Sprol

Let’s start with this photo of the greater Lima, Ohio metro area. It’s pretty and green, home to over 40 thousand people. The friendly town is easily within driving distance of larger cities like Ft. Wayne, Dayton, and Columbus, which sport more than 100,000 residents. Of course, there is lots of agriculture in this region, which you can see in the well ordered rectangular plots surrounding the town of Lima. Lots of agriculture. In 2003, the state of Ohio cash farm receipts totaled $4.6 billion. Almost half of that was from soybeans and products made from soybeans, so it’s a safe guess that lots of those green fields are soybeans.

As we saw last week, agriculture since the Green Revolution means extensive use of fertilizer from natural gas. Because of this there is going to be lots of anhydrous ammonia (NH3) somewhere to distribute to lots of farms. It’s relatively easy to manufacture. It’s also very dangerous to store, transport, and use, unless handled very carefully, acording to safety protocols, all the time.

The stuff is also hard to secure, mostly because people are always trying to steal it for who knows what reason. So there’s a danger there, because the people who are ripping this stuff probably don’t read safety instructions. Another danger is of course the sabotage risk. But mostly, like with lots of things in life, the real danger is from accidents. Complex systems can fail, people can fail, organizations can fail, and according to the EPA, over a million people would be harmed if there was a worse-case failure here.

The danger is real. The biggest problem with making this stuff is that you start with natural gas, which means you’ve got a pipleline somewhere. Pipeline accidents happen somewhere in the world a few times per year (see this pdf for 2002 incidents). Most sabotage happens outside of the United States closer to where the fuels are extracted such as Nigeria, rather than in Lima, Ohio, but leaks and pressure blasts seem to happen everywhere.

As we zoom in we notice a regular pattern on the ground, a field of big white blips. This is where Google Maps fails us as their images are far too low resolution to be of any help. To make this work we need to go over to TerraServer.

Here you can see part of the three General Dynamics plants, where among other things they make the M-1 Abrams tank, as well as the BOC Gases Hydrogen Production Plant. In this image the black areas in the upper left are the City of Lima Wastewater Treatment Plant, where all of the waste water is treated, first built in 1930 and later renovated and rebuilt at great expense. This message from the treatment plant’s home page does not inspire confidence:

Throughout the plant each stage of treatment is monitored and controlled by a computerized process control system (PCS). Lima’s wastewater PCS consists of distributed programmable logic controllers which are monitored using a desk top computer network.

I feel better already.

Oddly enough if you search for anhydrous ammonia in Lima very not much comes up, but look up the word plant and you get all kinds of industrial supply companies. Let’s try looking in the water.

The drinking water there tested in 2004 (pdf) for Nitrate, Atrazine (a herbicide runoff), Choloform, Chlorine, Coliform… in other words, normal, safe to drink. Hmmm. No wonder Americans spent $7.7 billion for bottled water in 2002, and $8.3 billion in 2003.

Ohio seems to be a pollution friendly state; in 1998 they gave a special air permit to BP Chemical so that they could expel Butanediol into the air. This is toxic stuff that turns into the drug GHB among other things when the body metabolizes it. They can legally dump this stuff into the air? I could not be making this stuff up.