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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We’ll be focused on blog maintenance for the next week or so (mostly getting things back in working order since the migration). Then we plan to resume a regular posting schedule beginning just after the New Year. Thanks for your continued interest and support. We’re now officially live on our new blog host. Thanks to Annette and her team for tremendous help with the migration. Since we’re also on a new platform, we’ve temporarily lost some of the old features and links, but will add them back asap. Before we’re back to 100%, if you need anything in a pinch and can’t find it, feel free to drop us a note at tceblog[at]gmail.com. Thanks. For those of you who keep track of ongoing TCE news, we’re sorry to be slacking. We have a bunch of new stories to post (including new legislation) but won’t be able to do so until late this week. In the meantime, we may try a live-blogging experiment from a conference we’re attending on Wed/Thurs (more on this to come), but who knows for sure? Regardless, we hope to be caught up and back on track with regular posts by/after this weekend. Happy Holidays and thank you all for reading the TCE Blog. We greatly appreciate your visits, your emails, and your support. As many have noticed, this has been a tough year for maintaining a schedule of regular/active updates. Without getting into the gory details, we have been unable to post regular updates throughout the year due to limited staff and unavoidable conflicts for our time. Hence the many starts and stops… Having recently made a few slight changes to free up more time, we hope to resume our regular schedule of updates within the very near future. In the meantime, we hope you and yours have a safe, happy, healthy New Year. Yes, you read those words right. We are considering launching an online store. Though we don’t expect to get rich going this route, we like the idea for several reasons:
So here’s the burning question: If we sell T-shirts, mugs, and other items bearing a graphic and/or message, what should they say? We have several ideas, but we’d love reader input. Put another way, what would you or others be likely to purchase if made available in our store? Please reply using comments…or contact us directly if you prefer. Thanks. P.S. If any community group leaders like the idea of selling merchandise through our store to raise money, please contact us… Folks have been writing us for some time, but we’ve been unable to respond. An update here is long overdue. Is the TCE Blog dead? No. Our day job has had us swamped and intensely-focused for months and we have been (temporarily) unable to devote any quality time to updates or emails. However, we have every intention of continuing to maintain this blog as the largest single dedicated source of TCE news and information on the web. For readers who visit us regularly and look forward to our updates, and for those who have emailed and not received a prompt reply, please accept my apology. Please know that we appreciate our growing readership’s continued support and will return to regular posts as soon as we are able. best, neil P.S. There has been quite a bit of recent interest in TCE problems in Pennsylvania. For updates on some of the latest concerns and happenings, check out investigative reporter Jon Goodman’s blog, Talk of the Town. While we’ve got lots to catch up on already, it’s going to have to wait 2 weeks. This blog will officially be on break until September 1. When we return, be on the lookout for: - Excerpts and noteworthy details from the bowels of the National Academies’ TCE report - State-by-state lists of TCE contaminated sites in the Superfund and RCRA programs (to our knowledge, not available in list form elsewhere on the web) - Special guest co-bloggers - Continuing coverage of important legal news and issues - Ongoing highlights of breaking news and media reports from TCE-impacted communities across the country - You tell us. Email us and let us know what kind of news/info you need and/or would like. As always, we’ll do all we can to respond to requests. Until then… Sorry we’ve been away from national news for a few days folks. We’ve got lots of catching up to do. Commentary will be light as we get you up to speed. To readers who have written us recently, thank you for writing and apologies for the sluggish response. We’ll be in touch by the weekend. Often I’m asked why I started the TCE Blog in the first place. Part of the reason is that my former hometown had a TCE-contaminated public water supply. Since 80% of the town was served water from the TCE-contaminated public supply wells, tens of thousands of Cheshire citizens were exposed to dangerous levels of TCE via public water for decades. Residents and workers weren’t warned at the time except for a handful of families who were given bottled water to drink because of contaminated private water supply wells. To this day, polluters have never been held accountable. When a public health assessment in 2004 finally revealed the truth about contamination and cancer, officials not only tried to stifle more inquiry, they refused to share with residents what was known about TCE and cancer. They also didn’t bother to mention the other VOC’s (PCE, Benzene, TCA) still migrating under the town. Without help from the town or the state, citizens like me were left to find information on our own. Though there was plenty to be found on the web, three things became abundantly clear after months of additional, independent research: 1. There appeared to be no central place for finding information about TCE, its health affects, and the impact it has on communities. Information was/is scattered about. 2. Other communities across the country were struggling to find the same information and answer the very same questions as Cheshire…also without help from their local and state officials. Very few of these communities knew about one another. 3. We were amassing so much information about TCE and its impact on communities nationwide, this information just had to be consolidated, preserved, and shared. From this, the TCE Blog was born. – Now, evidence suggests there is still significant VOC contamination underground in Cheshire. Astonishingly, state and local leaders/officials have refused to act. See, I don’t just write about contaminated communities. I’m from one:
* Actual names and email addresses have been removed to protect the innocent guilty innocent. We’ve noticed over the past year that many people arrive at this blog while looking for maps of contamination areas and underground plumes within various TCE-contaminated communities. As such, we’ve added Maps as a topic category (see list of categories in LEFT-hand sidebar). If you have any plume maps you’d like to make available, know where we can link to current contamination maps, or are looking for a specific map that you can’t find, please don’t hesitate to let us know. I was toying with the blog layout a bit and by accident pressed a wrong button and installed a new visual theme/layout. Everything on the blog turned green. No joke. I quickly installed a different theme so that things look OK again (not too far from the old look), but some of the details have changed (or been removed). Though it started inadvertantly, over the next week or two, we’ll be making some changes to the blog ease readability and useability. Please bear with us. Thanks. We’re looking for a new site search tool. Currently we use Google’s free site search and its just not getting the job done. We want to enable quick and effective keyword search within this site. We’re looking around for a simple, proven solution. Meantime, if you have any tools/programs you might recommend, please let us know (use comments feature below…or send email directly to tceblog AT gmail.com) In the interim, sorry the site search is so ineffective. If you are looking for something but can’t find it, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly. Since we’re always open to fielding and sharing questions from readers, we have just added a new topic filter over to the right —–> It’s called…get this…Reader Questions (yes, creativity abounds on a Thursday afternoon). If you are struggling to find information that readers (or we) can possibly assist with, please don’t hesitate to contact us. With permission, we’ll be glad to post any questions (and responses) that may be relevant for our readers. Download here (9K PDF). Please feel free to print and share. We’re back from an unexpected break. Please bear with us as we jump back in with current news and do our best to catch you up on things we missed.
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