Ineptitudities

I know that's not a word, but it's been that kind of a day.

Glued to the news reports of hurricane damage and floating corpses while I watch my city get deluged by the remnants of Katrina...she swept up into the Ohio Valley and it's been pouring and windy here since about six this morning. Nothing like what happened in the South, but impressive nonetheless; lots of flooding and weather alerts and such going on, in the midst of...


...this. Yet again, Cincinnati has made the national news for something utterly and completely inept that could have been prevented. A train-car tanker full of styrene has been sitting on some railroad tracks near the Lunken airport (east side of town) for around nine months, apparently forgotten by the powers that be. But when you leave a tank of pressurized styrene sitting all by its lonesome for nine months, through one of the hottest summers on record, apparently some problems can develop, such as those chemicals rotting a hole in the top of the tanker and starting to spew forth. This in turn necessitates such precautions as the evacuation of hundreds of people from their homes in the area, the closing of local schools and businesses and a whole bunch of roads, and the fire department spraying cold water all over the damned leaking mess around the clock because there's a danger that it could explode, sending us all to high heaven and releasing a shitload of benzene into the air.

Oy. The mayor is pissed that the railroad company left this thing just sitting there. He said, and I quote, "Wal-mart can track a pair of socks, but you can't track a train car filled with dangerous chemicals." Also, our local terrorism unit is investigating. What are they going to find, terrorists? Ha! No. They're going to find ineptitudities.

Coming into work this morning, I walked through the wind and the rain coming at me sideways, rendering my umbrella useless, smelling the stink of this thing. Since the hurricane is pushing all the air around in funny ways, the wind is blowing east to west instead of the way it's supposed to, which means the stink of this crud is all over downtown now. Luckily this building has a good ventilation system, and if the tanker explodes like they're afraid it will, it's far enough away that it shouldn't hit us here.

Interesting days.