The Thin Man

Chilling data on a hot, dry year

Here's the news from the Penn State Weather Station website, on the day that Al Gore was awarded he Nobel Peace Prize for his work to spread the word about man-made global warming:

This year's average high temperature so far, according to the website data, is warmer than all but 19 of the last 112 years.

This year's average low temperature so far is warmer than all but 13 of the last 112 years.

It's a dry year, too, of course. We've had less rainfall this year than all but 17 of the last 112 years.

Drier and drier

We get a thunderstorm once a week but no real rain — this year keeps heading toward one of the driest on record.

The Penn State Weather Station says only 16.31 inches of rain (including snow) has fallen this year. Only 11 of the last 112 years have been drier so far.

The weekly thunderstorms yield a third of an inch each — welcome but hardly worth the work to clean up after them.

We've had three little storms in the last three weeks — and in that time we've inched up a notch on the dry scale. Another storm is forecast for tomorrow.

The wettest year on record — 59.30 inches for all 12 months — occurred in 1996. There was a lot of snow.

The driest — 24.81 inches in all — was 1930. The Dust Bowl followed shortly.

The 112-year average: 38.76 inches. It'll take a lot of weekly third-of-an-inch gully washers to get even close.

Ferguson to change land-use zones

Ferguson Township tonight will act to protect one big tract of land from development and to clear the way for development on a another big tract.

The supervisors will hold public hearings on 155-acre Circleville Farm along Blue Course Drive and a 423-acre tract along state Route 45 and up the side of Tussey Mountain.

Supervisors plan to change the zoning of Circleville Farm from agricultural to traditional towns development, which will provide hundreds of residential housing units. The zoning on the Tussey Mountain tract will be changed to Forest and Gamelands.

Votes to actually change the zoning designations will follow the hearings.

For those who like it hot and dry

You don't need this little statistic to know this is one of the driest years on record.

The brown spots on lawns and tree leaves say it all.

But just for the record, the Penn State Weather Station says that only 12 of the last 112 years has had less rain than this year — a measly 15.22 inches.

Forecasters are also calling for a summer that's 2 degrees warmer than normal on average.

Whew!

After the storm: A tree story

Lightning struck the tree next to my house at the very start of Friday evening's storm. I didn't realize it was lightning at the time and thought it only the result of very strong wind on hardy, full-grown leaves, acting like thousands of small sails.

I was standing on the other side of the house from the tree at the time, about 30 yards away. So I guess I dodged a bullet, or rather a bolt of lightning.

There was a loud, sustained crack that tore through the stormy air and that I knew could only be the trunk of a big tree splitting. I ran from one side of the house to the other to look.

The top third of a 50-foot tree had come crashing down into my neighbor's yard, but thank goodness not on top of either her house or mine. Still, with all that in only the first moment of the storm, I turned away and braced to see what more might be visited on my lot.

It was not until first thing Saturday morning, cleaning up under a bright sky, that I realized it was lightning that had hit home. The tree, or rather the ends of both parts of it, were badly charred. The leaves on branches near the break looked not so much like moist and juicy springtime leaves but like gnarled fists of green scrambled eggs.

The fallen tree, I also found out Saturday morning, brought down my neighbor's electricity line with it, and her TV cable. My tree also took down several stout limbs of her own trees. My insurance agent  Monday morning called everything an act of God.

The yard was a big mess. It's amazing how much different a tree looks when it's no longer upright reaching for the sky, but limp and fallen on the ground. It took a full Saturday's work to clean up.

But I got to know a little about a couple of saws I keep around the house. I got a small sense of satisfaction for having the tools on hand in the first place. And I also got to say something out loud to my spouse that it was nice to be able to say: It could have been worse.

Winds of change worry College leaders

College Township leaders are worried that a commercial wind turbine operator could try to put giant windmills on Mount Nittany.

No one is interested yet, council members said at a meeting Thursday night, but they believe Mount Nittany is one of the few places in Centre County where winds are strong enough to attract alternative-energy entrepreneurs.

A half dozen commercial wind farms are operating in Pennsylvania—along the Allegheny Front, in the Pocono Mountains and off Lake Erie.

The ordinance draft that College Township council began looking at Thursday might limit the locations for commercial wind turbines to land that is zoned agricultural.

Up to 10 percent of the township's land is zoned agricultural, perhaps enough to satisfy the Pennsylvania Municipal Planning Code's requirement that municipalities make land available for all legitimate uses.

David Wasson, council chairman, said he did not want commercial wind mills to be permitted on land zoned forest or rural residential, on Mount Nittany itself or its foothills.

He said the big wind turbines — they can be a couple of hundred feet tall with blades the size of airliner wings — could spoil one of the state's most beautiful mountains.

But councilman David Koll said there will never be a commercial wind farm in the area "because this is State College."

"We all want to be clean," he said, in a slightly mocking tone, "but, my God, we can't ruin Mount Nittany."

Koll added that there's just not enough space — the needed hundreds of acres — for the commercial end of wind power.

"But I do see a lot of people wanting to be carbon free," he said.

After storm, muddy waters in Spring Creek

These are images, provided by Oak Hall resident Stan Smith, showing that Spring Creek got muddied after a downpour late Saturday afternoon in Boalsburg.

Smith said the photos were taken at about 7 p.m. Saturday.

Below is a story about it that appeared in Wednesday’s Centre Daily Times:

BOALSBURG — Fine-particle sediment flowed into Spring Creek headwaters Saturday evening when a thunderstorm lashed a residential construction site where a sediment basin was being converted to a stormwater management facility, the Centre County Conservation District said.

Jim Coslo, resource conservation supervisor for the county agency, said his office was notified on Sunday about the sediment from the Springfield Commons residential development at Boalsburg's Torrey Lane and Loop Road.

Coslo said "really fine soil particles" got into Spring Creek and were reported to have discolored the popular fishing stream to its confluence with Cedar Run at Oak Hall, about a mile downstream.

The creek had cleared by the time Conservation District agents investigated on Tuesday, Coslo said.

The investigation determined that the sediment basin, in transition to a permanent stormwater management site, had been seeded for a grass cover to prevent such silting. But the grass had not yet taken root and the storm turned the basin bottom to mud, Coslo said.

He said Torron Group developer Thomas Songer subsequently agreed on two measures to prevent a recurrence: additional seeding and mulching in and around the pond; and the installation of silt fencing, a woven geotextile fabric that blocks the passage of fine particulate, around disturbed areas.
Songer could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

In August 2005, about 250,000 gallons of muddy runoff from the same site flowed into the Spring Creek headwaters because a regulation device had not been installed, as called for, on the sedimentation-control equipment, a Conservation District official said at the time.

Coslo said Wednesday that Saturday's discharge into Spring Creek was limited to small soil particles, less harmful to the waterway than larger particles.

Sinkhole tragedy in Guatemala

The karst geology (porous limestone formations) around Mount Nittany is prone to sinkholes, an example of which we saw last week in the heart of the Penn State campus.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, but that's not always the case with sinkholes. In Guatemala on Friday, the consequences of a sinkhole in a populated area (photo at right) were tragic.

Conservancy: Reforest Rockview land

The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has completed its ecological assessment of Spring Creek canyon on what is now Rockview state prison land, and the Benner Township supervisors have put up the report on the township's website.

You can read the 30-page report by clicking here, though it may take a few moments to open.

The state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has asked township supervisors and conservancy officials to the state capital to discuss the conservancy's report, which includes a recommendation that cropland above Spring Creek be reforested.

Warmest December in 111 years of data

The year 2006 in the State College area turned out to have an average low temperature, 43.14, that was warmer than all but two of the last 111 years, according to data from the Penn State Weather Station.

The year's average high temperature, 61.01, ranked ninth in the last 111 years, according to the data. But this December alone had a higher average high temperature, 46.84, than any other year.

The year-end data comes at a time when the Alps lack snow, when a big ice shelf has broken free from the Arctic ice cap and when scientists are increasingly attributing the climate change to human activity, burning hydrocarbon fuels that deplete the Earth's protective ozone layer.

Even in subtropical Taiwan, from where I'm writing, possible effects have been felt. On a tour of the island's western coast last week, our guide told us that one popular shoreline attraction has been closed because the ocean water had gotten too close to structures.

Winter days are often chilly if not cold in Taiwan, but the new year started sunny and warm today, spoiling a lot of opportunities among the Taiwanese to display limited but cherished supplies of short-season wardrobes.

In Taipei today, my partner Wenyi, a Taiwan native, walked out into 80 degrees at 10 a.m., and she immediately got out from inside a hooded sweatshirt.

"It's so hot," she said. "It's like summer."

Affordable housing and Rockview land

The proposal to set aside surplus Rockview state prison land for affordable housing isn't off the agenda altogether as community advisers meet to discuss what to do with the land.

But idea, advanced by Centre County Commissioner Chairman Chris Exarchos, has been assigned a secondary status by Benner Township Supervisor John Elnitski, chairman of the Spring Creek Canyon advisory committee.

Exarchos has called for the state to transfer to the county more than 100 acres of the Rockview land around the Shiloh Road interchange for residential housing that would be affordable to people who work in the Centre Region.

But when the issue was raised near the end of last Thursday's meeting, Elnitski said the matter would not be taken up before the state sells 1,200 acres to Penn State and gives about 400 acres to Benner Township.

"It would be addressed after the land transfer," Elnitski said. The statement would seem to run counter to the Exarchos proposal for a transfer directly to the township (of land that is now tagged for Penn State).

But Elnitski said that when the affordable housing matter does come up, "it's another major discussion, yes."

As the meeting came to a close, Bill Brusse, president of the Spring Creek chapter of Trout Unlimited, told committee and audience members to think about land use, not land ownership.

"It isn't about who owns it," he said. "It's about how best to use it."

A chilling fact for a cold day

Global warming?

We're heading for one of the warmest years in the last 111 years, according to the Penn State Weather Station.

Data through today, including the chilly weekend and this morning, ranks this year's average low temperature as the fifth warmest since 1895.

Only 16 years since then have had a higher average high temperature than this year.

Top Rendell aide to talk on Skytop

Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty's "major announcement" in Centre County today may signal the state's attempt to put a big stamp of authority on its long-term plan to clean up the acid rock drainage mess at the Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop.

The DEP refused to disclose what McGinty would say at the meeting between state road builders and environmental regulators. But it seemed likely she would announce the DEP's approval of PennDOT's plan to move a million tons of pyritic rocks from the Buffalo Run watershed into a "dry tomb" in the Bald Eagle Creek watershed.

The plan by Gov. Ed Rendell's administration has stirred opposition, with the Nov. 7 election only six weeks away. It's a fair bet that Rendell directed his Cabinet secretary to make the trip and personally announce the DEP approval of PennDOT's water quality management permit. That would help his administration to get in and out of the story more quickly.

In the three or four times that I've raised the Skytop issue with Rendell over the last three years, he has never failed to recall how he had serious doubts about building I-99 over Bald Eagle Mountain when he was governor-elect in 2002, as the Skytop excavation was just beginning.

Four years later, in trying to become a re-elected governor, the validity of those doubts loom large in the massive piles of sulfur-bearing rocks along the idle and unfinished road corridor at Skytop and the $50 million price tag to stop them from leaching acidic drainage into streams and ground water.

A walk in the woods

I took a walk in the woods Sunday, on land along Spring Creek that is handily located between State College and Bellefonte off Interstate 99's Shiloh Road interchange.

The state prison system owns the land now, but it will soon to be given to Benner Township for a public recreation area that will encourage more people to walk in the woods more often.

I wasn't jumping the gun or trespassing Sunday. The Spring Creek corridor from Shiloh Road toward, but not all the way to, Fisherman's Paradise, is open for catch-and-release fishing. But even without fishing, you can walk the creekside path for a mile or two until a sign says go no farther.

Few others were there Sunday afternoon, in the midst of the Steelers game. I came across one fisherman working a fly back and forth in the creek, two people out with their dogs and a bicyclist — four people in two hours.

It was a peaceful two hours, at times warm or cool on your skin, depending on whether the sun's shine made it first through a filter of clouds and then through the upper reaches of trees.

It was quiet. You could hear the creek murmur, almost always gently but sometimes in a rush where the current ran fast. A light breeze rose and fell, stirring an occasional rustle as it moved through leaves. Sometimes the breeze came up when you were alongside a swift place in the creek, and you couldn't distinguish one rising sound of nature from the other.

Leaves in brown and gold blew down from the trees onto the creek surface. They made themselves into a fleet of tiny watercraft atop the small waves, their shadows on the creek bottom below mirroring their ride downstream.

A woman spoke to me as I walked along. She had interrupted her own walk to pause near a tree along the creek and look across the water. A dog, I think it was a retriever, lay at her feet. As I walked by, she turned toward me.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she said, and I could only agree.

Schoolyard sinkhole due for repairs

Here's a photo of a sinkhole near the first base line bench of the ball field behind Ferguson Township Elementary School in Pine Grove Mills.

The sinkhole, three or four feet across and about 10 feet deep, opened up Monday in the wake of heavy weekend rains from the remnants of Tropical Storm Ernesto.

The hole is now isolated withing a fairly wide-perimeter fence, and school children playing at recess in the schoolyard Wednesday, when this photo was taken, stayed far from the area.

Edward Poprik, director of physical plant for the State College Area School District, said the sinkhole will be examined by a geologist today to determine how to repair it -- fore example by filling it with rocks or clay or some other material.

Ferguson Township supervisor George Pytel said he believes a longer corridor in the area is prone to sinkholes, from what he speculated was a stream that flows underground through the area.

Growing up with acid mine drainage

Like tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians, I grew up next to a creek, in Blossburg, that ran dead yellow from acid mine drainage and that continues to run dead yellow from acid mine drainage.

That's why Barbara Barrett's story on efforts to clean up the state's long lost waterways is so important--the promise of improved quality of life alone is worth the investment.

As a small boy I took up rod and reel one day, walked to the creek (we called it a crick) and sat there in vain until my mother found me and told me there was nothing in there to catch.

A few years later, and a little bigger, I walked the crick upstream until I got to its source, and found it running right out of of an old hillside mine shaft.

It was an adventure, as I recall, but it was also a rude awakening to see the yellow-boy crick pouring right out of the earth.

The river my old creek runs into also ran yellowish orange throughout my youth, and only now is a cleanup target of the state.

I can't wait until they get to my little creek. It needs a little life in it.

Big storm has weekend in its sights

Tropical Storm Ernesto is heading north at 15 mph and continues to threaten central Pennsylvania with drenching and potentially flooding rains Saturday and Sunday, according to an AccuWeather report posted at 5 a.m. today.

The report says Ernesto was located about 195 miles south of Charleston, S.C., with 50 mph winds and faster gusts.

A graphic accompanying the report shows the very center of the storm coming through central Pennsylvania, just to the east of Centre County.

The Penn State campus weather service, posting at 5:47 a.m. today, predicts 2 to 5 inches of rain Friday and Saturday, tapering off by later Saturday. "At this point, it appears that the rain will be mainly over for the Penn State home opener, but activities before the game will certainly be wet," the Penn State forecast says.

The forecast adds:

"With streams, creeks and even major rivers running high from recent heavy rains, it is important to prepare for significant flooding. If you live in a flood prone area, be prepared to evacuate if heavy rain does indeed occur and rivers begin to rise."

Centre County Commissioner Chris Exarchos urged residents in flood-prone areas to pay close attention to weather reports.

Penn State said it will decide today whether to move football festivities,, planned for Beaver Stadium Friday night, into the Bryce Jordan Center.

Boalsburg breaks in new tanker

Those high-arching streams of water in the air over Boalsburg last evening were not searching for some elusive fire in the sky to put out.

It was just the Boalsburg Volunteer Fire Company training to break in its new tanker, explained fire police captain Denny Johnson.

The tanker, which cost about $300,000, supplied water from its 2,500-gallon fiberglass tank to engines positioned across the parking lot at Boalsburg Technology Park along U.S. Route 322.

Volunteers aboard the engines (the fire trucks that carry the fire hose) played the thick streams high into the sky above.

The streams met at their peaks to form a liquid arch -- an unexpected water feature in the landscape for motorists tooling along U.S. Route 322.

Year one of warmest and driest

Leaves falling earlier than usual and cooling nights may be refreshing signs of autumn, but the year so far is shaping up to be one of the warmest and driest on record, according to the 111 years of data maintained by the Penn State Weather Station.

The average high temperature so far this year, 63 degrees, is the seventh warmest on record during those 111 years, and the average low temperature so far, 44 degrees, is the fourth warmest, the data show.

To date, only 12 of those 111 years have been drier, according to data through Monday, measuring only 21 inches of rain so far this year.

You can check out this running daily weather summary here.

For a primer on what makes leaves fall when they do, and why they change colors in th first place, go to a widely linked U.S. Forest Service site.

For the Old Farmer's Almanac updated forecast for the rest of the year, here's the click.

Hanna backs foes of Skytop acid rock move

Opposition to the state's plan to move a million tons of acid-generating rocks from the Buffalo Run watershed to the Bald Eagle Creek watershed got kicked up a notch this week.

In a letter to Gov. Ed Rendell on Monday, state Rep. Mike Hanna, D-Lock Haven, says he supports more than 1,800 petitioners to the governor who have expressed opposition to the Transportation and Environmental Protection departments' cleanup plan for the Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop.

"I am deeply concerned about the Bald Eagle watershed and the possible contamination of that valuable resource from the pyritic rock found in the area of PenDOT's I-99 road project," Hanna says in the letter.

His letter says he first expressed worries last October when he helped form the Bald Eagle Watershed Association, and its adds: "Since that time other citizens have become involved, formed organizations and circulated petitions voicing their concerns, which I support."

Hanna, who is unopposed for re-election this year, is a 15-year lawmaker and a member of the House Game and Fisheries Committee. His 76th state House district includes much of the Bald Eagle Valley.

His letter to Rendell asks that PennDOT and DEP reconsider two sites in the Mountaintop area as options. One old mine site is below Osceola Mills and the other outside of Kylertown. Centre County Commissioner Scott Conklin also has asked the state to consider the Mountaintop sites.

"These areas are already contaminated and are not directly in close proximity to any watersheds," Hanna says in the letter to Rendell.

INITIAL STORY ON THE OPPOSITION PETITIONS

OPPOSITION'S COVER LETTER WITH PETITIONS

PENNDOT'S LETTER IN RESPONSE TO OPPOSITION

New website counters acid plan opposition

Bald Eagle Valley opposition to the state's acid rock drainage cleanup plan at an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop has spawned a website in reaction from a home owner on the Patton Township side of the mountain.

Buffalo Run Road resident Eric McGinnis, a Penn State Paterno Library associate director, has put up a site dedicated to demonstrating "that we will not accept further delays in removing pollutants and the opening of I-99."

A grass roots group, Concerned Citizens for Clean Water, has collected more than 1,800 signatures on a petition to Gov. Ed Rendell that declares opposition to the Transportation Department's plan to move a million tons of acid-generating rocks from the Patton Township side of Skytop to a "dry tomb" three miles away in Worth Township, in the Bald Eagle Valley watershed.

McGinnis said he put up his web site, PattonCleanWater.org, in response to the Bald Eagle Valley opposition, fearing new delays in cleaning up the environmental hazard and resuming construction of I-99.

The site posts news stories about Skytop and encourages readers to write letters to newspaper editors, but McGinnis said he has not yet tried to organize others.

"We want to make sure that our interests are still being addressed," McGinnis said in an interview. "This is me getting angry and not having enough time to go knocking on doors."

Very hot links on global warming

When you can't tie your shoes without breaking into a sweat, when bottled water shelves in supermarkets gape with empty spaces, and when non-readers suddenly discover that public libraries are cool — it just might be time to read up on global warming.

Here are a few links to help:

For starters, more than three dozen links to good websites, selected by the Goddard Space Flight Center, can be found on the center's global warming master directory. The directory doesn't annotate the sites but the site names themselves suggest what's there.

For effective summaries of recent research into global climate change, American Institute of Physics director Spencer Weart has put up a hypertext history. But the Woods Hole Research Center's "beginner's guide to understanding the issues of global warming" is more comprehensive and easier to navigate and read.

The Independent Television Serivce documentary film "Rising Waters," which explores the global warming impact already confronting Pacific Islanders, is summarized here, with Qicktime video clips of interviews with South Pacific climatologists, fishermen and government officials.

The federal government's Environmental Protection Agency site, using verbs of supposition rather than actual fact, says on its site that rising global temperatures "are expected" to raise sea level and change precipitation and other climate conditions and that the changes "could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies."

"It could also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems," the EPA says. "Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our National Parks may be permanently altered."

Keep it cool.

EPA engineer offers acid cleanup option

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency engineer from Philadelphia came to the public meeting on Skytop last night to report on a 13-year project that showed phosphate may sharply reduce acid rock drainage from pyritic waste rock piles.

William G. Browne told state officials and Bald Eagle Valley residents that he has been following the Skytop saga for two years and that work done by Canadian researchers Margarete Kalin and Bryn Harris applied phosphate mining waste to pyritic rocks and reduced acid generation from 70 percent to 96 percent of non-treated pyrite.

The Kalin and Harris academic paper on their project, "Chemical precipitation within pyritic waste rock," which was reviewed in April, is available online at www.sciencedirect.com.

Browne said he was acting on his own behalf, not EPA's, but his presentation to the state Department of Environmental Protection was applauded by the 100 or so members of the audience in the Bald Eagle Area High School at Thursday's meeting.

Audience members called for the state Department of Transportation to find a place other than near the Bald Eagle Creek in Worth Township to dispose of a million tons of acid-generating rocks from an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop.

The audience members seemed to see Browne as an ally, a scientist with a conclusion that differed with the conclusion of scientists in the service of the state government.

Skytop cleanup meeting slated

Bald Eagle Valley residents get a chance Thursday evening to question state officials about their plan to move a massive amount of potential water contaminant out of the Buffalo Run watershed in Patton Township and into the Bald Eagle Creek watershed in Worth Township.

The meeting about the so-called "engineered rock placement area," or ERPA, is sponsored by the state Department of Environmental Protection and starts at 6:30 p.m. in the Bald Eagle Area High School auditorium in Wingate.

The DEP and the Transportation Department say they must move the million tons of pyrite-laced sandstone over the crest of Skytop because state law has tougher restrictions on discharges into Buffalo Run than it does for Bald Eagle Creek.

The state officials also say they cannot resume construction of Interstate 99 at Skytop until the environmental cleanup plan is in place -- a condition that some see as little more than leverage by the state to get its way.

County creeks high, but not over top

What a difference a week of rain makes. This year, almost at the year's halfway point, went from a pace that would have made it the seventh driest in the last 111 years to a pace toward the 27th driest, which doesn't sound nearly so bad.

A quick look at Penns, Spring and Bald Eagle creeks Wednesday afternoon and this morning showed swift-running water had risen to course through what had been dry weeds without yet climbing all the way over bank tops.

(The National Weather Service, by the way, has put up a web site mapping and llisting rivers, streams and creeks in Pennsylvania and their potential for flooding.)

At the confluence of Spring and Bald Eagle creeks in Milesburg, however, the buildup of silt and stones that worries municipal leaders got built up a little more. That's a worrisome development because when the creek space fills with silt and stones, there's less space for water and it has to go elsewhere when it gets high.

Milesburg municipal officials say they can't afford to dredge the creek confluence, and higher government authorities such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won't. The municipal officials should make that a point of negotiation as the state Fish and Boat Commission prepares to remove McCoy's Dam a mile upstream on Spring Creek.

In any event, there was still space Wednesday for kayakers, putting in at Bellefonte and making the turn into the Bald Eagle at Milesburg. A class of 11 kayakers from Krislund Camp in Madisonburg had long planned an afternoon on Spring and Bald Eagle creeks and would have made the trip in any event. But they lucked out and got higher water than expected.

Center County lucked out as well in getting water not as high as elsewhere in the state, dodging the flooding bullet that struck Wilkes-Barre. Perhaps the Army Corps of Engineers should take another look at its dredging priorities and see if it can find a few thousand dollars to ease real concerns in Milesburg.

We needed the rain, and we will continue to need the rain, but we don't need it to come all at once. If it persists in doing so, then we need to take steps to guard against injuries and damage.

Rain helps, but the year's still dry

We still need more rain. Even with Sunday's and Monday's rains, we're still heading toward one of driest years on record, though Monday's half-inch certainly helped.

As of last Wednesday, we were on a snow and rainfall pace to make it the 7th driest of the last 111 years, according to the Penn State Weather Station. Rains since then, including Monday's, have put us on a pace to be the 14th driest year.

Through Monday, with the year nearly half over, we've had 15.31 inches of rain. The most rainfall in a year on record for the area is 59.30 inches in 1996. The least: 24.81 inches in 1930.

The forecast calls for clearing starting tonight. Good enough. Just so it stops by July 2. That's when the Spikes are back in town.

Home Depot settles environmental case

Building supply giant Home Depot, which plans to put up a big store in Centre County, has just settled an environmental case against the company in Connecticut.

The Home Depot agreed Wednesday to pay $425,000 and change the way it handles pesticides and fertilizers to resolve allegations that it violated numerous environmental regulations at stores in Connecticut, The Hartford Courant reported.

Connecticut environmental regulators said the settlement has the potential to create benefits that extend beyond the state's borders because Home Depot is working with manufacturers to develop stronger bags that would resist punctures that lead to spills.

Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement chain and second-largest retailer in the United States after Wal-Mart, operating more than 2,000 stores in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

The company, which targets do-it-yourselfers, plans to build a store at Interstate 99's Valley Vista Drive interchange in Patton Township, directly across North Atherton Street from its mass marketing rival Lowe's.

The settlement announced in Connecticut Wednesday calls for the Home Depot to pay a civil penalty of $99,000 and contribute $326,000 to a fund to help educate other retailers about environmental laws and regulations that govern the handling of hazardous materials.

Connecticut environmental officials said they found violations found at 13 Home Depot stores that included "the improper display, handling and disposal of products — such as pesticides and fertilizers — that contain hazardous materials."

The company was also cited for failing to comply with hazardous waste, pesticide and storm water management programs, the DEP said.

Home Depot said it is "committed to compliance" with environmental laws, but would not answer questions about the settlement or the alleged violations, the newspaper reported.

Travel, the environment and E.B. White

Here are a couple of thoughts from the great American writer E.B. White that seem quite cogently to represent the tension between environmental protection and the growing demands for more capacity on our roadways.

White (1899-1985), best known for his children's books (Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little), wrote for The New Yorker and Harper's magazines for decades. He had a lot to say and said it really well.

In the two passages below, White seems almost to be talking to Centre County, referring to the 3-year-old environmental hazard at an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop, where the state unearthed 2 million tons of sulfide-bearing rocks and is now preparing to spend $50 million to clean up the mistake.

“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good," White wrote on one occasion. "Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”

But White was a traveler as well. As a young man, long before President Eisenhower began building the nation's interstate highway system, White drove from coast to coast, when doing so was more of an adventure than it is today.

And in a lighter state of mind, White perhaps reflected on that cross-country adventure when he wrote this concise formulation of an American principle. “Everything in life is somewhere else," he said, "and you get there in a car.”       

Rockview land talk tonight

Anyone interested in the state's plans to transfer ownership of about 1,600 acres of Rockview state prison land may want to stop by a public meeting 7 p.m. tonight (Thursday) in the auditorium of the Central Pennsylvania Institute of Science & Technology on Harrison Road in Pleasant Gap.

State Sen. Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, will host the meeting. Others who'll be there include officials from Benner Township, the state Game Commission, the state Fish & Boat Commission, Penn State, ClearWater Conservancy, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the state Department of General Services, and the state Department of Corrections.

Legislation has been drafted but not yet introduced that would sell 1,200 acres of Rockview farm and forest land north of Interstate 99 to Penn State, for use by its College of Agricultural Sciences. A nearly 400-acre corridor of land along Spring Creek — called Spring Creek Canyon — would go to Benner Township for passive recreational uses.

What happens to the land is of high interest to sportsmen's groups and environmental watchdogs because it's such a big piece of undeveloped real estate in Benner Township, right between high-growth State College and Bellefonte areas. 

The state bought the land for its prison system in 1911. It's been largely preserved in its natural condition since then because it's been virtually off-limits to the public. Tonight the public gets to ask decision-makers what will become of the land.

Bush, Paulson and the environment

President Bush's choice for treasury secretary should please environmentalists. Henry Paulson Jr., chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm, will come before the Senate for confirmation Tuesday.

He'll bring to Oval Office conversations about the economy not only a huge career as a winner in the Wall Street financial world but also a parallel career as an impassioned environmental watchdog and long-time bird watcher.

Paulson's proposal that Goldman donate 680,000 acres of land in Chile to the Nature Conservancy stirred protests from shareholders who said he was putting his own environmental concerns ahead of the firm's corporate interests, The New York Times reported.

Paulson is the departing chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy, the Washington-based organization dedicated to protecting land and waterways around nation and world from developmental encroachments. Centre County's own ClearWater Conservancy has applied to the Nature Conservancy for a grant to help preserve the Musser Gap in Ferguson Township.

Conversations between Bush and Paulson may be like conversations between a student and a teacher.
Bush said in a TV interview last year that adhering to the Kyoto treaty on climate change in 2001 would have "wrecked" the U.S. economy.

The Goldman Sachs "environmental policy," its most prominent homepage link after its "annual report," considers global warming as already established fact.

The Goldman web site says that "we will work to ensure that our people, capital and ideas are used to help find effective market-based solutions to address climate change, ecosystem degradation and other critical environmental issues, and we will seek to create new business opportunities that benefit the environment."

Acid rock drainage meeting tonight

Concerned citizens will have an opportunity tonight to quiz state officials on their plan to treat acid-bearing rocks that will remain at an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop. The pubic meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Park Forest Middle School, 2180 School Drive, Patton Township.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has scheduled the meeting on the state Department of Transportation's application for a permit to pipe drainage water from the Patton Township side of Skytop Mountain to a treatment plant on the Huston Township side.

Other cleanup strategies to be addressed at the meeting include plans to cover pyritic fill areas with impermeable covers to keep rainwater out, and a plan to cover the faces of two cuts through the mountainside that have left veins of pyrite exposed.

Pyrite, or iron sulfide, is a natural mineral that is harmless if left underground. But when it is exposed to air and water at the same time, a chemical reaction produces metal-dissolving sulfuric acid.

A gradual weathering process over millions of years does not degrade water. But when massive amounts of pyrite are unearthed at once, it can devastate water supplies. PennDOT has about 1.6 million tons of pyrite-laced sandstone lying in exposed fill areas and spoil piles at Skytop

Feeling used? Talk to Bald Eagle folks

The state departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection are learning that science and technology can't really stand apart from politics. That hard lesson has been learned over and over again as technology has created big bombs and small pesticides.

It's a hometown lesson for Centre County now as PennDOT tries to convince residents of the North Bald Eagle Creek watershed to accept a million tons of unearthed acid-bearing rocks from the Buffalo Run and Waddle Creek watersheds in the Nittany Valley.

That's a highly sensitive issue because the state 15 years ago decided to route Interstate 99, together with all of its commerce-generating interchanges, into the Nittany Valley instead of keeping the hundreds of millions of dollars of improvements in the Bald Eagle Valley, the age-old transportation groove that slants northeast-southwest across Pennsylvania.

That decision has now led to a massive and costly environmental hazard. To surmount the Bald Eagle Ridge at Skytop to get into the Nittany Valley, PennDOT dug up more acid-bearing rocks than it knew what to do with, dumped them in spoil piles along the I-99 corridor just on the Nittany Valley side of the Skytop crest, and now wants to move them into the Bald Eagle Valley.

You can't blame Bald Eagle Valley residents for feeling used.

For its part, PennDOT said this morning its plans for the permanent cleanup of Skytop survived Wednesday night's meeting at Bald Eagle Area High School, where about 200 people turned out, many of them feeling used and asking aloud or in writing the good tough questions that always accompany that feeling.

PennDOT says it's listening.

"We will be taking some time to review and read through the written comments as we proceed with any further plans," PennDOT spokeswoman Marla Fannin said. "All comments will be taken into consideration as we move forward.  We believe time is of the essence but there is no hard-date time frame regarding a final remediation decision."

What the Shuster rider did

The record needs to be set straight on a question that came up last week during the state’s public meeting on the acid rock drainage environmental hazard at the Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop Mountain.

The question from an audience member was whether two sentences that then-U.S. Rep. Bud Shuster inserted into a highway funding bill in 1998—sentences that eliminated federal oversight of some highway construction—applied to the I-99 construction that includes Skytop.

The answer given by a state Department of Transportation environmental engineering consultant, and heard by the 200 audience members at the meeting, was that the so-called Shuster rider did not apply to the I-99 construction at Skytop.

That answer is wrong. It went uncorrected by PennDOT officials themselves at the meeting, and it will take just a few moments of sorting through government bureaucracy stuff to show why it is wrong.

First, here is the Shuster rider itself (page 96 of the 541-page legislation, about an inch scroll-down), section 1212 (u) of the Transportation Equity Act of 1998:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the State of Pennsylvania is authorized to proceed with engineering, final design and construction of Corridor O of the Appalachian development highway system between Bald Eagle and Interstate Route 80. All records of decision relating to Corridor O issued prior to the date of enactment of this Act shall remain in effect.”

On Aug. 12, 2004, the Centre Daily Times reported correctly that the Federal Highway Administration would normally have done periodic inspections of construction of a highway such as I-99 because 80 percent of the money used to build it was federal tax dollars.

But the Shuster rider took the FHWA out of regulatory roles for I-99, according to David Cough, FHWA director for Pennsylvania operations. Cough could cite no other instance of the federal highway administration being denied its oversight role.

“What Shuster did gave PennDOT quite a bit of flexibility in the project,” Cough said, adding that normally “we would be conducting inspections” of such a project. “We basically, oversee their oversight of the project,” Cough said. “If this were an FHA oversight project, PennDOT would have consulted with us and sought our approval of major contract changes.”

David Densmore, U.S. Fish and Wildlife field supervisor in State College, told the CDT in August 2004 that during I-99 planning in the 1990s his agency was trying to “minimize the landscape level of the project’s effects, recognizing that when you go off and you start chopping off the tops of mountains that you increase the risks.”

The Shuster rider, Densmore, added, “constrains federal regulatory agencies from taking action — in other words, I cannot interfere in future actions.”

Cough said federal highway administration lawyers interpreted the Shuster rider to mean that it would be illegal for the federal highway administration to assert its oversight role in I-99 construction.

One reason for the confusion about the impact of the Shuster rider on I-99 construction lies in its reference to “Corridor 0” because “Corridor O” has also come to refer to a planned but not yet designed four-lane highway from Port Matilda to Woodland in Clearfield County, generally paralleling U.S. Route 322.

But “Corridor O” in the rider, as Cough pointed out, refers to the Appalachian development highway system corridor whose southern terminus is Interstate 68 near Cumberland, Md., and whose northern terminus is I-80 near Bellefonte — “from Interstate 68 in Cumberland to Interstate 80; part of Corridor O is NHS Corridor 9 and existing Interstate 99.” The planned but not yet designed four-lane spur from Port Matilda to Woodland that has often been referred to as Corridor O is actually described as "Corridor O-1" in the Appalachian development highway system.

All of this can be checked out out on a couple of reliable web sites, AARoads here and the Wikipedia page here.

Even though the Shuster rider did eliminate the federal oversight of the I-99 project, that does not mean that federal oversight would have compensated for the lack of vigilance that led to what looks to be a $50 million mistake: the cleanup of a million cubic yards of highly concentrated pyritic rocks to keep them from leaching metal-dissolving sulfuric acid into streams and ground water.

"That doesn't mean it would have gone any better," Cough said.

"I would not suggest we could have foretold this specific impact," Densmore said.

But it does mean that because of the Shuster rider the federal agencies never got a chance to take a look and perhaps see something that PennDOT officials didn't.

Choice crack rocks Skytop pyrite parley

At a meeting about the state's plans for Interstate 99 and Skytop Monday night, the level of applause after each remark about acid rock drainage varied with the point of view. While a few state officials and prospective contractors had the high ground on stage in the Park Forest Middle School auditorium, an audience of 200 or more taxpayers had the floor.

But none of the arguments — moving the acid rocks three miles from one watershed to another, treating them where they are at Skytop or starting the thinking back at square one — got much more or much less applause than any other.

Not so, however, with the wisecracks that accompanied the arguments. One stood out.

State College resident Dan McLean, retired from the profession of cleaning up after acid mine drainage, left the audience in loud laughter at the end of his argument that the state, rather than spend $50 million and move the rocks, should leave the rocks where they are and build a water treatment plant for a tenth as much to neutralize and clean the acidic runoff.

McLean then shifted from a serious to a storytelling tone. He said the state's Skytop plans reminded him of a tale he'd once heard about a man and a woman who fell in love, got married, and decided to buy a gold mine together and get wealthy. He said the decision-makers on stage reminded him of the wife, and the audience members of the husband.

The husband and wife in the story dug a long, narrow passage into the earth, he said, and mined all the precious metal. Then, with prosperity there for the taking, they wound up getting a divorce and in front of a judge deciding who would get what. The wife got all the gold from the mine, McLean said. And yes — with the audience only a small step behind the gathering punch line — he added that the husband got the shaft.

Skytop meeting in Patton tonight

Just a reminder that state Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler will address the public tonight about Interstate 99 construction and the delay caused by the acid rock drainage cleanup at Skytop Mountain, five miles west of State College.

Biehler's presentation is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in the Park Forest Middle School auditorium in Patton Township. But the doors will open at 6 p.m., when PennDOT and the DEP will have information stations on different aspects of the problem set up.

The meeting starts at It will be the first PennDOT-organized public meeting on the environmental hazard in Centre County since September 2004. That meeting followed a period of substantial rain, and contaminant levels were much higher than usual in some residential wells and ground water.

The contaminant levels have been fairly stable since then, owing in large part to 18 acres of tarps that PennDOT used to cover the spoil piles and fill areas where a 1.5 million tons of pyrite-laced sandstone were dumped after being excavated in an Interstate 99 road cut.

PennDOT has to move about two-thirds of the rocks out of the Buffalo Run watershed, and Biehler tonight will be addressing the options for doing so.

Time for a real talk about Skytop

Now that state decision-makers have agreed to convene a public meeting on their acid rock drainage cleanup plans for Skytop, I can't wait to see how the meeting will be organized.

State Sen. Jake Corman arranged for the state departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection to describe where they stand and what their options are for preventing a million cubic yards, about 1.5 million tons, of pyrite-laced sandstone from leaching metal-dissolving sulfuric acid into streams and ground water around Skytop Mountain.

When the state agents tried to stand up in front of an angry Indiana County crowd last month to explain their plans, the crowd shouted the presenters into silence, complaining that the state was withholding information even as the state tried to convey it.

The April 12 meeting in Patton Township will surely have less noise and anger, but no less concern from the people. I am hoping that the state agents take questions from audience members in a format that will allow everyone else in the audience to both hear the question and the answer, rather than disperse and diffuse the discussion among several talking stations.

True question-and-answer communication can only take place when everyone can hear what's going on. Otherwise it's a roomful of whispers.

A walk on the wild side

When Benner Township asked for opinions about what to do with the Spring Creek Canyon after the township takes ownership, it got opinions from institutions such as Penn State and the state Game Commission and from individuals such as Potter Township resident Lou Hass, who simply takes pleasure from walking along the creek.

"I’ve enjoyed the wilderness of the area — so I guess I’m a tree hugger, and proud of it," Hass, a retired educator in biochemistry, said in an interview. "This area is going through gangbusters — it would be nice if we could have a nice area such as the canyon and preserve it, and maybe enlarge it."

You can read a summary of remarks by Hass and others, and the full statements of institutional remarks, on Benner Township's Web site, and you can read a story about what lies ahead in the township's plans by clicking here.

Those plans include a pending agreement with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy steward of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater, in Mill Run, Pa.

Here we go again (I-99)

After more than two years or work, the state Department of Transportation is back to square one in deciding what to do with a million tons of acid-bearing rocks unearthed during Interstate 99 road construction at Skytop Mountain, five miles west of State College.

The frustration of Centre County residents was evident Thursday in remarks that state Sen. Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, made to Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty during a budget hearing in the state capital.

You can get a glimpse of Corman's remarks in a video stream here, and you can read a story here about PennDOT's decision to set aside a permanent cleanup plan for Skytop that it announced aonly a month ago.

More on Fergus and Cheney

Saturday's New York Times includes an essay that State High graduate Chuck Fergus wrote on safety issues involved in Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting accident. It is in the "Outdoors" column in sports.

The piece is apolitical. Fergus is the author most recently of "A Hunter's Book of Days," a journal of bird hunting experiences in Centre County before he and his family moved to Vermont three years ago.

"If you do not know where your companions are, you do not shoot," Fergus writes. "It's as simple as that."

Bird hunter Chuck Fergus on Cheney

State College native and current Vermont resident Chuck Fergus has a few good questions about Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident, and it’s no surprise.

Fergus, outdoorsman and author of 15 books on hunting, has been a bird hunter for 40 years and has trained two English springer spaniels as bird dogs.

Here’s a taste of his writing, taken from chapter 2 of his most recent book, “A Hunter’s Book of Days.” The passage gives the feel of hunting, not for quail in this case but for grouse, and not in Texas but on Centre County’s own Bald Eagle Ridge a couple of years ago. He’s with his dog, Caillie.

“I stand up, look about, and tell Caillie to heel,” Fergus writes. “I’m edgy now, as I scan the cover out in front—edgy, because I really want to find grouse. I want to find grouse because there is no other sort of hunting as thrilling and challenging as the pursuit of those wild and cagey birds.”

Fergus said by phone Wednesday night his first thought on hearing about the vice president’s shooting accident was immediate and clear: “If Dick Cheney shot somebody with a shotgun, then he had done something that was grave and very seriously wrong.”

In his four decades of bird hunting, Fergus said, he’s never been involved in a hunting accident, although at least once every season there has come a moment when he’s had the impulse to shoot but has held back for the sake of another’s safety.

“It’s the responsibility of any hunter to be certain that his or her shot pattern does not strike a fellow human,” Fergus said. “Always in the back of your mind, is to take stock, always keeping track of where your partners are. The cardinal rule is to always know where your shot is going to go.”

Fergus said assertions that it’s unsafe to shoot low flying birds, especially quail, as Cheney must have done, is debatable.

“Quail are a social bird so they gather in a covey, feed together and move through habitat together. When dogs find a covey, they find it by scent. When the dogs flush the quail, the quail go in all directions. It’s not wrong necessarily to shoot birds that are flying like that, if you know where all the hunters are, where all the dogs are.”

Fergus finds it odd that the shooting victim, Austin lawyer Harry M. Whittington, was reported to have been retrieving a downed quail when the vice president shot him. Quails are small and hard to find in the brush, and it’s more typical to let the dogs find them.

“What you want to do is rely on the dog’s nose. They can win the bird from 10 to 20 yards away,” Fergus said. “It’s very strange behavior that they would not use the dog to find a dead bird.”

He said it’s absurd to think that Whittington was somehow to blame. “The bottom line is that Cheney was careless,” Fergus said. “He demonstrated himself to be precipitate and careless.”

Park's nature at center of complaint

Some might see it as civilization creeping up the mountain. College Township Councilman David Fryer sees it as "an environmental abortion."

At Thursday night's township council meeting, Fryer complained loudly about trees that have been cut down at Mountainside Park in Lemont, apparently at the direction of the Centre Region Parks & Recreation Commission, to make room for more playground equipment.

"That's not what we need to be doing," Fryer said. "We could have set the equipment in there without tearing anything out. That's an environmental abortion out there."

The seven-acre park on Matilda Venue has about an acre's worth of lawn up front and six acres of nature trails through the wooded foothills of Mount Nittany. The lawn is wide open but edged with picnic tables, a swing set, sandbox and a few other diversions for the very young.

But the lawn just got a little bigger and the woodland a little smaller. Instead of taking up more lawn with equipment, the commission opted to clear more forest at the start of one of the nature trail. That move has made all the difference to Fryer, himself a Lemont resident.

"It's a nature area," Fryer said. "We can't undo the damage that's already been done by hacking up those trees."

Of heat and ash

Here’s one consumer’s report about wood pellet stoves: They do reduce home heating costs but in the bargain they create a lot of ash and thus introduce a home cleanup cost.

Like a lot of people, I bought a wood pellet stove ahead of winter. I was motivated by recollections of last winter’s steep heating bills and expectations of much higher oil prices this year together with much colder temperatures.

The stove, inserted into a fireplace, burns pellets that look like rabbit food but are made instead of compressed sawdust, wood chips and other biomass. The stove puts out enough warmth so that our oil-burning furnace, its thermostat set at 55 degrees, comes on only occasionally. That's apart from morning shower time, when we turn it up for a quick blast of heat.

It will take a few years of using the pellet stove to recoup the $2,700 we paid for it, but a 40-pound bag of wood pellets costs about $4 and lasts four to eight hours, depending on how high we set the heat, less costly than oil or natural gas.

I expected all that, from salesroom conversations. What I did not anticipate was the once-weekly cleanup of ash inside the stove, which didn’t come up in those salesroom conversations because I didn’t ask about it.

The ash doesn’t leak out of the the stove when it’s on, but it builds up inside and has to be removed every 10 bags or so. That process has taken me through one too-small shop vacuum that blew out on me — and all over a nearby desk computer — to a bigger and better shop vacuum that has held up so far.

It's apparent that my discontent isn't isolated. I've noticed that companies that produce wood pellets — they're enjoying a seller's market — have tried to co-opt the ash nuisance into a marketing strategy. One boasts that its pellets create less ash. That seems like a dubious claim. I've tried that brand and two others and see no difference.

There's plenty of web sites out there for comparison shopping and for advice in choosing between  wood, wood pellet and gas stoves as alternative heating sources. For starters, the home owner resource site Demesne has a useful page.

Of rocks and roads

It's been more than a year since the state Department of Transportation has invited the public in the Centre County region to a meeting about the threat to water from acid-bearing rocks unearthed in massive spoil piles and fill areas at an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop. But another such meeting lies ahead.

Marla Fannin, PennDOT spokeswoman, says she'll try to arrange a meeting in December, soon after the state House Transportation Committee convenes its third public hearing on the acid rock drainage hazard five miles west of State College.

The state House panel met first in March 2004 about the Skytop probl