Skip to main content

DNREC: The left hand and the right hand

There is a brief, bland reference in today's News Journal to the Delaware City train derailment story I got from Jen Wallace of the Green Party yesterday:
Also sought is a clarification of rules for reporting problems, mishaps or spills at the refinery’s new crude-by-rail loading and unloading operation. Four cars derailed during a weekend accident at the new facility late last month, but no public notice was required because none of the tanks leaked.
Now we could go into the rationalizations provided by PBF Energy or the criticism of their behavior by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, but that's too easy.

Instead, let's go to DNREC.

Yesterday Jen Wallace let me know, well before noon, that Ravi Rangan of DNREC had confirmed that the derailment had occurred, and also confirmed other details, such as PBF Energy being unprepared to get the cars back on the tracks without waiting hours for equipment from out of state.

So, curious, I called the DNREC Public Information number and asked about the incident, just to see what the spin would be.

The spin:  "I haven't heard anything about that.  I'll have to check and get back to you."

Still waiting.

With a little luck, the DNREC Public Information Officer might actually read today's newspaper and call me up to tell me about the derailment that, for some strange reason, she couldn't find out about even after other DNREC officials had already publicly confirmed it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?