Colo. scientists to study aftermath of hurricane

[Guest guest]

Article Last Updated: 09/01/2005 03:11:57 AM

Colo. scientists to study aftermath of hurricane

By Brown and Katy Human

Denver Post Staff Writers

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_2991055?rss

Stalactites of mold will hang from ceilings in New Orleans after

water recedes, and the potentially toxic substance will cling to

walls all over the city.

" It's going to be the plague after the flood, " said Colorado State

University researcher Doug Rice, who will help hotels, hospitals and

other businesses clean up moldy buildings.

" It will impact every building that has gotten wet, " he said.

Rice is among dozens of scientists trying to make their way to

Louisiana and Mississippi to study everything from emergency-

response techniques to infectious disease and mold.

They are searching for rental cars and places to stay, hoping to

collect what some call " perishable data " that could help during

another disaster.

The University of Colorado's Natural Hazards Center has begun to

hand out small grants of a few thousand dollars to help researchers

get into the field.

" We're trying to learn about what makes organizations and

communities able to organize, to be creative, resilient, " said

Kathleen Tierney, director of the center in Boulder.

People's memories of disasters are notoriously faulty, Tierney said.

Days matter for researchers who want to understand just how special

communication systems form, or how thousands

of evacuees are organized into emergency shelters.

One social scientist wants to learn whether a new federal emergency

system is leading to improved emergency response.

Another hopes to understand what happened to the poor, fishing-based

community of Grand Bayou, south of New Orleans.

Rice said mold can get " out of hand " two to four weeks after a

hurricane.

In healthy adults, mold can cause headaches, runny noses and

shortness of breath.

Toxic molds are more dangerous and can cause memory loss, skin

rashes and severe headaches, and can be deadly for HIV patients and

others with immune-system deficiencies, Rice said.

Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or

khuman@....

[Guest guest]

And I have a little piece of news for these researchers from CO:

There's not a surface anywhere on that part of the Gulf Coast that isn't wet

enough to grow mold, and that's on the dryest day of the year. Never has been.

And they didn't do anything but break out the bleach after Camille in 1969. So

how they think they're gonna manage to isolate the new growth from the old

growth, and be able tell the fungal effects in a population from Cancer Alley

from the effects of decades of living in damp indoor spaces in an area saturated

with dioxin and dozens of pollutants from the gas and oil industry and the stuff

from the cane fields, who eat shell fish and ocean fish by the shipload and who

will be spending their time in water-soaked surroundings that are exposed to

sewage and dead bodies and every chemical on every piece of flotsam floating

around in it...is utterly beyond me. In a mess like that, they'd do well to

figure out what the questions are, let alone construct anything that remotely

resembles a decent study and come up with any answers.

But you can bet they're gonna keep asking us where's the science behind OUR

claims...

Serena

www.freeboards.net/index.php?mforum=sickgovernmentb

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