Fire in Apex

Grady, Kirk and Paul on the Apex chemical fire.

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It's odd, but several of the major sex abuse cases involving the Catholic church involve deaf kids. I didn't understand why, until I heard this song. And now I have to get some q-tips and sulfuric acid and scrub out my ears.
As I mentioned here, it looks like there is additional rumbling over Ohio's education standards.
One response I got from readers of The Republican War on Science was that the book depressed and outraged them, but provided little release, and didn't devote adequate energy to proposing positive solutions to the problems I had identified.
Just FYI, yesterday's New York Times has a piece by Denise Grady and Gina Kolata on avian influenza:

As terrible as the fire was, at least it gave me a pretty good class lesson. Rarely do I have the opportunity to make a discussion on water pollution hit quite so close to home.

i live in Apex, about a mile from the south edge of the evacuation zone. i got to stay home friday, because i couldn't get to work - all the roads were blocked between my house and my job.

as far as i've been able to tell from news reports, the fire (or, the stuff that burned) was either not as bad as initial reports, or the Town did a great job of getting people out before anyone got hurt - probably a little of both. there were few people actually hurt who weren't firefighters (and, that's an inherently dangerous job regardless of what's burning), and there doesn't seem to be any lingering pollutants in the air, or on the ground - at least not once you get away from the site of the fire. all good news, of course.

now, the news around here is of people who are suing the company because they were forced to evacuate their houses - one lawyer on the radio this AM described his client's complaint as the tragedy of missing the comforts of home "which they were accustomed to" for "nearly 48 hours".