brakes
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
The flock is very wasteful
Each bird a pound a day
Web-foots in a cesspool
Pollute the waterway
There are some kids playing
In that filthy ditch
Soon they’ll be displaying
The rash of Swimmer’s Itch
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
These ducks they do not migrate
They’re here day in, day out
Aquatic life they decimate
No plants, no fish, no trout
Hurry! Hurry! Heed my call
Before it starts to rain
Ten more ducklings took a fall
And are stranded in a drain
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
Have you people lost your minds?
I see you by your fence
These ducks are cute and I am kind
It’s you who’ve lost your sense
Beggars from the handouts
My God what have I done?
Their senseless habits leave no doubt
Their instincts are all gone
I like to feed the duckies
Try it and you’ll see
Aren’t they really lucky?
Relying just on me
Now I know just what to do
Like one would teach a child
I’ll feed the ducks at the zoo
And let the rest live wild
So if you feed the duckies
Beware of the spell
Or you will do the same as me
Loving ducks to death as well
—Ducks Anonymous, LLC
Clean Slate for 2020
Inside the doorway that leads to your editor’s 3,500 square foot garden hangs a small chalkboard upon which he records the common names of the species of birds that are seen there—or from there—during the year. If he remembers to, he records the date when the species was first seen during that particular year. On New Year’s Day, the results from the freshly ended year are transcribed onto a sheet of notebook paper. On the reverse, the names of butterflies, mammals, and other animals that visited the garden are copied from a second chalkboard that hangs nearby. The piece of paper is then inserted into a folder to join those from previous New Year’s Days. The folder then gets placed back into the editor’s desk drawer beneath a circular saw blade and an old scratched up set of sunglasses—so that he knows exactly where to find it if he wishes to.
A quick glance at this year’s list calls to mind a few recollections.
Before putting the folder back into the drawer for another year, the editor decided to count up the species totals on each of the sheets and load them into the chart maker in the computer.
Despite the habitat improvements in the garden, the trend is apparent. Bird diversity has not cracked the 50 species mark in 6 years. Despite native host plants and nectar species in abundance, butterfly diversity has not exceeded 10 species in 6 years.
It appears that, at the very least, the garden habitat has been disconnected from the home ranges of many species by fragmentation. His little oasis is now isolated in a landscape that becomes increasingly hostile to native wildlife with each passing year. The paving of more parking areas, the elimination of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous growth from the large number of rental properties in the area, the alteration of the biology of the nearby stream by hand-fed domestic ducks, light pollution, and the outdoor use of pesticides have all contributed to the separation of the editor’s tiny sanctuary from the travel lanes and core habitats of many of the species that formerly visited, fed, or bred there. In 2019, migrants, particularly “fly-overs”, were nearly the only sightings aside from several woodpeckers, invasive House Sparrows (Passer domesticus), and hardy Mourning Doves. Even rascally European Starlings became sporadic in occurrence—imagine that! It was the most lackluster year in memory.
If habitat fragmentation were the sole cause for the downward trend in numbers and species, it would be disappointing, but comprehensible. There would be no cause for greater alarm. It would be a matter of cause and effect. But the problem is more widespread.
Although the editor spent a great deal of time in the garden this year, he was also out and about, traveling hundreds of miles per week through lands on both the east and the west shores of the lower Susquehanna. And on each journey, the number of birds seen could be counted on fingers and toes. A decade earlier, there were thousands of birds in these same locations, particularly during the late summer.
In the lower Susquehanna valley, something has drastically reduced the population of birds during breeding season, post-breeding dispersal, and the staging period preceding autumn migration. In much of the region, their late-spring through summer absence was, in 2019, conspicuous. What happened to the tens of thousands of swallows that used to gather on wires along rural roads in August and September before moving south? The groups of dozens of Eastern Kingbirds (Tyrannus tyrannus) that did their fly-catching from perches in willows alongside meadows and shorelines—where are they?
Several studies published during the autumn of 2019 have documented and/or predicted losses in bird populations in the eastern half of the United States and elsewhere. These studies looked at data samples collected during recent decades to either arrive at conclusions or project future trends. They cite climate change, the feline infestation, and habitat loss/degradation among the factors contributing to alterations in range, migration, and overall numbers.
There’s not much need for analysis to determine if bird numbers have plummeted in certain Lower Susquehanna Watershed habitats during the aforementioned seasons—the birds are gone. None of these studies documented or forecast such an abrupt decline. Is there a mysterious cause for the loss of the valley’s birds? Did they die off? Is there a disease or chemical killing them or inhibiting their reproduction? Is it global warming? Is it Three Mile Island? Is it plastic straws, wind turbines, or vehicle traffic?
The answer might not be so cryptic. It might be right before our eyes. And we’ll explore it during 2020.
In the meantime, Uncle Ty and I going to the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg. You should go too. They have lots of food there.
Some Autumn Insects
With autumn coming to a close, let’s have a look at some of the fascinating insects (and a spider) that put on a show during some mild afternoons in the late months of 2019.
SOURCES
Eaton, Eric R., and Kenn Kaufman. 2007. Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, NY.
No Deposit/No Return
Late this afternoon, despite a cold bone-chilling rain, news media and crowds of onlookers gathered along the Susquehanna shoreline upstream of Three Mile Island at the small town of Royalton to catch a glimpse of the removal of a downed aircraft from the river. Back on October 4, a single-engine Piper PA46 Malibu was on the final leg of an approach to runway 31 at Harrisburg International Airport when it lost power. The pilot and passenger were uninjured during the emergency “splashdown” in the shallow water just short of the runway.
…You Don’t Have Three Mile Island To Kick Around Anymore!
At 12:07 P.M., E.D.T. today, forty-five years and eighteen days after being commissioned into commercial service on September 2, 1974, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station’s Unit 1 reactor was shut down for the final time. There will be no refueling. There will be no more electricity furnished to the grid by the plant. It is henceforth a user, not a producer, of energy.
Here’s the final shutdown, in pictures…
No Need to Hurry
It’s that time of year when one may expect to find migratory Neotropical songbirds feeding among the foliage of trees and shrubs in the forests, woodlots, and thickets of the lower Susquehanna valley.
During a late afternoon stroll through a headwaters forest east of Conewago Falls outside Mount Gretna, I was pleased to finally come upon a noisy gathering of about two dozen birds. It had, previous to that, been a quiet two hours of walking, only the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm punctuated the silence. Among this little flock were some chickadees, robins, Gray Catbirds, an Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), and a Hairy Woodpecker (Dryobates villosus). Besides the catbirds, there were two other species of Neotropical migrants; both were warblers. No less than six Black-throated Blue Warblers (Setophaga caerulescens) were vying for positions in the trees from which they could investigate the stranger on the footpath below. And among the understory shrubs there were at least as many Ovenbirds (Seiurus aurocapilla) satisfying a similar curiosity.
When they depart the Susquehanna valley, these two warbler species will be southbound for wintering ranges that include Florida, many of the Caribbean Islands, Central America, and, for the Ovenbirds, northern South America. Their flights occur at night. During the breeding season and while migrating, both feed primarily on insects and other arthropods . On the wintering grounds, they will consume some fruit. It is during their time in the tropics that the Black-throated Blue Warbler sometimes visits feeding stations that offer grape jelly, much to the delight of bird enthusiasts.
Black-throated Blue Warblers and Ovenbirds commonly winter on the Florida peninsula and in the Bahamas. With the major tropical cyclone Hurricane Dorian presently ripping through the region, these birds are better off taking their time getting there. There’s no need to hurry. The longer they and the other Neotropical migrants hang around, the more we get to enjoy them anyway. So get out there to see them before they go—and remember to look up.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
It’s a hot summer weekend with a sun so bright that creosote is dripping from utility poles onto the sidewalks. Dodging these sticky little puddles of tar can cause one to reminisce about sultry days-gone-by.
Sometime in July or August each year, about half a century ago, we would cram all the gear for seven days of living into the car and head for the beaches of Delmarva or New Jersey. It was family vacation time, that one week a year when the working class fantasizes that they don’t have it so bad during the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
The trip to the coast from the Susquehanna valley was a day-long journey. Back then, four-lane highways were few beyond the cities of the northeast corridor and traffic jams stretched for miles. Cars frequently overheated and steam rolled from beneath the hoods of those stopped to cool down. There were even 55-gallon drums of non-potable water positioned at known choke points along some of the state roads so that motorists could top off their radiators and proceed on. Within these back-ups there were many Volkswagen Beetles pausing along the side of the road with the rear hood propped up. Their air-cooled engines would overheat on a hot day if the car wasn’t kept moving. But, despite the setbacks, all were motivated to continue. In time, with perseverance, the smell of saltmarsh air was soon rolling in the windows. Our destination was near.
At the shore, priority one was to spend plenty of time at the beach. Sunbathers lathered up with various concoctions of oils and moisturizers, including my personal favorite, cocoa butter, then they broiled themselves in the raging rays of the fusion-reaction furnace located just eight light-minutes away. Reflected from the white sand and ocean surf, the flaming orb’s blinding light did a thorough job of cooking all the thousands of oil-basted sun worshippers packing the tidal zone for miles and miles. You could smell the hot cocoa butter in the summer air as they burned. Well, maybe not, but you could smell something there.
By now, you’re probably saying, “Hey, why weren’t you idiots wearing protection from the sun’s harmful U.V. rays?”
Good question. Uncle Tyler Dyer reminds me that back in the sixties, a sunscreen was a shade hung to cover a window. He continued, “Man, the only sun block we had was a beach ball that happened to pass between us and the sun.”
During several of our summertime beach visits in the early 1970s, we got a different sort of oil treatment—tar balls. We never noticed the things until we got out of the water. Playing around at the tide line and taking a tumble in the surf from time to time, we must have picked them up when we rolled in the sand.
Uncle Ty wasn’t happy, “Man, they’re sticking all over our legs and feet, and look at your swim trunks, they’re ruined. And look in the sand, they’re everywhere.” The event was one of the seeds that would in time grow into Uncle Ty’s fundamental distrust of corporate culture.
Looking around, tar balls were all over everyone who happened to be near the water. Rumor on the beach was that they came from ships that passed by offshore earlier in the day. The probable source was the many oil spills that had occurred in the Mid-Atlantic region in those years. During the first six months of 1973 alone, there were over 800 oil spills there. Three hundred of those spills occurred in the waters surrounding New York City. The largest, almost half a million gallons, occurred in New York Harbor when a cargo ship collided with the tanker “Esso Brussels”. Forty percent of that spill burned in the fire that followed the mishap, the remainder entered the environment.
When it was time to clean up, we slowly removed the tar from our legs and feet by rubbing it away with a rag soaked in charcoal lighter fluid or gasoline. Needless to say, our skin turned redder than it had already been from sunburn.
After a full day in the surf, we’d be on our way back to our “home base” for summer vacation, a campground nestled somewhere in the pines on the mainland side of the tidal marshes behind our beach’s barrier island. There, we’d shake the sand out of our trunks and savor the feeling of dry clothing. As the sun set, the smoke, flicker, and crackle of dozens of campfires filled the spaces between the tents and camping trailers. Colored lights strung around awnings dazzled sun-weary eyes as night descended across the landscape. We’d commence the process of incinerating some marshmallows soon after. Then, sometime while we were roasting our weenies and warming our buns, we’d hear it.
His device didn’t have a very good muffler. It sounded like a rusty old lawn mower running on the back of a rusty old truck that didn’t sound much better. And you could see the cloud rising above the campsites around the corner as he approached. It was the mosquito man, come to rid the place of pesky nocturnal biting insects. Behind him, always, were young boys on bicycles riding in and out of the fog of insecticide that rolled from the back of the truck.
One was wise to quickly eat your campfire food and put the rest away before the fog rolled in. You had just minutes to choke down that burned up hot dog. Then the sense of urgency was gone. Everyone just sat around at picnic tables and on lawn chairs bathing in the airborne cloud. A thin layer of insecticide rubbed into the skin along with the liberal doses of Noxzema being applied to soothe sunburn pain will get you through the night just fine.
Perhaps the most memorable event to occur during our summer vacations happened at the moment of this writing, fifty years ago.
We were vacationing in a campground in southern New Jersey. Our family and the family of my dad’s co-worker gathered in a mosquito-mesh tent surrounding a small black-and-white television. An extension cord was strung to a receptacle on a nearby post, and the cathode ray tube produced the familiar picture of glowing blue tones to illuminate the otherwise dark scene. There was constant experimentation with the whip antenna to try to get a visible signal. There were no local UHF broadcasters and the closest VHF television stations were in Philadelphia, so the picture constantly had “snow” diminishing its already poor clarity. But we could see it, and I’ll never forget it.
SOURCES
Andelman, David A. “Oil Spills Here Total 300 in ’73”. The New York Times. August 8, 1973. p.41.
Cortright, Edgar M. (Editor). 1975. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, DC.
Friendly Neighborhood Spider, Man
Within the last few years, the early-summer emergence of vast waves of mayflies has caused great consternation among residents of riverside towns and motorists who cross the bridges over the lower Susquehanna. Fishermen and others who frequent the river are familiar with the phenomenon. Mayflies rise from their benthic environs where they live for a year or more as an aquatic larval stage (nymph) to take flight as a short-lived adult (imago), having just one night to complete the business of mating before perishing by the following afternoon.
In 2015, an emergence on a massive scale prompted the temporary closure of the mile-long Columbia-Wrightsville bridge while a blizzard-like flight of huge mayflies reduced visibility and caused road conditions to deteriorate to the point of causing accidents. The slimy smelly bodies of dead mayflies, probably millions of them, were removed like snow from the normally busy Lincoln Highway. Since then, to prevent attraction of the breeding insects, lights on the bridge have been shut down from about mid-June through mid-July to cover the ten to fourteen day peak of the flight period of Hexagenia bilineata, sometimes known as the Great Brown Drake, the species that swarms the bridge.
After so many years, why did the swarms of these mayflies suddenly produce the enormous concentrations seen on this particular bridge across the lower Susquehanna? Let’s have a look.
Following the 2015 flight, conservation organizations were quick to point out that the enormous numbers of mayflies were a positive thing—an indicator that the waters of the river were getting cleaner. Generally, assessments of aquatic invertebrate populations are considered to be among the more reliable gauges of stream health. But some caution is in order in this case.
Prior to the occurrence of large flights several years ago, Hexagenia bilineata was not well known among the species in the mayfly communities of the lower Susquehanna and its tributaries. The native range of the species includes the southeastern United States and the Mississippi River watershed. Along segments of the Mississippi, swarms such as occurred at Columbia-Wrightsville in 2015 are an annual event, sometimes showing up on local weather radar images. These flights have been determined to be heaviest along sections of the river with muddy bottoms—the favored habitat of the burrowing Hexagenia bilineata nymph. This preferred substrate can be found widely in the Susquehanna due to siltation, particularly behind dams, and is the exclusive bottom habitat in Lake Clarke just downstream of the Columbia-Wrightsville bridge.
Native mayflies in the Susquehanna and its tributaries generally favor clean water in cobble-bottomed streams. Hexagenia bilineata, on the other hand, appears to have colonized the river (presumably by air) and has found a niche in segments with accumulated silt, the benthic habitats too impaired to support the native taxa formerly found there. Large flights of burrowing mayflies do indicate that the substrate didn’t become severely polluted or eutrophic during the preceding year. And big flights tell us that the Susquehanna ecosystem is, at least in areas with silt bottoms, favorable for colonization by the Great Brown Drake. But large flights of Hexagenia bilineata mayflies don’t necessarily give us an indication of how well the Susquehanna ecosystem is supporting indigenous mayflies and other species of native aquatic life. Only sustained recoveries by populations of the actual native species can tell us that. So, it’s probably prudent to hold off on the celebrations. We’re a long way from cleaning up this river.
In the absence of man-made lighting, male Great Brown Drakes congregate over waterways lit often by moonlight alone. The males hover in position within a swarm, often downwind of an object in the water. As females begin flight and pass through the swarm, they are pursued by the males in the vicinity. The male response is apparently sight motivated—anything moving through their field of view in a straight line will trigger a pursuit. That’s why they’re so pesky, landing on your face whenever you approach them. Mating takes place as males rendezvous with airborne females. The female then drops to the water surface to deposit eggs and later die—if not eaten by a fish first. Males return to the swarm and may mate again and again. They die by the following afternoon. After hatching, the larvae (nymphs) burrow in the silt where they’ll grow for the coming year. Feathery gills allow them to absorb oxygen from water passing through the U-shaped refuge they’ve excavated.
Several factors increase the likelihood of large swarms of Great Brown Drakes at bridges. Location is, of course, a primary factor. Bridges spanning suitable habitat will, as a minimum, experience incidental occurrences of the flying forms of the mayflies that live in the waters below. Any extraordinarily large emergence will certainly envelop the bridge in mayflies. Lights, both fixed and those on motor vehicles, enhance the appearance of movement on a bridge deck, thus attracting hovering swarms of male Hexagenia bilineata and other species from a greater distance, leading to larger concentrations. Concrete walls along the road atop the bridge lure the males to try to hover in a position of refuge behind them, despite the vehicles that disturb the still air each time they pass. The walls also function as the ultimate visual attraction as headlamp beams and shadows cast by moving vehicles are projected onto them over the length of the bridge. Vast numbers of dead, dying, and maimed mayflies tend to accumulate along these walls for this reason.
The absence of illumination from fixed lighting on the deck of the bridge reduces the density of Great Brown Drake swarms. Some communities take mayfly countermeasures one step further. Along the Mississippi, some bridges are fitted with lights on the underside of the deck to attract the mayflies to the area directly over the water, concentrating the breeding mayflies and fishermen alike. The illumination below the bridge is intended to draw mayflies away from light created by headlamps on motor vehicles passing by on the otherwise dark deck above. Lights beneath the bridge also help prevent large numbers of mayflies from being drawn away from the water toward lights around businesses and homes in neighborhoods along the shoreline—where they can become a nuisance.
SOURCES
Edsall, Thomas A. 2001. “Burrowing Mayflies (Hexagenia) as Indicators of Ecosystem Health.” Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management. 43:283-292.
Fremling, Calvin R. 1960. Biology of a Large Mayfly, Hexagenia bilineata (Say), of the Upper Mississippi River. Research Bulletin 482. Agricultural and Home Economics Experiment Station, Iowa State University. Ames, Iowa.
McCafferty, W. P. 1994. “Distributional and Classificatory Supplement to the Burrowing Mayflies (Ephemeroptera: Ephimeroidea) of the United States.” Entomological News. 105:1-13.
Uncle Ty’s T-shirt
It had been quite a few years, decades actually, since Uncle Tyler Dyer and I had visited the State Museum of Pennsylvania, formerly the William Penn Museum, in Harrisburg. Several days ago we decided to stop by to see what’s new.
I was fussing around with the official “Life in the Lower Susquehanna Watershed” camera while walking slowly down an entrance corridor when I heard Uncle Ty exclaim from up ahead, “Hey man, that’s my T-shirt!”
There it was, neatly screen-printed on luxurious , but functional, blended cotton and polyester, just like the one Uncle Ty wore forty years ago. This priceless gem was no iron-on job. It was the real thing, just like Coke, but a little bit more expensive.
Uncle Ty said that, other than his own artistic creations, his T.M.I. T-shirt was the only one he wore during the summer of ’79. It even had spots of hardened wax in the fabric around the belly section where his candle had dripped during one of the anti-nuclear energy protest vigils he attended.
I wasn’t so certain, I thought he had a few others in his rotation back then. All those corporate beer brand and pop music group T-shirts were really popular. And “Grease”, Uncle Ty really liked Olivia Newton-John back then. He had a “Grease” T-shirt for sure. Then I remembered, and I reminded him, “You were wearing a Buck Tractor Pulls T-shirt back then, weren’t you?” I was sure of it, nice artwork of a hopped-up farm tractor on the front and “See You at the Buck” across the back.
“No way man,” he retorted, “There’s no way I went down there to waste a Saturday night with that gasoline and gunpowder gang. I would have sooner spent a Saturday night getting a tooth worked on by an angry intoxicated dentist!”
Oh well, everybody has there own idea of a good time.
Three Mile Island, Thunderstorms, and Two-headed Cows
We’re beginning to worry about Uncle Tyler Dyer. It’s been almost a month since a tornado descended from an eastbound cloud that first passed by Three Mile Island, and from him we’ve heard not a word about it. And the rainfall totals during the past year, well above normal and record setting, but not a peep from him about it. The floods too, and the gusty thunderstorms that either seemed to strike only our town, or would instead let us high and dry while passing off to the north or south. For forty years, from Uncle Ty’s point of view, these phenomena were all attributable to those towers down at Three Mile Island. He would say, “Man, you know the lightning in that thunderstorm was terrible because of T.M.I. You know that, don’t you?”
If you happen to live in the lower Susquehanna valley, you’ve probably heard comments like that at the local diner, taproom, or gathering of family and friends. Many are offered by good-humored folk, in jest, to enliven the conversation. It makes a chat about the weather a bit more exciting. Then to, there are those who became extraordinarily suspicious of the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island after the accident. To them, any deviation from the status quo must be caused by those big towers down there. Even if they don’t fully believe what they’re saying, it matters that they don’t miss the chance to get in a jab, even if it’s a glancing one. That’s Uncle Ty. He sees that plant in a different light than we do, from a different perspective. To him, Three Mile Island is the ultimate symbol of corporate evil. It’s not about the fuel used to operate the reactor. The invisible threat of radioactivity is a metaphor for the secretive operations of sinister big business. Those towers are a collection of monoliths representing greed, interlocking corporate directorships, and immunity from accountability. And no one is going to change his mind.
If you remember reading, watching, or listening to news reports in the weeks and months following the accident at Three Mile Island, you recall stories from farmers and other residents living in the vicinity of the plant who described diverse irregularities in the health of domestic animals and in populations of wildlife there. For some, these reports left a lasting impression of conditions near the site of the accident.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Nuclear Regulator Commission conducted an investigation into these reports. Because the levels of radiation released during the accident were barely above background levels, it was going to be difficult to detect any changes in animals or plants that could be definitively linked to operations at Three Mile Island or the accident there.
Upon evaluating cases for which sufficient data had been preserved or animals were available for examination, investigators failed to find any animal deaths, injuries, diseases, deformities, or stillborn young caused by known effects of ionizing radiation exposure. Anemic conditions would have been expected in animals exposed to significant doses of radiation, but cases of anemia were not found. For the animal fatalities reported, their numbers generally fell within the expected mortality rates for breeding, raising, and keeping the species involved. For the cases examined, no link could be made to exposure to ionizing radiation or byproducts released during the operation of T.M.I. or the accident at Unit 2. Instead of a pattern of mortality and illness consistent with ionizing radiation exposure, investigators instead found a wide-variety of problems considered common to animal keeping.
During the investigation, some of the causes for domestic animal afflictions were identified and, when possible, proper remedies were recommended. Animal husbandry errors, accidents, and disease accounted for most of the deaths, disabilities, and reproduction failures in domestic animals. The occurrence of stillborn or deformed pets was attributed to a variety of diseases and developmental problems that are frequently associated with the symptoms described by pet owners. Poultry eggs that failed to hatch were believed to be infertile or were not maintained at the proper temperature during incubation. Many of the physical ailments in adult dairy cows were traced to mineral deficiencies in the feed. Cases of rickets were found among steers at two different farms. Supplements mitigated these abnormalities in the involved herds. Some cows were found to be suffering from bacterial or viral infections. A few dairy animals had developed mastitis, an inflammation often caused by bacterial infection of the udders. Following diagnosis, herdsmen were able to initiate treatment. Among livestock, fertility and reproductive deficiencies were generally traced to nutritional shortcomings or disease. Those farmers needing further help troubleshooting breeding difficulties were referred to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s Diagnostic Lab.
The majority of people not living in the lower Susquehanna valley at the time paid little attention to the results of the investigations. Such reports are often lengthy and boring, not as exciting as the stories of mutants and catastrophe, and not as memorable. Naturally, the closer you lived to T.M.I., the more informed you probably were about it; you knew first-hand how life was both before and after the accident. Those living elsewhere were sometimes left with exaggerated recollections based upon those initial news stories from the scene.
While traveling some years ago, Uncle Ty was astounded by the perception folks from outside Pennsylvania had of the place he calls home. He told us of one incident in particular. Uncle Ty had gone to the South Bronx in New York City to participate in an “End the Violence” protest. Gunfire and murder were an occurrence of epidemic proportions on street corners there at the time. It turned out that the protest was a poorly attended flop. It happened to be Bat Day at Yankee Stadium, so everyone had gone there instead. During his extended lunch break, Uncle Ty struck up a conversation with a local, a likeable public safety worker who lived and worked in the South Bronx. Ty expressed some sympathy for the stressful conditions the fellow had to endure as a resident there. The guy appreciated his sentiments, but didn’t think he had it too tough. When Ty told him that his home was near Three Mile Island, the guy shook his head in pity and said, “yeah, I hear it’s pretty bad out there, all the two-headed cows walkin’ around and s…”. A guy from one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country felt really sorry for him. Even Uncle Ty was caught off guard by that one, but it wasn’t the last time he heard it either.
Today, Uncle Ty has us all pondering. Has he given up on Three Mile Island’s grand towers as the primary factor affecting all meteorological irregularities in the lower Susquehanna? Will we ever hear of a cooling tower induced drought again? What will he turn to? It’ll have to be something big. A causative force that no one can quite prove or disprove, mysterious enough to keep everyone guessing if he really knows something no one else knows. I wonder what it’ll be. No matter what it is, it just won’t be the same as hearing, “Man, don’t you know? T.M.I. did it.”
SOURCES
Gears, G. E., G. Laroche, et al. (1980) Investigations of Reported Plant and Animal Health Effects in the Three Mile Island Area. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Las Vegas, NV.
Tornado: Close Call
Severe thunderstorms with hail, torrential rain, and flooding passed through the lower Susquehanna valley this evening. The National Weather Service in State College issued a warning for a radar-indicated tornado shown crossing the Susquehanna River downstream of Conewago Falls at 6:55 P.M. E.D.T. The rascal revealed itself about ten minutes later.
The staff at a retirement community west of Elizabethtown was on the alert and had the fortitude to quickly sound a warning siren. It was howling away as this image was taken. What could have been a disaster was instead a spectacular close call.
Three Mile Island 40: Part Three
A sixteen year-old skinny kid driving a Ford Pinto on a Saturday afternoon in late March, 1979, might be perceived by some observers as a metaphor for the accident at Three Mile Island on that same day. When experiencing a rear-end collision, the fuel tank on these little compact cars had been known to explode, sometimes with fatal consequences. They quickly gained a reputation as a deadly hazard on the highway. Despite a recall and engineering fix to prevent the fuel tank from failing, the Pinto remained cursed, and it was henceforth looked upon as a dangerous creation of man that best be avoided if you wished to remain in good health.
For a sixteen year-old, a Pinto functioned just fine as a frugal form of transportation. So in a hideous limey-yellow one, a kid showed up at the Three Mile Island Observation Center to have a look around. There, hundreds of photographers, reporters, and journalists had gathered to try for their angle on the latest news from the accident scene. Cars and news vans lined the state road, Pennsylvania Route 441, in front of the facility. Anything that moved was photographed and interviewed. The story of the day, March 31, 1979, was the impending explosion of the hydrogen gas bubble in the Unit 2 reactor. It was the sensation that they had waited for.
By Saturday, the N.R.C. was growing concerned about the potential of a hydrogen explosion within the Unit 2 reactor. Hydrogen was formed early in the accident when hot steam in the high-temperature core reacted with the zirconium alloy in the fuel rod cladding and produced primarily zirconium dioxide and hydrogen gas. Some of this gas had been vented into the reactor containment building. There, it mixed with atmospheric oxygen and ignited when a block valve switch was operated during the late morning of day one. Operators recalled hearing a “whooshing” sound just after flipping the switch. It is believed they did not really hear the explosion or burn-off of the gas, but rather the activation of a water spray system in the building in response to it.
The N.R.C. learned on Friday of this event that had occurred two days earlier. Harold Denton wanted to know if radiolysis of water inside the reactor was producing additional hydrogen and, more critically, oxygen. Many in the N.R.C. were convinced by their calculations that enough oxygen could be produced in the coming days to make the existing hydrogen bubble explosive. Denton wanted to know for sure, and ordered a team to enlist outside help to determine a timeline for this radiolysis. He also assigned a team to determine the parameters and details for a possible explosion.
Meanwhile, this story had gone public. Upon hearing the words “nuclear” and “explosion” together in news reports, the memories of old Civil Defense promotions came back to haunt local residents, and the nation. For many, the horrific image of a nuclear explosion had been projected into their perception of the accident. An explosion similar to an atomic bomb was not possible in the reactors of the type used for energy production in the United States, but few sleep well with visions of mushroom clouds dancing in their heads. For those on the fence deciding whether to stay or go, this was it, the last straw. In response to these broadcasts, more residents left the lower Susquehanna region on Saturday. As they went out, press personnel moved in, many setting up camp at the Three Mile Island Observation Center.
At 2:45 P.M., reporters at N.R.C. headquarters in Bethesda were told that a 10 to 20 mile evacuation might be necessary as a precaution if the decision was made to attempt to force the hydrogen bubble out of the reactor.
An Associated Press story went public at 8:23 P.M. quoting N.R.C. officials as saying that the hydrogen bubble could explode spontaneously.
This information kept local Civil Defense personnel up through the night answering phone calls from the worried residents who remained in their homes. They wanted to know what to do, but the local offices and P.E.M.A. were getting very little advice from the Lieutenant Governor’s and Governor’s offices. The state B.R.P. was still providing them with radiation information, but beyond that, Civil Defense offices were on their own for the night.
Harold Denton, being informed that President Carter was coming to Three Mile Island the next day, wanted things clarified. He told his deputy Victor Stello, Jr. to solicit sources outside the N.R.C. on the oxygen issue. Stello had fielded a call from the White House at about 9:00 P.M.. In response to the A.P. story, he told a presidential aide that he did not share the concern of others at the N.R.C. regarding the production of oxygen in the reactor. He and some engineers at Babcock & Wilcox, designers of the reactor, were among the few who shared this opinion. (Also, engineers at Babcock & Wilcox analyzing the effects of an explosion, should one occur, were confident that water and steam, if maintained in the pressurized reactor containment vessel, would reduce the pressure of an explosion to within the capabilities of the vessel to contain it.)
On Sunday morning, April 1, 1979, Victor Stello made his case to Harold Denton explaining why he thought there would be no hydrogen explosion in the Unit 2 reactor. He told Denton that pressurized water reactors like TMI-2 routinely have free hydrogen circulating in the coolant. The majority of oxygen produced by radiolysis would bind with this hydrogen and simply make more water.
Just minutes before the President landed at the Air National Guard facility at Harrisburg International Airport at 1:00 P.M., the N.R.C.’s Joseph Hendrie and Roger Mattson, who had been researching the explosion question, arrived at a hangar there to present their case to Denton.
Quoted in the “Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island”, Mattson described the scene:
“…And Stello tells me I am crazy, that he doesn’t believe it, and he thinks we’ve made an error in the rate of calculation…Stello says we’re nuts and poor Harold is there, he’s got to meet with the President in 5 minutes and tell it like it is. And here he is. His two experts are not together. One comes armed to the teeth with all these national laboratories and Navy reactor people and high faluting PhDs around the country, saying this is what it is and this is the best summary. And his other (the operating reactors division) director saying, “I don’t believe it. I can’t prove it yet, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s wrong.”…”
President Jimmy Carter was no stranger to nuclear reactors, or reactor accidents for that matter. A 1947 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Carter eventually worked his way into Captain (later Admiral) Hyman Rickover’s nuclear command. In 1952, Rickover (known as the father of the Nuclear Navy) ordered the 28 year-old Lieutenant Carter, then assigned to the Naval Reactors Branch at the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, to the scene of a partial meltdown of a research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada.
There, Carter led a team of 23 men. Their job was to shut down and dismantle the damaged reactor. They built a mock-up of the reactor on a tennis court and practiced taking turns performing the tasks to complete the job. This model would be used to track the progress of the project in the actual reactor. When a bolt, nut, or other part was removed in the real reactor core, it would be removed from the model as well.
Following these preparations, men suited up in protective gear and were lowered into the reactor, one man at a time, to do the work. Each man in the rotation was permitted to be in the reactor for only ninety seconds, then he was hoisted back out. During every one of these short journeys to the core, each worker, including Carter, received a dose equivalent to a year’s worth of allowable radiation today. Carter’s urine was radioactive for six months afterward.
President Carter’s earlier experiences in Rickover’s Navy, particularly at Chalk River, gave him exceptional familiarity with conditions arising from the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.
Following the briefing of the President and Governor, Stello, Hendrie, and Mattson went back to the N.R.C.’s temporary office to try to rectify the oxygen and explosion problem. After consulting with some additional outside sources, including Westinghouse and General Electric, they had the answer. The hydrogen bubble would NOT explode. It was 3:00 P.M.
At just before 4:00 P.M., there was a new push from the N.R.C. in Bethesda to start an evacuation within two miles of the plant. Chairman Hendrie informed them—there is NO danger of an explosion. The teams in Bethesda would find concurrence with Stello, Hendrie, and Mattson by later that evening. On Monday, the N.R.C. trickled out the good news, but would not outright admit that their calculation errors had caused a near panic. Instead, they claimed that they had been a little too conservative in their estimates.
Shortly following the President’s visit, or during it, the hydrogen bubble began dissipating. The public wasn’t made aware of it until the following day, Monday, April 2. By then, operators for the utility reported that it was nearly gone. No direct action had been taken to get rid of the bubble, its disappearance was mysterious, yet welcome.
Nobody knows how many people evacuated the lower Susquehanna valley during the accident. It is generally believed that over 100,000 left for at least the weekend. Some communities, such as Goldsboro, a small town overlooking Three Mile Island’s reactors from the York County side of the Susquehanna, may have experienced evacuation rates approaching ninety percent. In the majority of areas more distant from the plant, the rate was well below fifty percent. Most of those who left their homes began returning as schools reopened during the mid-week.
During that first weekend, the press was angling to get officials to speculate on the probability of the occurrence of a catastrophic core meltdown. No one had realized that the meltdown had already happened, on day one. It was determined in 1987 that in excess of half of the more than 100 tons of uranium oxide fuel had melted during that first morning. In 1989, 20 tons of molten fuel was discovered to have flowed to the bottom of the reactor vessel and solidified into a slag-like mass there. Fortunately, Unit 2’s pressurized reactor vessel had kept the catastrophic core meltdown contained within its five-inch-thick steel structure.
Crews on Three Mile Island worked faithfully to manage gases and continue the cooling of the reactor core. Cold shutdown of the reactor (reduction of temperatures to below the atmospheric boiling point of water) would take another week, the full cleanup and de-fueling would take more than a decade. Unit 2 was placed in monitored storage in 1993, and will be fully decommissioned simultaneously with the Unit 1 reactor when the latter is permanently taken out of service.
On the day of his visit to Three Mile Island, President Carter signed executive orders activating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (F.E.M.A.), a new entity formed to house Civil Defense and disaster preparedness, with the latter of the two becoming the greater focus of its mission.
Forty years after his visit to Three Mile Island, Jimmy Carter, at age 94 ½ years, had become the longest-lived President in American history. We wish he and Rosalynn many more happy years.
Finally, what shall we think of the risky travels of a sixteen year-old? Was the bigger hazard the act of being inside a Ford Pinto while driving to Three Mile Island on Saturday, March 31, 1979, or was it the act of being at Three Mile Island itself on that afternoon? We’ll let you decide.
SOURCES
Forman, Paul, and Sherman, Roger. 2004. Three Mile Island: The Inside Story. Web presentation based upon Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibit, as accessed March 28, 2019. https://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/index.htm
Kemeny, John G., et al. 1979. Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island; The Need for Change: The Legacy of TMI. U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Milnes, Arthur. January 28, 2009. “When Jimmy Carter Faced Radioactivity Head-on”. The Ottawa Citizen.
Three Mile Island 40: Part Two
It was forty years ago today. The civics teacher had a hook on stick, and he was under orders to use it. He was trying his best to draw the water-stained paper blinds down over the tall old single-pane glass windows that covered the length of the outer wall of his west-facing room. You understand, this was not something he was doing of his own accord. He was a veteran educator, one of those teaching the offspring of his students from a previous generation. He was no tyrant merely wanting to deny his pupils the distractions of a beautiful spring day outdoors. He was ordered by the coffee cup brigade in the front office to close the windows and draw the shades. The safety of the students is at stake!
As his third class of the day entered the room, the instructor enlisted the help of a couple of taller students to try to get some of those stubborn window coverings pulled down. No luck. Class would commence with blinds up, down, and in between. Today’s topic: the dangers of nuclear energy. As usual, it was something of an open discussion of current events. All points of view were encouraged.
Few noticed the town fire siren howling away during the first minutes of the oratory. That happened every once in a while, so it wasn’t so remarkable. The class transformed from debate and dialog to a practical demonstration a little while later when fire trucks began circulating through the streets near the school broadcasting muffled incoherent warnings of some sort to the residents of adjacent neighborhoods.
Within moments there was clamor in the hallways as several students were banging locker doors and making off with their wares. Soon the old classroom phone that hung as a decoration on the wall near the doorway began making an obnoxious noise. What does this mean? What should we do? It never made a sound before. The dedicated educator walked over and picked up the receiver. He timidly said, “Hello?” He listened carefully, acknowledging the caller from time to time, then he said, “O.K.” After hanging up the little-used device, he walked over to a startled girl and simply told her to gather things and report to the office, one of her parents was here to pick her up.
The old sage walked back to the lectern and just stared around at the quiet faces in the room , not a word was said until the phone rang again. He looked over toward a skinny sixteen year-old kid, a late-bloomer, seated near the half-shaded windows and quietly said, “Mr. C—, you have duties to perform, don’t you? You may leave.” Then he turned to answer the phone for the second time. The skinny kid departed the school building posthaste.
Since the beginning of the accident, operators of the Unit 2 reactor had been spending a considerable share of their time and effort coping with noncondensible gas in Unit 2’s coolant system. Not only was there growing concern that a build-up of Hydrogen around the top of the reactor core was preventing coolant from reaching the fuel assemblies, but gas was causing problems in other portions of the cooling system as well. One component in particular, a make-up tank used to store water that is used as needed to increase the volume of coolant in the primary cooling system, was of concern in the early morning hours of Friday, March 30, 1979. Its relief valve had activated at least once due to excessive pressure. Gauges read that gases had displaced all of the water from the tank.
Just before 7:00 A.M., operators decided to open a valve to purge the radioactive gases from the make-up tank into the waste gas decay tanks where it is collected and stored by design. The venting began at 7:10 A.M. Aware that a header leaks in this system, and that any leaked gas will enter the auxiliary building and be discharged to the atmosphere from its vent stack, a helicopter monitoring flight is requested to collect samples above the plant and its perimeter. Almost an hour into the venting process, at 8:01 A.M., a radiation reading of 1,200 millirems per hour (mr/hr) is measured 130 feet directly above the vent stack. A reading of only 14 mr/hr was taken along the boundary of the facility site. This was an expectable set of readings. During a short venting procedure involving the make-up tank on the previous day, a sampling flight measured 3,000 mr/hr fifteen feet above the stack .
Confident that they can now keep gas accumulation in the make-up tank under control by “puffing” it clear on a regular basis, and again having the ability to use the make-up tank to equalize coolant levels, the process is a success. The operators are on to the next step as they strive to get the reactor into a cold shutdown.
Friday’s memorable troubles resulted from a series of inaccurate reports of the 1,200 mr/hr reading taken above the auxiliary building vent stack. For the next ninety minutes, the 1,200 mr/hr figure shot like lightening through a chain of phone calls that left Three Mile Island and made its way through state-level and county-level offices and found smooth sailing through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (N.R.C.) and landed right in the middle of meeting of the latter in Bethesda, Maryland.
But first, at 8:45 A.M., a Telex message arrives at the N.R.C.’s Incident Response Center:
“The seal return to the makeup tanks was causing excessive gas pressures in the makeup tank which was directed to the waste gas decay tanks which were full. The waste gas tanks were being released to the stack. Pennsylvania Civil Defense was being notified by Licensee.”
This errant message indicates that the highly radioactive contents of the waste gas decay tanks, which are NOT full, can be expected to vent from Three Mile Island with some regularity for the foreseeable future. At 9:00 A.M., the N.R.C.’s Lake Barrett carries the Telex into a meeting of the agency’s Executive Management Team (E.M.T.). Alarmed by the news, they ask Barrett to calculate what an off-site radiation dose might be with the anticipated releases. Ironically, Barrett arrives at a figure of 1,200 mr/hr for a person at the site boundary, a value exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) threshold for evacuation of sensitive persons. Within minutes, the E.M.T. receives a phone call from Karl Abraham, the N.R.C. press officer at Governor Richard Thornburgh’s office in Harrisburg. He’s on the speakerphone and wants to know if the reports of 1,200 mr/hr readings above the “cooling towers” are true. This is the first the E.M.T. has heard of the 1,200 mr/hr number at the site, and because it matches Barrett’s calculation for off-site releases from full waste gas decay tanks, they assume it to be an off-site number and forget that Abraham was asking a question. Following a discussion, Harold Denton, Director of Reactor Regulation, orders that a recommendation for evacuation out to ten miles in the direction of the plume be given to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (P.E.M.A.), the state-level Civil Defense agency. This recommendation is delivered at 9:15 A.M. Unfortunately, the location of the 1,200 mr/hr reading was not verified beforehand.
In Harrisburg, Margaret Reilly of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Radiation Protection (B.R.P.) was trying to verify the N.R.C.’s reasons for the evacuation recommendation. There was some ire because P.E.M.A. received the recommendation instead of the B.R.P., or, better yet, Governor Thornburgh himself. Information available to Pennsylvania agencies showed no reason to evacuate.
Dutifully acting on the N.R.C.’s recommendation, the state notifies Dauphin County Civil Defense, telling them to expect an evacuation order from the Governor within five minutes. The mild temperatures on this Friday were due to a steady wind from the southwest, putting communities in Dauphin County within any possible plume from the Three Mile Island Unit 2 facility. It appeared that communities in Dauphin County, including the city of Harrisburg, would comprise the majority of the evacuation zone. Fire companies, municipal officials, local Civil Defense directors, and others were alerted. Announcements on Harrisburg’s WHP radio advised citizens within five miles of T.M.I. to make preparations and gather supplies for a possible evacuation. The cat was out of the bag.
Governor Thornburgh was very cautious, possessing an understanding of the risks to the public that an evacuation order could cause. He would later be quoted, “In Pennsylvania, P.E.M.A.’s role is to manage the emergency, not to recommend evacuation. P.E.M.A. mentality (during the T.M.I.-2 accident) was akin to being all dressed up with no place to go—leaning forward in the trenches. We had to be careful about that attitude.” Thornburgh knew that ordering an evacuation meant moving patients in health care facilities, possibly at great risk to them. He knew too, that evacuation meant putting helmets in the street—the National Guard.
The Bureau of Radiation Protection had checked the site and conferred with the N.R.C. in Bethesda and was convinced that an evacuation was not necessary. Because of the public broadcasts, phone lines were jammed, so nuclear engineers from B.R.P. are hurriedly en route to the Governor’s office and P.E.M.A. to deliver the facts in person. It’s 9:45 A.M.
At the same time in Bethesda, the E.M.T. had learned that the 1,200 mr/hr reading was not from off-site, but from directly above the vent stack. They were also made aware that the venting had not come from the waste gas decay tanks, but from the make-up tank. And finally, they learned that the waste gas decay tanks were not full, but were accepting gases from the make-up tank as designed. By 10:00 A.M., they rescinded their evacuation order—about the same time that Governor Thornburgh countermanded it.
Too late. By this time people were getting out of town. Schools were overwhelmed as parents showed up to pull their children out of class, one by one at first, then in droves. Sirens were sounding. Broadcasts were telling people to close blinds and windows and remain indoors. The Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident was now the biggest news event in the nation.
Governor Thornburgh went on WHP radio at 10:25 A.M. to broadcast a message to residents, attempting to rectify some of the contradictions of the morning. Within the hour, President Carter would call the Governor and assure him of the White House’s full support. He told the Governor that he was sending Harold Denton to the scene forthwith. Denton was to “take charge of the site on behalf of the federal government”.
At local Civil Defense offices in the lower Susquehanna valley, there was a continuous flow of telephone calls from concerned citizens, some of them very frightened. They wanted to know what to do. The ball was rolling, and people with families were becoming more and more inclined to leave.
A skinny sixteen year-old volunteer walked into a community fire station in a small town about six miles from Three Mile Island at about 11:00 A.M. There, the town’s mayor and Civil Defense Director were conferring inside the “Civil Defense office”, a coat closet with a desk and ashtray. The phone was in the adjacent closet, which had more desks and ashtrays. The discussion centered around responsibilities for ordering an evacuation. Following the events at the federal and state level earlier in the morning, it was unclear who had the authority and responsibility to order an evacuation.
The scene was tense, the cigarette smoke was rolling out of the closet for hours as phone calls were made and the chain of command was clarified. Evacuation plans were being worked out in case they were needed. Moving patients from hospitals and nursing facilities was a particularly difficult planning challenge to be tackled. The cloud would persist as the chain smoking continued for the next couple of days. (And those plaid double-knit leisure suits with Flintstones neckties—wow!—it’s a good thing there were no photographs taken of this scene.)
Elsewhere inside the fire station, the sixteen year-old lad and some other volunteers collected the radiological monitoring supplies from the blue and white Civil Defense rescue truck. After gathering some fresh batteries, they ventured outdoors and set up a small monitoring station. Lungs clouded by all the chain smoking inside could be clarified out there. Several metering devices were employed in an attempt to detect radiation. The crew remained at their post through late afternoon, keeping a sharp lookout for the fashion police and enjoying the balmy spring air. It was easy work and no radiation was detected.
Following further consultation with the N.R.C., the Governor held a press conference at 12:30 A.M. He advised pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area of a five-mile radius around Three Mile Island. He closed the schools and the few students still in the classrooms were on their way home—or to the mountains for an unscheduled spring holiday.
Harold Denton would arrive at Three Mile Island during the mid-afternoon. Denton found inadequate facilities and communications (no cellular telephone in 1979!) at the T.M.I. Observation Center building where other N.R.C. personnel had set up temporarily. This facility on the east shore of the Susquehanna overlooking the plant was now overrun by scores and soon hundreds of reporters, so Denton set up his base in a home offered by a Met-Ed employee just across the street. He set up his temporary office in the living room, complete with a direct line to the White House. Denton would have his work cut out for him; the hydrogen gas bubble was becoming an increasing concern and the press was storming over the possibility of a catastrophic meltdown. The situation was serious—there would be no BINGO in the fire halls this weekend.
Thanks Mr. H—, wherever you are!
SOURCES
Kemeny, John G., et al. 1979. Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island; The Need for Change: The Legacy of TMI. U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Rogovin, Mitchell, et al. 1980. Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commisssioners and the Public. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Three Mile Island 40: Part One
Forty years ago, at just about 4:01 A.M. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River at Conewago Falls “scrammed”—the control rods automatically dropped into the reactor core to stop fission. This occurred in response to the automatic opening of the “Pilot-Operated Relief Valve” (P.O.R.V.) on the pressurizer, a tank designed to prevent the boiling of water in the primary cooling system loop that transfers heat energy from the reactor core to the steam generator. The P.O.R.V. activated when steam in the top of the pressurizer tank was compressed by water that was expanding as it increased in temperature while circulating within the primary cooling system loop.
During normal operating conditions, water in a non-nuclear “secondary loop” is pumped through tubes within the steam generator where it absorbs energy from the hot water in the primary cooling system loop. The heat converts the water in the “secondary loop” to steam for turning the steam turbine and making electricity. At about 36 seconds after 4:00 A.M., a set of pumps “tripped” and stopped feeding water through the “secondary loop” to the steam generator. Within seconds, Unit 2 ceased making electricity. Starting automatically as a failsafe were a set of three “emergency feedwater pumps”, designed to reestablish water flow to the steam generator. A reactor operator verified their start just fourteen seconds after the main pumps “tripped”. Unfortunately, the operator did not notice the panel lights indicating that valves were closed on each of the two lines supplying the steam generator from the emergency pumps. With the “secondary loop” shut down, heat from fission in the reactor core began accumulating within the steam generator and the primary cooling system loop, leading to the P.O.R.V. activation, and the reactor’s “scramming”. The “scram” triggered control rods to drop in 69 tubes among the 36,816 uranium oxide fuel rods to absorb neutrons and stop the chain reaction fission process in the core of Unit 2.
Following the reactor’s “scramming”, an equipment malfunction occurred when the P.O.R.V. failed to automatically close as designed after reducing pressure within the pressurizer vessel on the primary cooling system loop. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this equipment malfunction initiated a small “Loss Of Coolant Accident” (L.O.C.A.). Fortunately, the reactor’s High Pressure Injection system (H.P.I.) automatically began pumping water into the primary cooling system to compensate for the loss of coolant through the stuck valve. Even though fission was no longer generating heat, the decaying radioactive materials within the reactor still require continuous cooling until the reactor is brought to cold shutdown.
(Note that the dropping of control rods to effect an automatic scramming immediately reduced the heat output in the core to 160 megawatts, or about 6% of that generated while the fission reaction was occurring. Normally, the heat release rate after the first hour would drop to about 30 megawatts and, over next three hours, to 20 megawatts. This is still a lot of heat—enough to severely damage the fuel assemblies in the core. Twenty megawatts is equivalent to the heat release rate from a big wind-driven apartment fire. It is critical that an uninterrupted flow of cooling water circulates through the core to prevent damage. See the “Riverside Firemen’s Retreat” page on this site to learn how heat release rate applies to the work firefighters do.)
Enter human error, enhanced by insufficient training, missing protocols, and a poorly designed control panel (including, at one point, 100 alarms in simultaneous operation!), and soon the small L.O.C.A. was converted into a destructive meltdown event. An illuminated light on the reactor control panel indicated that a signal had been sent to close the stuck P.O.R.V.; it did not indicate the valve’s position—open or closed. It would be two hours before operators were aware of the stuck valve and would take corrective action to close the back-up “block valve” to stop the leak. Had the H.P.I. system continued operating autonomously throughout this two hour period, no damage to the reactor core would have resulted. However, operators began overriding the emergency H.P.I. system by throttling the flow of 1,000 gallons per minute back to less than 100, hoping to maintain a certain water level in the reactor. This action was inspired by an operator’s doctrine encouraging them not to let the primary cooling system ever “go solid” (fill completely with water). For “extended periods” during the first day of the event, the H.P.I. was throttled back or shut down. It was during these periods that much of the core of the reactor was exposed, resulting in its meltdown.
The Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island reveals how haphazard and unorganized the notifications of key persons and agencies were from the very start of the accident. The mayor of Harrisburg at the time, Paul Doutrich, first heard about the accident when he received a phone call from a radio station in Boston inquiring what he planned to do about the nuclear emergency. They had to fill him in first.
The public gained little if any confidence from clumsy and often contradictory public statements made by the plant operator, regulators, and various other government officials during the first days of the event. The oscillations between dire warnings on one hand, and assurances that there is no need to worry on the other, frightened and angered thousands of people in 1979. Memories of these awkward and inconsistent messages continue to be the dominant recollections for many residents of the lower Susquehanna region to this very day.
Here, for your entertainment pleasure, is how the media and general public first learned of the accident on the morning of March 28, 1979 (quoted from the Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island)…
“WKBO, a Harrisburg “Top 40” music station, broke the story of TMI-2 on its 8:25 a.m. newscast. The station’s traffic reporter, known as Captain Dave, uses an automobile equipped with a C.B. radio to gather his information. At about 8:00 a.m., he heard police and fire fighters were mobilizing in Middletown and relayed this to his station. Mike Pintek, WKBO’s news director, called Three Mile Island and asked for a public relations official. He was connected instead with the control room to a man who told him: “I can’t talk now, we’ve got a problem.” The man denied that “there are any fire engines,” and told Pintek to telephone Met Ed’s headquarters in Reading, Pennsylvania.”
By late Wednesday afternoon, the reports from the plant indicated that everything was under control. Day one would end with the residents of the lower Susquehanna area presuming they would hear little more of this event. Then came Friday.
SOURCES
Forman, Paul, and Sherman, Roger. 2004. Three Mile Island: The Inside Story. Web presentation based upon Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibit, as accessed March 28, 2019. https://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/index.htm
Kemeny, John G., et al. 1979. Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island; The Need for Change: The Legacy of TMI. U. S. Government Printing Office. Washington, D.C.
Tundra Swan Migration
There was a hint of what was to come. If you were out and about before dawn this morning, you may have been lucky enough to hear them passing by high overhead. It was 5:30 A.M. when I opened the door and was greeted by that distinctive nasal whistle. Stepping through the threshold and into the cold, I peered into the starry sky and saw them, their feathers glowing orange in the diffused light from the streets and parking lots below. Their size and snow-white plumage make Tundra Swans one of the few species of migrating birds you’ll ever get to visibly discern in a dark moonless nighttime sky.
The calm air at daybreak and through the morning transitioned to a steady breeze from the south in the afternoon. Could this be it? Would this be that one day in late February or the first half of March each year when waterfowl (and other birds too) seem to take advantage of the favorable wind to initiate an “exodus” and move in conspicuous numbers up the lower Susquehanna valley on their way to breeding grounds in the north? Well, indeed it would be. And with the wind speeding up the parade, an observer at a fixed point on the ground gets to see more birds fly by.
In the late afternoon, an observation location in the Gettysburg Basin about five miles east of Conewago Falls in Lancaster County seemed to be well-aligned with a northwesterly flight path for migrating Tundra Swans. At about 5:30 P.M., the clear sky began clouding over, possibly pushing high-flying birds more readily into view. During the next several hours, over three thousand Tundra Swans passed overhead, flocks continuing to pass for a short time after nightfall. There were more than one thousand Canada Geese, the most numerous species on similar days in previous years. Sometimes on such a day there are numerous ducks. Not today. The timing, location, and conditions put Tundra Swans in the spotlight for this year’s show.
Other migrants moving concurrently with the waterfowl included Ring-billed Gulls, American Herring Gulls (6+), American Robins (50+), Red-winged Blackbirds (500+), and Common Grackles (100+).
Though I’ve only seen such a spectacle only once during a season in recent years, there certainly could be another large flight of ducks, geese, or swans yet to come. The breeze is forecast to continue from southerly directions for at least another day. Keep you eyes skyward, no matter where you might happen to be in the lower Susquehanna valley. These or other migratory species may put on another show, a “big day”, just for you.
2018 Migration Count Summary: Rainout
If you were a regular visitor to this website during the autumn of 2017, you will recall the proliferation of posts detailing the bird migration at Conewago Falls during the season. The lookout site among the Pothole Rocks remained high and dry for most of the count’s duration.
In the fall of 2018, those lookout rocks were never to be seen. There was to be no safe perch for a would-be observer. There was no attempt to conduct a tally of passing migrants. If you live in the lower Susquehanna River drainage basin, you know why—rain—record setting rain.
Our Oasis
Fifty years ago, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave Earth and journey to its closest celestial body, the Moon. Launching on the morning of December 21, 1968, they were the first to enter space from atop the powerful and complex Saturn V rocket. Their eyes would be the first to see the Earth as an entire sphere and to orbit the Moon and observe its obscure far side. For many back home, they changed not only the way we understand the Moon, but how we perceive the uniqueness and fragility of Earth.
Said Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell during a televised broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve half a century ago, “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.”
Spotted Lanternfly in the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed
Second Mountain Hawk Watch is located on a ridge top along the northern edge of the Fort Indiantown Gap Military Reservation and the southern edge of State Game Lands 211 in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. The valley on the north side of the ridge, also known as St. Anthony’s Wilderness, is drained to the Susquehanna by Stony Creek. The valley to the south is drained toward the river by Indiantown Run, a tributary of Swatara Creek.
The hawk watch is able to operate at this prime location for observing the autumn migration of birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and bats through the courtesy of the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Garrison Commander at Fort Indiantown Gap. The Second Mountain Hawk Watch Association is a non-profit organization that staffs the count site daily throughout the season and reports data to the North American Hawk Watch Association (posted daily at hawkcount.org).
Today, Second Mountain Hawk Watch was populated by observers who enjoyed today’s break in the rainy weather with a visit to the lookout to see what birds might be on the move. All were anxiously awaiting a big flight of Broad-winged Hawks, a forest-dwelling Neotropical species that often travels back to its wintering grounds in groups exceeding one hundred birds. Each autumn, many inland hawk watches in the northeast experience at least one day in mid-September with a Broad-winged Hawk count exceeding 1,000 birds. They are an early-season migrant and today’s southeast winds ahead of the remnants of Hurricane Florence (currently in the Carolinas) could push southwest-heading “Broad-wings” out of the Piedmont Province and into the Ridge and Valley Province for a pass by the Second Mountain lookout.
The flight turned out to be steady through the day with over three hundred Broad-winged Hawks sighted. The largest group consisted of several dozen birds. We would hope there are probably many more yet to come after the Florence rains pass through the northeast and out to sea by mid-week. Also seen today were Bald Eagles, Ospreys, American Kestrels, and a migrating Red-headed Woodpecker.
Migrating insects included Monarch butterflies, and the three commonest species of migratory dragonflies: Wandering Glider, Black Saddlebags, and Common Green Darner. The Common Green Darners swarmed the lookout by the dozens late in the afternoon and attracted a couple of American Kestrels, which had apparently set down from a day of migration. American Kestrels and Broad-winged Hawks feed upon dragonflies and often migrate in tandem with them for at least a portion of their journey.
Still later, as the last of the Broad-winged Hawks descended from great heights and began passing by just above the trees looking for a place to settle down, a most unwelcome visitor arrived at the lookout. It glided in from the St. Anthony’s Wilderness side of the ridge on showy crimson-red wings, then became nearly indiscernible from gray tree bark when it landed on a limb. It was the dreaded and potentially invasive Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula). This large leafhopper is native to Asia and was first discovered in North America in the Oley Valley of eastern Berks County, Pennsylvania in 2014. The larval stage is exceptionally damaging to cultivated grape and orchard crops. It poses a threat to forest trees as well. Despite efforts to contain the species through quarantine and other methods, it’s obviously spreading quickly. Here on the Second Mountain lookout, we know that wind has a huge influence on the movement of birds and insects. The east and southeast winds we’ve experienced for nearly a week may be carrying Spotted Lanternflies well out of their most recent range and into the forests of the Ridge and Valley Province. We do know for certain that the Spotted Lanternfly has found its way into the Lower Susquehanna River Watershed.
