Deep Ocean to Deep Space

I attended the E2Tech Annual Meeting and Forum on “Risky Business: Floods, Fatalities and Fear” this past Thursday morning. In my opinion the title was a bit exaggerated but you get the idea. The panelists came were from engineering, geology,  environmental  and  toxicology  backgrounds. The focus was on evaluating the risks they saw facing the people of Maine and they did not get into the technology of how to resolve them.

Diane Silverman lead the panel and gave us an overview of the components of risk; probability, prescription, toxicity, exposure and other factors to ponder.

Andrew Smith presented risk factors for three threats, lead, arsenic and heat. All are very dangerous but the first two we are making progress on and the threats are being reduced. However Maine is perhaps the least air conditioned state in the nation so a major heat wave could cause many deaths.

Patrick Gwinn presented a over view of where we are coming from, the progress being made and where we are likely to be going in the future. We have made good progress but the number of chemicals now produced is so large that even under the most favorable conditions it would be more than a 100 years before the EPA could get around to evaluating them all. We need to prioritize how we spend our resources on assessing chemical risk.

Robert Gerber gave examples of how he assesses risks of flooding and landsliding. Real vs. perceived risk, deterministic vs. probabilistic modeling. Ocean vs. Riverine flooding. And an interesting example of a flooding risk analysis he did for the Yarmoth Historical Society when they were offered a building for “free” which is on the edge of a flood plain.

Points I am still pondering:

What will Maine do to respond to the risk of heat waves when we have so little air conditioning and when we are likely to need it the most other environmental events are likely to task our electric power grid?

How often will we come up short on being prepared when FEMA only looks at historic data and not the trends?

We were quizzed by electronic polling on our own assessment of various risks before and after the presentations and I can tell my bias is towards things we can do something about which is an acknowledged approach. Lets get busy on what we can fix.

You can find the presentations at: http://www.e2tech.org/event-2069427