Monday, March 26, 2018

FREE, NO COST (except travel & lodging) Training Offered . EPA Environmental. State, County, City, Township, and Federal Employees.

Keep in mind that all incidents and disasters are local until federal response or other coordinating entity arrives on scene.
Have someone familiar in your local office at the State, County, City, township familiar with environmental Superfund process for the protection of your community. 
Don’t wait until the event occurs, get ahead of the curve.
BEMA International


** Attendees must be Federal, Tribal, State or Local agency employees. 
   
     Contractors, private industry and academia are not permitted to attend
    either course.  Travel/lodging costs are the responsibility of the student or
    student’s employer. **

Oil Response Training - Combined Backwater and Fast Water
Hosted by Environmental Response Training Program (ERTP)
ERT – OSRTI
Portsmouth, NH
April 16, 2018 - April 19, 2018
Password:  cosmo1
This course is custom designed to meet requests of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Federal On-Scene-Coordinators (FOSCs) in their regions. The course may be from 2 days to 5 days in length dependent on request and agenda development. The course may contain any of the course content and field work found in the Slow, Backwater Practical Course or Fast Water Practical Courses listed in their course descriptions. Dependent upon selection of course work participants will deploy boom on lakes or rivers; establish oil recovery sites; provide protection to sensitive areas and shoreline with boom; operate boats on lakes or rivers; install dikes, dams and filter fences on streams; and install French drains and cut-off walls.
Instructional methods will include classroom instruction and field work.

Introduction to Risk Assessment Guidance With Expanded Eco-Risk
Hosted by Environmental Response Training Program (ERTP)
ERT – OSRTI
Augusta, ME 
May 15, 2018 - May 18, 2018 
Registration:  https://trainex.org/classdetails.cfm?courseid=1561&classid=7759
This 3.5-day course provides participants with the fundamentals of risk assessment as applied to the Superfund cleanup process. This course is designed to present an introduction to the Superfund risk assessment process to Project Managers, On-Scene Coordinators, Risk Assessment Reviewers, and potentially new Risk Assessors working at hazardous waste sites or treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. The course assumes little experience with toxicology and risk assessment or knowledge regarding Superfund risk assessment guidance.

Waste Treatment, Transportation, and Disposal
Hosted by U.S. EPA
Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation
Boston, MA
June 6, 2018 - June 7, 2018
Waste Treatment, Transportation and Disposal, a 2-day advanced training course, focuses on specific technical and regulatory issues that On Scene Coordinators (OSC) and Remedial Project Managers (RPM) must address when treating, transporting and disposing of waste.
 

Massive Oil Fields in Texas Are Heaving, Sinking, And Opening Up Like Mouths

Massive Oil Fields in Texas Are Heaving, Sinking, And Opening Up Like Mouths
https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-oil-fields-in-texas-ar…

4,000 square miles of geohazard.
PETER DOCKRILL
22 MAR 2018

It began with sinkholes. Two of them, gaping mouths to nowhere opening up as if to swallow the town of Wink, Texas. As they expanded, there were fears they might collide, morphing into one giant void.

They first emerged in 1980, and things haven't gotten better since. Now, an unprecedented study reveals Wink and its vast sinkholes are just a tiny part of a much bigger problem – a vast stretch of historical oil fields that are heaving and sinking, covering an area almost the size of Connecticut.

"The ground movement we're seeing is not normal," explains geophysicist Zhong Lu from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"The ground doesn't typically do this without some cause."

235 texas oil wink geohazard 3Safety sign in Wink (Nicolas Henderson/Flickr)

Lu was part of a team who in 2016 used satellite data to reveal that the two Wink sinkholes weren't frozen in place, but could be about to expand in response to subsidence detected in and around the town.

Now, the researchers have used the same techniques, zoomed out, to find that an area encompassing some 10,360 square kilometres (4,000 square miles) – covering four counties and six towns – is in fact sinking and uplifting, in parts by as much as 1 metre (40 inches).

"These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water," Lu says.

"Proactive, continuous detailed monitoring from space is critical to secure the safety of people and property."

The satellite data the team used was sourced overhead in between November 2014 and April 2017, and coupled with oil-well production data provided by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the researchers conclude this epic instability is the result of decades of oil extraction in the area, and its knock-on effects on rocks below the surface of the earth.

235 texas oil wink geohazard 3Ground deformation (Zhong Lu and Jin-Woo Kim/SMU)

Nobody's sure quite how the heaving and sinking will develop from here, but the bad news is the phenomenon might not be contained to the already vast expanse of oil fields the researchers have so far looked – the extent of the damage could ultimately be way bigger.

"Our analysis looked at just this 4,000-square-mile area," says one of the team, geodetic scientist Jin-Woo Kim.

"We're fairly certain that when we look further, and we are, that we'll find there's ground movement even beyond that. This region of Texas has been punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s and our findings associate that activity with ground movement."

The subsidence issues – which are thought to be tied to seismic activity that's previously been linked to oil and gas operations in Texas – will be monitored ongoing by the team, who want to know how bad the problem is, and how far it reaches.

"We have seen a surge of seismic activity around [the town of] Pecos in the last five to six years. Before 2012, earthquakes had not been recorded there," Kim says.

"Although earthquakes and surface subsidence could be coincidence, we cannot exclude the possibility that these earthquakes were induced by hydrocarbon production activities."

There's a lot more research to be done before we understand the full extent of this heaving landscape, but it sure looks like a legacy of plunder spanning most of a century has left the ground under Texas disturbed, even famished, and the time has come where it wants something back in return.

The findings are reported in Scientific Reports.





National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association 
1029 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC 20005
Office: (202) 628-8833
Fax No.: (202) 393-1816
Email: latinofarmers@live.com 
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org 

Cheap, Dirty Meat. 2018.

48 Million Sickened Every Year by Cheap, Dirty Meat

February 22, 2018

Organic Consumers Association
 by Katherine Paul
If you live in the U.S., you’re far more likely to get hit with salmonella or some other foodborne illness, than if you live in the U.K.  You can thank the factory farm industry for that.
An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian found “shockingly high” levels of foodborne illness in the U.S. The Guardian reports that “annually, around 14.7 percent (48 million people) of the U.S. population is estimated to suffer from an illness, compared to around 1.5 percent (1 million) in the UK. In the U.S., 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year of foodborne diseases.
Driving these grim statistics is the multi-billion-dollar industrial factory farm industry that not only makes us sick, but pollutes our water and airexploits workers, is causing an antibiotic resistance crisis and is unconscionably inhumane
And it’s all done in the name of “cheap food.”
TBIJ and the Guardian conducted its investigation based on U.S. government documents containing data on 47 meat plants across the U.S. According to the Guardian:
Some of the documents relate to certain companies, including Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the US’s biggest poultry producers, and Swift Pork. Although not a comprehensive portrait of the sector - there are around 6,000 US plants regularly inspected by Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) - the documents provide a snapshot of issues rarely detailed in public which has rung alarm bells with campaigners in both the US and UK.
Those rarely detailed “issues” include: meat contaminated with fecal matter; meat processing equipment contaminated with grease and blood; and chicken dropped on the floor then rinsed with chlorine and put back in the production line.
It’s enough to make anyone’s stomach turn.
It’s also enough to make consumers and entire neighborhoods revolt, and citizens to get more politically active.
Last year, the citizens of Tonganoxie, Kansas (population 5,000) stood up to Tyson and successfully scuttled the meat giant’s planned $320-million chicken factory farm.
In Nebraska, citizens are trying to keep out a $180-million factory farm poultry operation that Costco wants to build in the small town of Fremont. (Please sign our petition asking Costco to stop raising and selling factory farm chicken).
People aren’t just getting active. They’re also getting political.
Civil Eats recently reported on candidates running in Iowa, Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania who all have one thing in common: They want better food and farming policies in their states.
One of those candidates is Brandy Brooks, who’s running for Montgomery County (Maryland) city council. Brooks told Civil Eats:
“Food is this amazing lens for talking about justice. You could be talking about land use justice, racial justice, economic justice, immigration, health justice, housing—you can talk about everything through the lens of food.”
Brooks is right. Food is at the center of so many of the issues facing communities large and small, across the globe. That’s why Organic Consumers Association (OCA) partners closely with Regeneration Internationalas we look to transition from our industrial, degenerative food system to a regenerative alternative.
It’s also why we’re inviting consumers to get more politically active through our Citizens Regeneration Lobby
The factory farm industry tells us there’s no other way to produce meat. But farmers like Ron Rosmann in Harlan, Iowa, are proof that alternatives exist. The Main Street Project is proof that those alternatives can be scaled up to meet the growing demand for regeneratively produced meat.
We just need to take a stand against Big Meat. Our health depends on it.
Katherine Paul is associate director of the Organic Consumers Association

National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC 20005
Office: 202-628-8833
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org

March 2018. Congress Approves FY18 Funding Levels for Criminal Justice Programs

Congress Approves FY18 Funding Levels for Criminal Justice Programs
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Congress Approves FY18 Funding Levels for Criminal Justice Programs


Funding bill provides greater iInvestment in reentry and mental health treatment programs that increase public safety

Last week, the U.S. Congress approved the $1.3 trillion Fiscal Year 2018 Omnibus Appropriations bill that would set government funding through Sep. 30, 2018. The bill provides $30.3 billion for the U.S. Department of Justice and includes $2.9 billion for various state and local law enforcement assistance grant programs.
Learn more about the FY18 Omnibus Appropriations bill

Copyright © 2018 The Council of State Governments Justice Center, All rights reserved.



April 8, 2018. Los Angeles. Azusa Street Revival


Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Webinar. FEMA 2018-2022 Strategic Plan Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Private Sector Advisory

FEMA Webinar on 2018-2022 Strategic Plan


The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) invites you to join a webinar to discuss its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan (released on March 15, 2018.) The plan seeks to unify and further professionalize emergency management across the country, helping us build a stronger agency and a more resilient nation. 

WHAT: FEMA 2018-2022 Strategic Plan Webinar
WHO: David Bibo, FEMA Associate Administrator for Policy, Program Analysis, and International Affairs (Acting)
WHEN: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 2-3 PM EDT

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION:
Via Phone:     Dial in: 323-701-0223
Participant passcode: 883180
Via Adobe Connect: https://fema.connectsolutions.com/stratplan101iga2/ Please sign in as a “Guest” and remember to mute your line if not speaking.
Test your Adobe Connect connection prior to the meeting by clicking here.

BACKGROUND:

When disasters strike, FEMA cannot succeed alone in the mission of helping people.  We need to work in coordination with our partners and stakeholders to ensure that response and recovery is federally coordinated, state managed, and locally executed. This strategic plan strives to rally all our stakeholders and the Agency around the three goals of preparedness, catastrophic readiness, and reducing complexity.
The Strategic Plan outlines three ambitious, but achievable goals for the next five years:
  • Build a culture of preparedness
  • Every segment of our society, from individual to government, industry to philanthropy, must be encouraged and empowered with the information it needs to prepare for the inevitable impacts of future disasters.
  • Ready the nation for catastrophic disasters
  • FEMA will work with its partners across all levels of government to strengthen partnerships and access new sources of scalable capabilities to quickly meet the needs of overwhelming incidents.
  • Reduce the complexity of FEMA
  • FEMA must continue to be responsible stewards of the resources we are entrusted to administer. We must also do everything that we can to leverage data to drive decision-making, and reduce the administrative and bureaucratic burdens that impede impacted individuals and communities from quickly receiving the assistance they need. 
FEMA is committed to continued engagement with our partners as we implement the Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan incorporates feedback received from you through previous engagements, and we want to continue that discussion as we define best ways to capture and measure successful implementation of the Strategic Plan and its goals. We value the diverse perspectives and insight each of you provide based on your experiences with disasters, and we seek this input as we begin to move forward.

"The Making of a Resilient Future: Disaster Risk in Developing Countries.". 2018. FEMA PrepTalks


The Federal Emergency Management Agency, in partnership with organizations that collectively represent the emergency management profession, released today the sixth video presentation from the inaugural PrepTalks Symposium, Francis Ghesquiere's "The Making of a Resilient Future: Disaster Risk in Developing Countries."

In his PrepTalk, Ghesquiere presents a global perspective on the need to improve disaster resilience. He highlights the scale of the challenge, from rapid urbanization in areas at risk of earthquakes and floods, to the increasing frequency and intensity of storms. He discusses the need for all sectors to participate in planning and to incorporate future trends in population growth, urbanization, and increasing risk due to future environmental conditions. Ghesquiere heads the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), a global partnership hosted by the World Bank with programs in more than 80 countries. In a recent report, The making of a riskier future: How our decisions are shaping future disaster risk, GFDRR demonstrates how "tomorrow's risk is being built today. We must therefore move away from risk assessments that show risk at a single point in the present and move instead towards risk assessments that can guide decision makers towards a resilient future." Ghesquiere focuses on the importance of this future perspective in his PrepTalk. 

Ghesquiere's presentation, the question-and-answer session that followed, a discussion guide, and additional reference materials are available at https://www.fema.gov/preptalks. This is the sixth video of eight being produced from the PrepTalks Symposium held in Washington, D.C. in January. The next PrepTalks Symposium is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2018. Upcoming PrepTalk video topics include lessons learned from disaster survivors and financial literacy. The next PrepTalks video is currently scheduled for release later this month.

PrepTalks are a partnership between FEMA, the International Association of Emergency Managers, the National Emergency Management Association, the National Homeland Security Consortium, and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Congratulations. VFW Teacher of the Year Award. Shondra Pegram Wooden


Congratulations Shondra!

As a veteran of foreign wars it is truly an honor that you are being recognized for your outstanding work in not only teaching, but other works for the youth of Prince Georges County (PGC), Maryland. 

Mark Dozier and I enjoyed the 2017 Summer PGC Bowie State University Capstone Homeland Security & Emergency Management program.  PGC has continued the program throughout the academic year which can be attributed to the initial summer program you assisted in establishing with your hard work.

As a member of BEMA International we stand with you.  Congratulations.

Charles D. Sharp 
CEO, Black Emergency Managers Association International


 
 
Good morning!!!! I just wanted to share with u an honor 
I received last week. I was named Teacher of the Year by the Veterans of Foreign Wars  (VFW) šŸ˜Š
 
Shondra



Black Emergency Managers Association
           International
1231  Good Hope Road  S.E.
Washington, D.C.  20020
Office:   202-618-9097 
bEMA International 
GC_Endorser_BLUE_RGB_GRADIE     






“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ¯
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Cooperation, Collaboration, Communication, Coordination, Community engagement, and  Partnering (C5&P)             A 501 (c) 3 organization.


Wednesday, March 14, 2018

March 2018. Solar grant funding available to District residents!



The 51st State Solar Co-op is open to all District residents, and income-qualified participants may be eligible for a grant to cover their solar installation!
Solar United Neighbors logo
Hi Randall,
The 51st State Solar Co-op is open to all District residents and offers grant funding for income qualified households to cover the cost of installing a solar system that will cut your electric bill in half! All co-op participants whether they are eligible for grant funding or participating at market rate will own their solar systems from day-one. If you're interested in learning more, be sure to join our next information session on Wednesday, March 28 at the Takoma Community Center!

You can also help us spread the word by letting your family, friends, and colleagues know about the 51st State Solar Co-op by forwarding this email or sharing the event on Facebook.

51st State Solar Co-op Information Session
Wednesday, March 28
7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Takoma Community Center
300 Van Buren Street NW
Washington DC, 20012
This co-op is a project funded by Solar for All, a program of the District of ColumbiaĆ¢€™s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) that seeks to provide the benefits of solar electricity to 100,000 low-income households and reduce their energy bills by 50% by 2032. The program, which was established by the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) Expansion Amendment Act of 2016, is funded by the Renewable Energy Development Fund (REDF).

The co-op will focus on expanding access to solar for low- and moderate-income households, but is open to all District homeowners, no matter their income or neighborhood. For more information, please visit the 51st State Solar Co-op landing page.
Hope to see you there!
Yesenia Rivera
D.C. Program Director, Solar United Neighbors
About us | Go solar | Learn the issues | Get involved | Membership | Donate


 
DC SUN is now Solar United Neighbors. We are a community of people building a new energy system with rooftop solar as the cornerstone. We help people go solar, join together, and fight for their energy rights.
 
www.solarunitedneighbors.org  1115 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC, 20005

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