• Quake Damaged Trans-Alaska Pipeline Still Shut Down
  
• Chronic Wasting Studies Explore Cross-Species Jump
  
• Yellowstone Rangers' Health at Risk from Snowmobiles
  
• Teaching Bacteria to Find PCBs Delicious
  
• Riverbed Microbe Consumes Industrial Solvent
  
• California Protects Coasts, Wetlands, Farms
  
• Suquamish Tribe, Washington State Swap Tidelands
  
• Cruise Ships Agree to Keep Hawaiian Waters Clean
  

Quake Damaged Trans-Alaska Pipeline Still Shut Down

Mike Heatwole of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which maintains the pipeline, says inspections of the 200 miles of pipeline that have been damaged are being done by eight teams of engineers and pipeline maintenance specialists. These experts have in depth knowledge of Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) design and maintenance requirements and earthquake damage assessment skills.

Although there is no apparent damage to the integrity of the line, pipeline support structures near milepost 588 were displaced during the quake. The portions of the vertical support members displaced during the quake were the shoes which allow the pipeline to slide along the crossbeams in between the vertical supports.

At eight locations, there are shoes on the ground, and at five locations there are crossbeams on the ground. The shoes and crossbeams are part of the support assembly for above ground pipe.

In addition, the soil surface above remote gate valve 91 showed several fissures following the quake. Excavation and evaluation at this location is underway.

Based on the output from the Earthquake Monitoring System, a list of approximately 160 items has been prepared for inspection and evaluation prior to restarting the pipeline. Of the 160, 95 of those items have been evaluated, Heatwole says.

The pipeline is shut down and no leaks have been detected at this time. It has not been determined how long the pipeline will be down, but a more accurate estimate will be released after a comprehensive review of the affected area.

Since the earthquake, one tanker has been loaded out of the Port of Valdez. The oil inventory, already low at the time of the quake, has been depleted, Heatwole says.

There is no tanker loading taking place at this time. Tanker loading can resume approximately 24 hours after the restarting of the pipeline.

Chronic Wasting Studies Explore Cross-Species Jump

Overall, the Health and Human Services (HHS) department has proposed spending more than $29.2 million in fiscal year 2003 to expand research efforts to fight the growing threat of prion diseases, including chronic wasting disease among the nation's deer and elk populations.

Chronic wasting disease is one form of a group of fatal brain diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. These diseases include bovine spongiform encephalopathy - BSE or mad cow disease in cattle - scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

The hallmark of TSE disease is accumulation in the brain of abnormal prion proteins - misshapen versions of the normal prion proteins found on the surface of brain cells. There is no evidence that CWD has caused illness in humans.

"We must determine whether CWD is a threat to our food supply and how best to stop the spread of this disease in our deer and elk herds," Thompson said. "We will aggressively pursue innovative methods to expand research and direct assistance to states to fight the spread of CWD."

Scientists do not know yet whether deer or elk with chronic wasting disease might also transmit some form of TSE disease to people who eat or have close contact with them. With the disease beginning to spread over a wider geographical area in the United States, answering this question is of critical public health importance, Thompson said.

Chronic wasting disease is known to affect free ranging deer and elk in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Wisconsin and New Mexico. States that have or have had farmed elk herds with the disease are South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Montana.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will commission a formal risk assessment regarding the present potential human health consequences of chronic wasting disease and another on CWD transmissibility.

The studies will identify areas were data gaps exist and where research efforts should be focused to reduce the potential threat to health posed by chronic wasting disease.

The FDA studies are being commissioned as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has intensified its efforts to understand and fight this disease. Recently, a component of NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), awarded a seven year, $8.4 million contract to Colorado State University to establish an emerging disease research center focused on chronic wasting disease.

Scientists at NIAID's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, have initiated studies aimed at developing new therapies against chronic wasting disease. Researchers there plan experiments to determine whether the disease can be transmitted from deer or elk to monkeys, another model for assessing the potential for human transmission.

Recently, Rocky Mountain Lab scientists established that another TSE disease, hamster scrapie, could jump species - adapting to and causing disease in mice.

RML scientists have designed transgenic mice to make studying chronic wasting disease faster and less expensive. These mice carry the prion proteins of deer and elk, so their bodies react to the disease as a deer or elk would. Scientists will study the disease in these mice rather than in the larger animals, which are much more expensive and labor intensive to keep.

NIH has budgeted an estimated $24.3 million for TSE research in fiscal year 2002 and has requested $26.4 million in fiscal year 2003 - an 8.7 percent increase. Secretary Thompson called on Congress to move quickly to approve the HHS budget for fiscal year 2003, which began October 1.

"At a time when this devastating disease is harming deer and elk herds throughout America, we must do all we can to provide additional resources to research and combat CWD," Secretary Thompson said. "This is groundbreaking research that will have tangible implications for hunters and farmers."

The new Colorado research center in Ft. Collins, headed by veterinarian Dr. Edward Hoover, will investigate the mechanics of chronic wasting disease infection in deer and elk, especially in the immune system's lymphoid tissues. Such studies underlie the search for improved diagnostics and therapies.

Scientists at the Ft. Collins center will work on a possible vaccine to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.

Yellowstone Rangers' Health at Risk from Snowmobiles

Last winter, Yellowstone National Park equipped rangers with respirators to protect their lungs as they worked in kiosks where snowmobiles entering the park spewed pollution containing unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide, benzene, and formaldehyde.

Now, some park employees are experiencing hearing loss, and the world's first national park is instituting a hearing conservation program as the snowmobile season approaches.

The park has purchased and is testing high-tech ear protection, battery powered earmuffs that screen out high decibel noise. Park employees will receive training in how to protect their hearing from the roar and whine of snowmobiles.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality says, "Noise can be a health concern for employees working around snowmobiles, since it can cause hearing loss and increased blood pressure. Studies have shown hearing loss for persons subjected to 73 decibels for eight hours per day over 40 years, or for exposures to 85 decibels over a shorter number of years."

Concerns about the human health impacts from snowmobile use in Yellowstone have been expressed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Three environmental groups, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Natural Trails and Waters Coalition, and The Wilderness Society, warn that even after the fifth comment period in three years to demonstrate overwhelming public support for replacing snowmobile use in Yellowstone with snowcoach access, on November 12, the Bush administration will make public its plan to continue snowmobile use in Yellowstone.

After a decade of study, the Park Service decided in November 2000 to institute a gradual phaseout of snowmobile use in Yellowstone, beginning this winter. But the Bush administration withheld implementation of this decision to settle a lawsuit brought by snowmobile manufacturers and the state of Wyoming, which wants to protect tourism dollars.

Limitations on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, Bush administration officials have said, will be very strict. Yellowstone will not see "business as usual." The Park Service "will not allow impairment."

But the three groups say, in draft alternatives issued earlier this year, it was clear that "continued snowmobile use would come with less protection for human health and a heavier toll on Yellowstone and its wildlife."

Even the more restrictive of two options for continued snowmobile use would expand the acreage within Yellowstone where visitors would hear the whine of machines more often than not. The snowmobiles would emit more carbon monoxide and other pollutants into Yellowstone's air than snowcoaches, and the machines would conflict with winter fatigued wildlife.

A technical fix for snowmobile noise may be on the horizon. In 2000, State University of New York Buffalo engineering students designed a way to eliminate snowmobile noise and air pollution, winning first place in a contest sponsored by the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE).

The students used two year old snowmobiles that had previously been rented out to visitors at Yellowstone National Park. The winning design was a four stroke engine that reduced unburned hydrocarbons to undetectable levels.

Originator of the concept, Dr. Lori Fussell of Wilson, Wyoming, is organizer and co-founder of the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge Competition that challenges engineering students to reengineer an existing snowmobile for improved emissions and noise while maintaining or improving the performance characteristics of the original snowmobile. Each year the competition harvests ideas from bright, young engineers that can reduce the health impacts of snowmobiles.

Teaching Bacteria to Find PCBs Delicious

The scientists have identified one of the key stumbling blocks that prevent microorganisms from decomposing PCBs, a family of persistent hazardous industrial chemicals that is widespread in the environment.

PCBs have persisted for decades because decomposers, such as bacteria and fungi, do not find them tasty enough.

PCBs were manufactured and used in industry for decades for their insulating qualities, but the 1960s and 1970s brought increased awareness of their toxicity to animals and mass poisonings linked to PCB contaminated food. PCBs are no longer manufactured in the United States, but their persistence makes them a worldwide problem. Many cleanup methods, such as incineration, are ineffective and may generate other toxic compounds such as dioxins.

"The globe's entire surface is now contaminated with PCBs," said Jeffrey Bolin, professor of biological sciences and a member of Purdue's Markey Center for Structural Biology and Cancer Center. "They are in the soil you walk on and in Arctic ice. They accumulate in organisms as you go up the food chain, especially in aquatic environments, which means that creatures that eat fish - like humans - are particularly likely to absorb large quantities."

"PCB molecules actually look very similar to many organic molecules that certain bacteria eat," Bolin said. "But there are enough little differences that bacteria can't quite digest them. "The process of digestion requires a long chain of chemical steps, and if the bacteria can't accomplish one of those steps, the chain is broken and digestion can't occur," Bolin said. "What we have done is isolate one of the steps that causes problems for the bacteria, a clog in the biochemical pipeline if you will."

Bolin and his research partner, Lindsay Eltis, associate professor of microbiology and biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, predict that microorganisms can learn to consume PCBs if properly bred.

"A species will fit itself to a new environment, given many generations to adapt," said Eltis. "In the case of bacteria, you can get new generations once every few minutes under proper laboratory conditions - just like breeding dogs, only much more rapidly. We hope to use certain species of bacteria with a slight taste for PCBs and improve this trait through breeding until it's strong enough to make them consume PCBs as a food source."

The potential environmental rewards are inspiring, says Eltis. "If we succeed, we could get the planet back to where it was before PCBs were ever manufactured."

This research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and Canada's National Science and Research Council. It appears on the website of the journal "Nature Structural Biology."

Riverbed Microbe Consumes Industrial Solvent

In this week’s issue of the journal "Science," researchers from MSU’s Center for Microbial Ecology report the discovery of a microbe dredged from the bottom of the Hudson River that has an appetite for TCA.

TCA – 1,1,1-Trichloroethane – is a common industrial solvent found in at least half of the U.S. Superfund sites. The newly discovered bacterium is especially valuable because it consumes TCA under water, preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere and causing ozone depletion.

“TCA was one of the remaining groundwater pollutants for which biodegradation had not been resolved,” says James Tiedje, an Michigan State University Distinguished Professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and of crop and soil sciences.

The newly discovered bacterium, labeled TCA1, shows promise as an agent to clean up soil and groundwater that is contaminated by multiple chlorinated solvents.

Microbes that devour other toxics have been isolated, but TCA remediation has remained elusive.

“For a while, people didn’t think this bug existed,” says postdoctoral student and co-author Baolin Sun. “Now we’ve solved it.”

In the article “Microbial Dehalorespiration with 1,1,1-Trichloroethane,” Tiedje’s team identified TCA1, an anaerobic bacterium with a taste for TCA.

“This is the first bacterium that breathes the chlorinated solvent TCA,” says MSU doctoral student Benjamin Griffin. “It breathes TCA, and the only way we know how to grow the bacteria is to feed it TCA.”

The MSU group found TCA1 in the sediment of the upper Hudson River in New York. The bacterium also occurs naturally in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.

TCA1 converts TCA to chloroethane, a less toxic substance that can be degraded by aerobic microbes in soil.

California Protects Coasts, Wetlands, Farms

"These funds will protect the natural and historical resources that make our coast unique while providing public access," Davis said on Friday.

The governor also announced the release of $5 million for the acquisition and restoration of 1,200 acres of tidal marsh along the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta at Dutch Slough in the city of Oakley in Contra Costa County.

"This rare opportunity allows us to protect our natural resources for future generations," Davis said. "It is critical to continue these local partnerships to protect and restore our environment while ensuring a reliable water supply for the people of this state."

The Dutch Slough site has not subsided as deeply as many other parts of the Delta, allowing for a variety of tidal march restoration activities. When restored, the site will be a key component of a series of tidal marshes that extend east nearly 20 miles from Suisun Marsh.

The slough is a transition zone between saltwater and freshwater, creating a habitat for threatened and endangered fish, including chinook salmon, Sacramento splittail, and delta smelt, and other species. Rebuilding these fish populations is intended to help ease restrictions on water management in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The state has awarded two grants totaling more than $728,000 to ensure that 300 acres of farmland in the Salinas and Central valleys will remain in agricultural use forever.

"California has some of the best farmland in the world and agriculture remains the No. 1 business in the state," Governor Gray Davis said, announcing the grants on Sunday. "These grants are a step toward balancing the needs of a growing population with those of agriculture."

The money was used to purchase agricultural conservation easements on six farms. The property owners retain ownership and control of farm operations, but the non-agricultural development potential is permanently relinquished. In return, the landowners receive monetary compensation and/or tax benefits.

The project in Merced County is expected to discourage Delhi from expanding south and encourage even more farmland conservation. That, in turn, could create habitat and watershed benefits since the Merced River is less than two miles south of the newly protected properties.

The Monterey County Agricultural and Historical Land Conservancy's acquisitions if easments on three asparagus farms near Gonzales represent one of the most strategic uses of agricultural conservation easements in the state, Governor Davis said. With the addition of the latest parcels, more than 2,000 acres of prime farmland is shielded from development.

Most of the funding for all these projects comes from Propositions 12 and 40, the parks and resources bond acts passed by the state's voters in 2000 and 2002.

Suquamish Tribe, Washington State Swap Tidelands

The tribe will obtain 9.4 acres of tidelands in front of its tribal center and in return, the state will receive 19.5 acres of tidelands on Bainbridge Island. This is the first tidelands exchange between the state and any tribe.

In order to get the deal done, the tribe will purchase the 19.5 acres from the Bainbridge Island Land Trust. The two properties involved in the agreement are directly across from one another at Agate Passage.

“This beach is home to us,” said Wayne George, executive director of the Suquamish Tribe. “I remember coming down to this beach when I was a boy and harvesting shellfish; oysters and clams are a very important part of our lives. The Suquamish people have always used this beach. We need a clean place of our own where we can come and harvest. We are going to use shellfish off this beach for our use and enjoyment.”

For the Suquamish people, the land swap is historic. The deal gives the tribe something it was lacking – land that supports oysters and clams. The state gets 10 more acres of land that will have public access and be open to recreational shellfishing. The federal parcel is biologically richer than the land received by the tribe.

Neither the tribe nor the state will be allowed to build permanent structures on the beaches, and commercial activity will be limited to conventional aquaculture activities. Access to the beach in front of the tribal center will not be limited – the state receives an easement, allowing the public to traverse the tribe’s newly acquired tidelands.

“Acquiring these tidelands is important to the Suquamish Tribe,” George said. “The Suquamish people have always eaten oysters and clams. And by obtaining these tidelands, we can continue to provide our tribal members with a source of clean shellfish.”

Cruise Ships Agree to Keep Hawaiian Waters Clean

"The cruise industry plays an important role in keeping our economy strong, and is particularly important for local eateries, retail stores and attractions," said the outgoing governor. "At the same time, it’s critical that the industry be a steward in keeping Hawaii’s environment clean. This document sets forth the standards the industry has agreed to abide by in order to meet our shared interest in preventing pollution of our air and water."

The Memorandum of Understanding signed October 25 sets rigorous standards for wastewater management, solid and hazardous waste management, and air emissions from ships in Hawaiian waters.

It is a voluntary approach, but the policy guidelines for wastewater discharge outlined in the agreement meet or exceed current Hawaii laws and regulations.

"These waste management standards reflect the Association’s commitment to preserve and protect Hawaii’s fragile marine environment," said John Hansen, president of the North West CruiseShip Association.

"All of our member lines will abide by these guidelines, and we will continue work toward advancing environmental goals that prevent waste and pollution in Hawaiian waters."

The association agrees that its member lines will not discharge waste in sensitive Hawaiian marine areas. This area includes the National Humpback Whale Sanctuary around Maui, and Penguin Banks, shallow waters that extend to the south west of Molokai, a rich fishing grounds.

Wastewater, treated or untreated, may not be discharged until ships are at least four nautical miles beyond waters 600 feet deep.

There is one exception to this discharge prohibition. If advanced wastewater treatment systems are installed on board, and the ship can verify to the state’s satisfaction that its treated discharge exceeds federal standards, the cruise ships may discharge the highly treated and disinfected wastewater beyond one nautical mile off shore when traveling at least six knots.

The North West CruiseShip Association is a nonprofit association that represents Carnival Cruise Lines, Celebrity Cruises, Crystal Cruises, Holland America Line – Westours, Norwegian Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Radisson Seven Seas Cruises, Royal Caribbean International, Seabourn Cruises and World Explorer Cruises.