Black Swan Event in USA: Ebola in NYC

Nov 11

A extraordinary high percentage of the patients having Ebola in the USA have survived and gotten over Ebola. There seems to be a fatality rate is West Africa of over 70%, while in the USA it is way less than 5%.  It seems to be not as infectious as i once thought. The USA today is ebola free. So it is not going to be a big event as I once feared. 

The only problem is if in west africa it gets bigger...then people with ebola overwhelm our system.

All bets are off if Ebola mutates into being more infectious. That seems unlikely. Within a month we got a much better system at identifying and isolating ebola patients in the USA...we got a much better system of detecting ebola patient coming into the USA. 

We have accomplish a lot in a month...     


Oct 16

Dallas Presbyterian Hospital now has only 33% of their normal population of patients....67% empty!  

Oct 15

Did I get this right? Did I see it coming?

Me on Oct 1: "Ok, Ebola is the greatest transparency tool the world has ever known. If you got the littlest kink in your organization or government agency, the Ebola virus will tremendously amplify the weak signal so everyone in the world can see even your littlest defects."

Oct 14

Cost to treat Ebola in hospital about $20,000 per day. Maybe at least another $150,000 for support services: clean up house, keep tract of potential infected people, CDC and state authorities.

They are now refusing all new patients. I bet you a lot employees aren't risking their lives and showing up at work. Know question, Presby got their lawyers out. Right, we got a culture of selfishness...now we are going to see what this virus does to our heads!!

Again, I worry the new person with Ebola would be under so much psychological pressure under a death sentence…big time denial… they might not go into isolation until they really get sick.  

Who even thinks a person under a death sentence would ever be rationale!

I wrote Oct 2:  

Ok, is the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital system bankrupt and just not know it yet. So say they were grossly negligent on handling an Ebola patient, say patient shifting…they knowingly discharged a patient knowing it will cause great harm to the USA. Say through this one infected person, more than 1000 people become infected from Ebola and die.

They say 100 highly trained people are needed to treat one Ebola patient. How much does the treatment cost of one patient? You know it has got to be expensive."

Reposted on Oct 12

Oct 10:

What I fear more than anything else: Ebola will get in our blood distribution just like HIV. Somebody with Ebola will give blood, then it will get mixed together with other blood and get transported to many people inflecting them.  

Now if we get a slew of new USA infected people in the next week or two, we are in big trouble...

Sept 16 came in contact with a infected pregnant woman.

Sept 19 left Liberia

Sept 20 arrive USA( Airplane)

Sept 26 symptom, went to hospital, did not admit him.

Sept 28 Finially admitted him to hospital and treated him as he was infected.

Oct 2 media in USA has become dominated by Texas and Ebola!!! World wide stock market decline blame on Ebola fears.

Oct 12: Hospital nurse who cared for first USA Ebola patient is diagnosed with Ebola. She always used full protective clothing.    

Oct 2

Remember the world wide stock market decline and the weakness in the airline sector has been blame of Ebola!

Ebola Patient in Dallas Lied on Screening Form, Liberian Airport Official Says

The government officials portray this in the certainty of an impenetrable barrier. If you knew the true conditions of these temperature takers you think it is a extremely weak barrier. Actually the establishment knows that, but they think spinning this and lying to us won't cause our nation to go into a severe panic. I won’t be surprised if the officials knows our media is plastering our nation 24/7 with Ebola, it is huge, so stress might be making them overly protective to the detriment of all us.

What exactly does these means:

"taken by a trained CDC health care worker with a thermometer approved by the Food and Drug Administration"

We don't know the controls ont that liberian employees? Who was the temperature takers paid by and who were there bosses? A commment like this is to protect the CDC or seemly protect the USA from panic.

Filled out a form, asked if you had come in contact with somebody with ebola. Then econdary screening...

Seems CDC has the actual paperwork and temperature.  

Duh?

Man in U.S. WithEbola Had Been Screened to Fly, but System Is Spotty

This is a prime example of how you can’t trust foreigners fleeing Liberia with Ebola.  

Last week, I flew to London for a few days, and then on to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, across the continent from the heart of the Ebola crisis. After hours in various immigration lines, I triumphantly claimed my transit visa when two airport staff members in white coats stopped me and said they needed to check my temperature. One held the gun to my head and then, a few moments later, frowned at the machine. He said I had an elevated temperature. I felt panic mixed with dread. “I’ve been in line for two hours with a crowd of people in a hot room!” I explained. They asked if I had been vomiting. I told them I hadn’t, and they let me leave.

Oh, this has been repeated over and over in CNNN with certainty; “He had his temperature taken upon leaving Liberia.” What is the validity of that statement? Do we trust the Liberian officials as much at the US officials? Why do they test people leaving the country as much as the people coming to Liberia? Why do we place the burden on the Liberian without any of our controls…the USA in charge of the testing and procedure, and accountability…. onto them or consequence if they miss, how come it is not our responsibilities with our enforce codes and standards.

Can you imagine a Ebola sick person going to a doctor’s office and then it comes out…it would destroy that practice.   

Ok, is the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital system bankrupt and just not know it yet. So say they were grossly negligent on handling an Ebola patient, say patient shifting…they knowingly discharged a patient knowing it will cause great harm to the USA.  Say through this one infected person, more than 1000 people become infected from Ebola and die.

They say 100 highly trained people are needed to treat one Ebola patient. How much does the treatment cost of one patient? You know it has got to be expensive.

So a 1000 people die from the one hospital action…then they all sue the hospital corporation for damage???

CNN: From out Texas Ebola patient, as many as 80 people could have been infected from this guy. They are following 80 people. It could be way higher than that if he was sick and didn't disclose it. Right, they are going on the evidence his temperature was checked in Liberia...portraying it as a certainty of proof. Nothing in Nigeria works without bribes and it is a expected relationship between peoples in that area of the world. Our elites put in play certainty/uncertainty gaming across their agendas. It is a form of a horrible corruption across our country. They throw out a fact as absolute certainty of proof, but you go behind the scenes there is enormous secret and hidden uncertainty with the fact as proof. I am certain if you said I got a cold and threw the temperature taker a hundred bucks to ignore my elevated temperature, you could get on the plane. Think about it, say we had 1000 people in the USA who had. become infected with Ebola. That would be 80,000 people we would have to keep track of if this is the going rate. You see how fast this become uncontrollable. Think about how this would quickly spin out of control in NYC. 

You see how the Liberian guy went to a enclave of our poor?          
Oct 1

What this man must have seen in his closing month in Libera? This the the problem, was he fleeing liberia for better American treatment. It certainly looks like he knew he was infected. How could you trust him to tell the truth about his travels or history? It is not a adequate barrier if safety depends on a person telling the truth.  

The body of Sonny Boy Williams, 21, hours after he was picked up alive from his home in Monrovia, Liberia. The man who flew to Dallas and was later found to have the Ebola virus, identified by Liberian officials as Thomas Eric Duncan, helped Mr. Williams carry his sister, Marthalene Williams, 19, who was stricken by Ebola, to and from a hospital last month. She died the next day.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

unbelievably...isn't this how Ebola got to libera with a infected American lying his way into Liberia and dying in their airport or on the way to the hospital through a overloaded taxi.

DALLAS — Health officials in Dallas said Wednesday that they believed the man who is the first confirmed case of the Ebola virus in the country had come into contact with 12 to 18 people, including some school children, when he was experiencing symptoms.

Ok, Ebola is the greatest transparency tool the world has ever known. If you got the littlest kink in your organization or government agency, the Ebola virus will tremendously amplify the weak signal so everyone in the world can see even your littlest defects.   

Bet you it is race between finding more of the infected in Dallas or the first person diagnosed in the USA dies.  

Did the hospital release the Ebola effected patient because the hospital was afraid of picking up the tab of these sick people? You can bet the patient wasn't covered by medical insurance. Patient shifting?   

DALLAS — Sister of US Ebola patient: He told hospital he was from Liberia on 1st visit, was sent home.

Texas is warning us a close family member is now sick, there is four school age children in the family. They now are not going to school. Everyone with kids going to school in Dallas is now terrified their kids might be dying.

Would it be better for all of us if we knew what schools these kids came from.

Right now our officials can smell beginning of a widespread panic...they are desperately trying to head it off.  

CNN just reported it. When are we going to declare a national emergency and put us on a Ebola war footing? Martial law would come about from a bungle initial response to this disaster…that is what they would have to do to regain control of our nation because of a panic response.     

In the last 24 hour the feds and media have sewed the seeds of future panic situation. Everyone is afraid to destroy our economy and local economy, so they are pulling their punches. CNN is portraying this excessively in their black and white simpleton mode...all their dressed up assumptions as science to telegraphs we are safe, safe, safe. They won't make an assumption saying this is how we aren't safe. It is obvious they don't want us to panic, but is it a panic we need. Once we falsify the officials statements, then begins the mother of all panics. 

American Airlines (AAL) shareholders are experiencing some motion sickness. The entire industry is lower today on confirmation of the first case of Ebola in Dallas, Texas. Investors are concerned that some tourists may blanch at the prospect of spending 20 hours sealed in an aluminum Petri dish with 300 strangers until this Ebola thing is under control. Despite that headwind American shares still higher by nearly 40% in 2014.

I think we should have a national policy where we pay the sick a stipend and pay all their bills until they get well. 

Sept 30

Are we in our right mind believing this guy. Why not be overly conservative, assume everyone on that flight was infected and needing immediate contact. it is a warm, assuming honestly or anything is extremely dangerous.

The man, who was visiting relatives in the United States, was not ill during the flight, health officials said at a news conference Tuesday evening.  

I am saying, if I was fatality sick with two or three weeks left live, I wouldn't trust me. If I was away from home and dying...i would say what it took to get near my family and be in the area that I love to die.

Just saying, twelve days?  Hmm, arrived here Sept 20th?

Ship from Africa moves to New Orleans after sick crew removed in Belle Chasse

Vessel to arrive in New Orleans at noon

UPDATED 4:07 PM CDT Sep 18, 2014 

This is where privacy comes in huge conflict with the need for the public good. It is the interest of the greater good that privacy needs are minimized…where the public has a health right to know and understand if they had the possibility to be infected. The greater good has a higher worth than you privacy. In other words, a sick person should be compelled to honestly answer where he has been and who he could have possibly infected.

Now if we get a slew of new USA infected people in the next week or two, we are in big trouble...

Sept 16 came in contact with a infected pregnant woman.

Sept 19 left Liberia

Sept 20 arrive USA( Airplane)  

Sept 26 symptom, went to hospital, did not admit him.

Sept 28 Finially admitted him to hospital and treated him as he was infected.

Got sick four days after arriving in USA, so he declares. Wonder how all the airline passengers are? 

Ambulance drivers in quarantine! 

He came to USA to "visit" family...I mean, to get the best treatment and free medical.

Again, i bet he was knew he was in contact with a person who had Ebola in Liberia, risked inflecting others , then  strategized how to get treatment in the USA. He is a non USA citizen.

He is the first person outside Africa in the world who has come down with Ebola.

At least four days of outside contact when he was known to be infectous with Ebola. He comes from a world where Ebola is known to have a 80 to 90% fatality rate. Maybe he wanted to spend his last days with his famility...knowing that once going into the hospital he wasn't coming back alive.  

One thing you can absolutely count on, all Ebola patients are absolute liars.

History in the making...you knew it was on the way. So the panic started in Dallas...he caught it two to three weeks ago. I better not hear New Orleans anything!  

UPDATE: The Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate is reporting that a patient who was being evaluated for Ebola has tested positive for the virus. According to Reuters, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the case -- the first time Ebola has been diagnosed in the United States.

Published first on Aug Around Aug 1st 

Sept 18: 

See, the feds know a USA outbreak is right round the corner and they are getting heavy handed...

I still don't trust the Feds about Ebola.

Can you even imagine the fallout if these guys were later found inflected with Ebola???

BELLE CHASSE, La. - While the Coast Guard and the Centers for Disease Control were making decisions on how to respond to sick crew members aboard the New Orleans bound Marine Phoenix, Louisiana's top emergency manager says the state was apparently kept in the dark and cut out of the discussion.
"We should have been notified and been in that discussion of what we think the best course of action should be," said Kevin Davis, Director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
Davis maintains he wasn't notified about the medical emergency until late in the game.
He says given the nature of the emergency, the state should have been consulted before the ship came up the river and crew members rushed to the hospital.
Davis told the CDC, the agency needs to do a better job keeping the public informed.
"Because the initial discussion had Ebola in it, so that was certainly a fear," said Davis. "You know in a hurricane situation or any kind of disaster, information is the critical tool for the public to know what's going on, as they saw on TV people in (hazmat) suits, that was scary."
Late Wednesday night, hours after crew members were taken off the ship, the CDC finally reported the illness as malaria, not Ebola.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser also said local authorities didn't get much notice the ship would be docking in Belle Chasse.
"The big question is why did it come in the river if there was even the possibility that there was a problem and something serious could be spread," said Nungesser. "Whenever there's a problem, they should contact where the ship is heading and not just allow the ship to come up the river."
Both Davis and Nungesser now hope to get with their federal counterparts and come up with some better procedures before the next heath emergency aboard a New Orleans bound ship.

NYT: Fear of Ebola Drives Mob to Kill Officials in Guinea

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI SEPT. 18, 2014

The bodies of eight officials and journalists who went to a remote village in Guinea to dispel rumors about the deadly Ebola outbreak gripping the region were discovered after a rock-hurling mob attacked the delegation, claiming that it had come to spread the illness, a government spokesman said Thursday.

The delegation had left for the village on Tuesday for what was supposed to be a community event to raise awareness about the Ebola virus, said the spokesman, Albert Camara Damantang. When the angry crowd descended on them, he said, several officials managed to escape and alert their colleagues in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, who sent out a search party

This simply doesn't sound like malaria...it is a insect born disease. But I imagine if they knew it was Ebola it won't be going on to its original destination.  

A person on board the ship bound for New Orleans was listed as critically ill in a Jefferson Parish hospital after being diagnosed with malaria. Several other sailors on board will also be treated after showing signs of the disease

Another crew member aboard the freighter died from malaria after getting off the ship in the Bahamas earlier in the week.

So all of the officials are afraid of the panic…the idea that the city of New Orleans could quickly lose their commercial value if an Ebola infection breaks out. In the name of doing the greater good, to prevent the destructive panic, they lie. The trouble is the lying is really what causes the panic and economic destruction. 

You know, until they get unobtainable triplicate proof of Ebola they will never admit it. 

Do most nations have a agreement they would never admit Ebola has come to their shore because just the word is so destructive. 

Septic shock is very consistent with Ebola.

He said the patient was diagnosed with septic shock and treated with intravenous fluids, antibiotics and drugs to raise blood pressure

To think these guys all got bitten by a mosquito all at the same and two are deathly sick. It just don’t jive:  

"In endemic regions, where transmission is high, people are continuously infected so that they gradually develop immunity to the disease. Until they have acquired such immunity, children remain highly vulnerable. Pregnant women are also highly susceptible since the natural defense mechanisms are reduced during pregnancy.

If these types of malaria are left untreated, episodes may recur at irregular times for months or possibly years, and the malaria form can recur more than 25 years after exposure.

Right, in the middle of the night, the ship offload in a skiff ten of the infected with Ebola, then dump them off on the coast somewhere. A Ebola mega Katrina hurricane. The poor of New Orleans would be a perfect petri dish.

NEW YORK—Cocoa prices rose to the highest level in more than two weeks on Thursday on concerns that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could affect global supplies.

Ok, can you imagine the media fallout for the USA if all these sailor have Ebola. I can imagine somebody with Ebola paying the captain of the ship big bucks to take him to the hospitals of America.  

I think this is going to happen a lot more often, the elites of West Africa and beyond paying ships loaded with the Ebola to dock in America. We will unquestionably for free offload the sick and medically treat them. Bury them if we have too. That is what the west African and the rest of the poor countries will think. We are going to be flooded by these ships and I suspected a lot of private aircraft.

All of these indications could be technically true...but still a blantant lie. I just think the CDC and our government are blatantly lying to us. This is the beginning of it, when Ebola causes us to lose faith and trust in government. Ebola is really about that, not a runaway pathogen.

You know for a fact for an Ebola test to come back it takes many days and weeks. Four people on this ship all come up with malaria...I just don’t buy it.  

Another indication we got a brain dead media...

CDC, along with local and federal officials, responded today to a report of illness on a ship at the Port of New Orleans. Earlier today, local EMS transferred three of the ship's crew members to a local hospital.The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) confirmed a positive test result this evening for malaria in the patient being treated at a New Orleans-area hospital. DHH shared this information with CDC and local officials. The other two patients had mild symptoms and are being assessed. Another ill crew member disembarked in the Bahamas two days ago, where he was diagnosed with malaria and later died. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and does not spread from person to person. Approximately 1500-2000 cases are reported every year in the United States, almost all in recent travelers. 

Honestly, they didn't go big enough with sending troops into Nigeria. We have gone into a country with a no functioning government and the peoples in object chaos. I think mostly our new facilities will be basically isolated from the people once built. An island unto themselves.

Basically, the Nigerians officials will be like the iraqi military. Just fold and run when the first threat appears…loyalty unto only self-preservation. Their only function is to gauge the Americans for money in a unprecedented internal crisis. 
   

Everyone thinks this is undercounted by a factor of four. So the real number of deaths is 2800.

Sept 19: Ebola could infect 500,000 by end of January, according to CDC projection

What is this going to look like in six months? West Africa in a state of collapse, the USA facing hordes of hungry, poor and sick people at the boarder...the world consumed with by the spreading Ebola. We might be talking 500,000 or 1,000,000 infected.   

The World Health Organization says more than 700 more Ebola cases emerged in West Africa in one week, a statistic that shows the outbreak is accelerating

Just three weeks ago the number of new cases was around 500 for a one-week period. The number of people believed to have killed is now more than 2,600, an increase of roughly 200 from the last estimate, WHO said Thursday. Most deaths have been in Liberia.

The new figures from the U.N. health agency show that the disease is thought to have sickened more than 5,300 people. Just under half of those cases were recorded in the last three weeks.

Honestly, they don't deserve any help from the USA. For decades they been fighting for a weak and ineffective government...if they don't want to help themselves, they will just end hating our help.

If they don't have a strong centralized government who has a pattern of increasing justice and education for everyone...they don't deserve our help. It is a lost cause and they will turn on us as soon as our boots are on the ground. I think most of our help will get filtered to corruption in the top.

That should be the message to the rest of the world...if you won't help yourselves, we won't bail you out...if internal pressures and basically elite corruption keeps you undeveloped and a weak centralized government...then you will get no help from us.

If you won't fight for yourself, we won't do your fighting for you.

Liberian President Pleads With Obama for Assistance in Combating Ebola

SEPT. 12, 2014

The great fault with the corporate media and news...they need evidence when they are mostly blind. They have insuffience resources and access...but the they need proof to report the events of the day.
Now some are talking about 100,000s and millions of people being infected before this is over...

U.S. ScientistsSee Long Fight Against Ebola

The deadly Ebola outbreak sweeping across three countries in West Africa is likely to last 12 to 18 months more, much longer than anticipated, and could infect hundreds of thousands of people before it is brought under control, say scientists mapping its spread for the federal government.

“We hope we’re wrong,” said Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.

Both the time the model says it will take to control the epidemic and the number of cases it forecasts far exceed estimates by the World Health Organization, which said last month that it hoped to control the outbreak within nine months and predicted 20,000 total cases by that time.

But researchers at various universities say that at the virus’s present rate of growth, there could easily be close to 20,000 cases in one month, not in nine. Some of the United States’ leading epidemiologists, with long experience in tracking diseases such as influenza, have been creating computer models of the Ebola epidemic at the request of the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Departmemt.

Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the W.H.O., which has stood by its lower projections of the toll of the Ebola outbreak.Credit Martial Trezzini/KEYSTONE, via Associated Press

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to comment on the projections. A spokesman, Tom Skinner, said the agency was doing its own modeling and hoped to publish the results soon. But the C.D.C. director, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, has warned repeatedly that the epidemic is worsening, and on Sept. 2 described it as “spiraling out of control.”

While previous outbreaks have been largely confined to rural areas, the current epidemic, the largest ever, has reached densely populated, impoverished cities — including Monrovia, the capital of Liberia — gravely complicating efforts to control the spread of the disease. Alessandro Vespignani, a professor of computational sciences at Northeastern University who has been involved in the computer modeling of Ebola’s spread, said that if the case count reaches hundreds of thousands, “there will be little we can do.”

What worries public health officials most is that the epidemic has begun to grow exponentially in Liberia. In the most recent week reported, Liberia had nearly 400 new cases, almost double the number reported the week before. Another grave concern, the W.H.O. said, is “evidence of substantial underreporting of cases and deaths.” The organization reported on Friday that the number of Ebola cases as of Sept. 7 was 4,366, including 2,218 deaths.

“There has been no indication of any downturn in the epidemic in the three countries that have widespread and intense transmission,” it said, referring to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The scientists who produced the models cautioned that their dire predictions were based on the virus’s current uncontrolled spread and said the picture could improve if public health efforts started to work. Because conditions could change, for better or for worse, the researchers also warned that their forecasts became shakier the farther into the future they went.

Predicting Ebola’s Future Toll

Assuming current infection rates continue, a new model estimates there could be 20,000 Ebola cases by mid-October. The model’s estimate would nearly triple under deteriorating conditions and an increasing infection rate.

Dr. Lewis, the Virginia Tech epidemiologist, said that a group of scientists collaborating on Ebola modeling as part of an N.I.H.-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study, had come to a consensus on the projected 12- to 18-month duration and very high case count.

Another Midas participant, Jeffrey L. Shaman, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, agreed.

“Ebola has a simple trajectory because it’s growing exponentially,” Dr. Shaman said.

Lone Simonsen, a research professor of global health at George Washington University who was not involved in the modeling, said the W.H.O. estimates seemed conservative and the higher projections more reasonable.

“The final death toll may be far higher than any of those estimates unless an effective vaccine or therapy becomes available on a large scale or many more hospital beds are supplied,” she said in an email.

I have spent most of my life modeling and forecasting time series data. Usually the model is less important than the assumptions built into...

Dr. Vespignani said that the W.H.O. figures would be reasonable if there were an effective campaign to stop the epidemic now, but that there is not.

The modeling estimates are based on the observed growth rate of cases and on factors like how many people each patient infects. The researchers use the past data to make projections. They can test their methods by, for instance, taking the figures from June, plugging them into the model to predict the number of cases in July, and then comparing the results with what actually happened in July.

Dr. Shaman’s research team created a model that estimated the number of cases through Oct. 12, with different predictions based on whether control of the epidemic stays about the same, improves or gets worse. If control stays the same, according to the model, the case count by Oct. 12 will be 18,406. If control improves, it will be 7,861. If control worsens, it will soar to 54,895.

Before this epidemic, the largest Ebola outbreak was in Uganda from 2000 to 2001, and it involved only 425 cases. Scientists say the current epidemic surged out of control because it began near the borders of three countries where people traveled a lot, and they carried the disease to densely populated city slums. In addition, the weak health systems in these poor countries were not equipped to handle the disease, and much of the international response has been slow and disorganized.

But questions have also been raised about whether there could be something different about this strain of Ebola that makes it more contagious than previous ones.

Researchers are doubtful, but Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said it was important to keep an open mind about the possibility. During vaccine tests expected to start next month in monkeys, he said, he and his colleagues will monitor infected animals to see if they develop unusually high virus levels early in the disease that might amplify its infectiousness.

Some scientists have also suggested that as the outbreak continues and the virus spreads from person to person, it will have more opportunities to mutate and perhaps become even more dangerous or contagious. But Stuart T. Nichol, chief of the C.D.C.’s Viral Special Pathogens Branch, said that so far, researchers monitoring the mutations had seen no such changes.

Sept 10: On Wednesday, CNN reported, "There may be a lot more ebola victims being evacuated to the United States than we are been told about."

The vice president of an air ambulance service that is under contract with the State Department, Phoenix Air Group, told CNN that his pilots have transported "a lot of people who have been exposed."

Sept 9: The Ebola virus is spreading exponentially across Liberia as patients fill taxis in a fruitless search for medical care, the World Health Organization said Monday.

Sept 2: WHO: Ebola death toll tops 1,900

Aug 29: Right, historic low approval ratings of government in the USA. How is this going to play out in a modern country with broad based Internet and cell phone coverage? We are seeing the results of communication impoverished country... I bet you they will be thinking of shutting down our Internet? Can you imagine us with our wide spread communication and cell phone? Will we destabilize quicker that Nigeria because of the panic caused by our facebook or google in the USA?

The watchword so far on the ground is nobody can be trusted to tell the truth once exposed to Ebola...most of our societal protections is based on everyone telling the truth.

A Ferguson popping up in every community???

Why couldn't Ebola jump back in the animal population, then go on to infect humans through a animal or insect vector?

NYT: The World Health Organization is belatedly catching up to a warning issued in June by Doctors Without Borders, a group that has been delivering care in some of the hardest hit areas, that said the epidemic was out of control. On Thursday, the health agency said that the reported death toll had risen to 1,552, from 3,069 cases of infection in four West African countries — Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria — and that the actual toll could be up to four times higher because many cases go undetected or unreported. That suggests there could already be up to 12,000 cases.

Originally posted on 8/4

Aug 28: We expect these things to take off like the movies. Right, there is the disease, then how community responds to the disease...

Ebola Could Eventually Afflict Over 20,000, W.H.O. Says

By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and ALAN COWELLAUG. 28, 2014

GENEVA — As the tally of deaths from the worst known outbreak of the Ebola virus continued its seemingly inexorable rise, the World Health Organization said on Thursday that the epidemic was still accelerating and could afflict more than 20,000 people — almost seven times the current number of reported cases — before it could be brought under control.

The dire forecast was made as the W.H.O. reported that the number of known cases and fatalities had risen once again. The organization also acknowledged that in areas of intense transmission “the actual number of cases may be two-to-four times higher than that currently reported.”

The outbreak “continues to accelerate,” the organization said.

According to the latest figures released by the W.H.O. on Thursday, the death toll has risen by more than 100, to 1,552 out of 3,069 cases in four West African countries: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, which had previously indicated that its outbreak was under control.

While the disease was first identified in March, “more than 40 percent of the total number of cases have occurred within the past 21 days,” the W.H.O. said. “However, most cases are concentrated in only a few localities.”

Aug 22

Basically they put a veil over most of the information coming out of West Africa. I consider nothing accurate. Even these number are highly suspect...under counted.

"Ebola outbreak's death toll rises to 1,427."

"The scale of the world's worst Ebola outbreak has been concealed by families hiding infected loved ones in their homes and the existence of "shadow zones" that medics cannot enter, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. 

The U.N. agency issued a statement detailing why the outbreak in West Africa had been underestimated, following criticism that it had moved too slowly to contain the killer virus, now spreading out of control.

Independent experts raised similar concerns a month ago that the contagion could be worse than reported because suspicious local inhabitants are chasing away health workers and shunning treatment." 

More than 1,300 people have died from the disease and many experts do not expect the epidemic to be brought under control this year.

Aug 11

Looks like the nations closed down the reporting of events in West Africa.

 "man has contacted health authorities in Mumbai, after he started experiencing symptoms associated with the Ebola virus, which has killed over 900 people in West Africa." 12 million people.

Aug 8

 India has a lot of workers in Nigera...what if the flee ebola and get repatriated to back home?  

Aug 7

WHO declared a emergency

The west needs to see a lot more gruesome pictures and videos of Ebola victims and them dying.

Congressional Hearing

Tom Friedman CDC Director: "The infection and death numbers are a fog of war situation".

Ken Isaacs Samarian Purse: "The data is at least undercounted by 25% to 50%".

"If we don’t make a stand in West Africa, then we will be making a stand in all the capitals of the world. But I am afraid the cat is already out of the bag."

Dr Frank Glover: "People are getting infected because the care givers don't have gloves."

Ebola Deaths Go Exponential; Nigeria Demands Experimental Drug From US, Saudi Death First In Arab World

The chances of this happening would be one and ten thousands or more. I am sure every precaution known to mankind was taken. I wouldn’t be that concerned in a good bio-suit if I was next to one of these USA Ebola patients. Considering the bugs were two suits away from me. But the consequences are so huge to the accident.

Can you imagine if anyone in the airplane or other medical or care taker came down from the disease once the airplane got into the USA?

By the way, on the below graph, once we got into Aug, why did the increase slow down.
Basically the graph is heading in the exponential increase area. These aren't absolutely accurate numbers, more a guess.

Aug 7

Could it happen here?

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf declared a 90-day state of emergency to help deal with the outbreak of the Ebola virus in the West African country.

The government will use “extraordinary measures,”including suspending certain individual rights, to stop the spread of the disease that continues to kill people in Liberia, Johnson-Sirleaf said in a televised speech in the capital, Monrovia, yesterday.

Aug 6:

 Dr Jorge Rodriguez on CCN says he expects 10 to 20 million deaths worldwide from Ebola.

 New Yorker test negative for Ebola.

@ About 6 pm today the CDC raised the Ebola alert to the highest level and a presidential national news conference.

Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the United States Center for Disease Control, announced this afternoon that the agency has elevated its response to the Ebola virus to Level 1-- the highest possible response level. The CDC heightened the level today in response to multiple new diagnoses and scares around the globe.

Ebola lying:

WSJ: Mr. Sawyer's arrival on July 20 marked the first case of Ebola in Africa's most populous nation, though medical staff didn't know it at the time: For two days, Mr. Sawyer told his caregivers that he had malaria, even though his sister had recently died from Ebola, Lagos officials have said. But blood tests confirmed Mr. Sawyer had contracted Ebola.

The Catholics got it right.

 Ebola. The Family Disease.

It’s been cooking for months.

The question now is whether it will get out of the box.

“It” is the long-smoldering Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The box, of course, is West Africa itself.

Will a disease vector — meaning, an infected person — manage to infect someone else who is going to, say, Sudan, who infects someone else who is going to Egypt, who manages to get on a plane and end up in Instanbul?

There are many routes this disease could take out of that box. In this age of air travel and high mobility, disease can spread at the speed of a jet engine. But that is the worst one I can imagine. If, through one of the many routes available to it, this thing ends up unnoticed in Istanbul, the potential for it to go on to the airport in Frankfurt, and from there to the whole wide world is enormous. Istanbul is the roadway between Africa and Europe. Always has been.

That’s the nightmare scenario. It’s the one that tantalizes us like a real-life disaster movie as we watch this unfold. I’ve been reading about this killer disease as it has slowly built itself into an out-of-control epidemic for a long time now. The death toll kept rising, the affected area kept spreading. But it was slow. It sludged from one godforsaken arm pit of a country to another and nobody cared much.

The world has become inured to horror stories from Africa. We don’t know what to do about these things, and it beats us up to watch them. So we watch, feel bad for a moment, and then go on. What else can we do?

  But the trouble with these human horror stories is that, if they are allowed to fester, they reach a critical mass and begin to spread. It doesn’t matter much if the illness is terrorist serial killers posing as religios, or an actual virus that we can only see with an electron microscope, the death and sickness will fester and smolder like a fire in the attic until it bursts out and takes somebody’s house down in a conflagration.

Ebola is out of control in West Africa. I read today that Sierra Leone is using troops to quarantine the sick. Medical teams from all over the world, but most especially the United States, are out there fighting the fight in their hazmat soldier suits. At the same time, frightened villagers have been known to turn on the docs and even burn down aid stations.

I’m guessing that these villagers have their reasons for feeling this way. But I don’t know enough to speculate what those reasons might be.

All I know for sure is that there’s a fight going on to stop a virus before it gets out of the box and begins a run down pandemic highway, killing a huge percentage of humanity as it goes.

I honestly think that the boys and girls in the hazmat suits will shut this thing down. It’s almost never the thing we see coming that gets us. It’s the blind-side that take us down.

But the lessons in this horror story are obvious. You can’t consign any part of humanity to the waste bin and get away with it. Not forever. Like it or not, these people in West Africa are part of the human family. That’s why their long-smoldering virus scares us. Because what kills them will also kill us, and — here’s the big one — what kills them will spread to us just as if we were the same as them.

Which, of course, is the point. We are the same as them. Same DNA. Same human body. Same human immune system. We are them. They are us. These aren’t a bunch of infected bats or monkeys. These are human beings. Just like us.

And what kills them, can and will kill us.

There’s a moral here, and it’s not hard to find. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the blight of inner city neighborhoods, drug cartels in Central America or a killer virus in Africa, what happens to other people will come around and happen to us if we ignore it.

Take, for instance, the blight in inner city neighborhoods. Much — not all, but much — of that soul-killing blight is linked to the use of addictive and illegal drugs. These drugs come from South of the Border. The drug cartels south of the border, who are financed by our drug use north of the border, kill and terrify whole populations, who in turn head up north to get away from. We, in turn, stand at the border with signs, yelling at them and telling them to go back where they came from.

We’re all connected. What happens to them, will bite us too.

A virus in the poorest and most hopeless countries on the poorest and most hopeless continent in the world is cooking up a storm that will kill a lot of us if we don’t shut it down. The immediacy and the terror of this virus has our attention and we’re doing what has to be done to get it stopped. We are racing against time. Hurrying to get this thing pinned to the ground before that one infected person takes a pickup ride into the Sudan and meets someone else who goes to Egypt, who talks to someone who decides to take a short flight to Istanbul.

Because if that happens, we’re staring at the gun barrel of a conflagration.

We. Are. One. Highly-Dysfunctional. Family.

That is not poetry. It is absolute biological fact. 

One thing is certain, you can’t depend any Ebola infected count or death count from any official source including WHO.

Certainly from Africa…

Jon Stewart Completely Freaks Out Over Ebola, As We All Should  

This is already coloring our mid term. With our opinion with our government, do you think we will handle this any better than Nigeria. 

Nigeria Ebola delay creates fears of more cases

 I bet you a contagion is better controlled in a modern dictatorship.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabia's Health Ministry says a man who was being tested for the Ebola virus and was in critical condition in an isolation ward has died.

The Health Ministry says the Saudi man died Wednesday morning in a hospital in Jiddah. He was hospitalized after showing symptoms of a viral hemorrhagic fever following a recent trip to Sierra Leone, where there has been an outbreak of Ebola

NYT: Staten Island Against Ebola

Aug 5:

This is going to be a agonizing next two weeks.

Will the transmission rate change in the cold weather like the flu?

It is just a matter time.

You gotta be careful with what you post from the internet. Earlier in the day they reported this as the women showed up as negative.

UPDATE: Columbus Woman Being Tested for Ebola

COLUMBUS -- A 46-year-old woman is being tested at a Columbus hospital for the Ebola virus.

The Columbus Public Health Department says the woman recently returned from West Africa and is showing some symptoms of the virus.

Catch this date:

15 November 2012 Last updated at 19:50 ET

Growing concerns over 'in the air' transmission of Ebola
By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service
The infection is thought to get into humans through close contact with bodily fluids.

Canadian scientists have shown that the deadliest form of the ebola virus could be transmitted by air between species.

In experiments, they demonstrated that the virus was transmitted from pigs to monkeys without any direct contact between them.

The researchers say they believe that limited airborne transmission might be contributing to the spread of the disease in some parts of Africa.

They are concerned that pigs might be a natural host for the lethal infection.

What we suspect is happening is large droplets- they can stay in the air, but not long, they don't go far. But they can be absorbed in the airway”

Ebola viruses cause fatal haemorrhagic fevers in humans and many other species of non human primates.

Detailsof the research were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the infection gets into humans through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs and other bodily fluids from a number of species including chimpanzees, gorillas and forest antelope.

The fruit bat has long been considered the natural reservoir of the infection. But a growing body of experimental evidence suggests that pigs, both wild and domestic, could be a hidden source of Ebola Zaire - the most deadly form of the virus.

Now, researchers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the country's Public Health Agency have shown that pigs infected with this form of Ebola can pass the disease on to macaques without any direct contact between the species.

In their experiments, the pigs carrying the virus were housed in pens with the monkeys in close proximity but separated by a wire barrier. After eight days, some of the macaques were showing clinical signs typical of ebola and were euthanised.

One possibility is that the monkeys became infected by inhaling large aerosol droplets produced from the respiratory tracts of the pigs.

One of the scientists involved is Dr Gary Kobinger from the National Microbiology Laboratory at the Public Health Agency of Canada. He told BBC News this was the most likely route of the infection.

"What we suspect is happening is large droplets - they can stay in the air, but not long, they don't go far," he explained.

"But they can be absorbed in the airway and this is how the infection starts, and this is what we think, because we saw a lot of evidence in the lungs of the non-human primates that the virus got in that way."

The scientists say that their findings could explain why some pig farmers in the Philippines had antibodies in their system for the presence of a different version of the infection called Ebola Reston. The farmers had not been involved in slaughtering the pigs and had no known contact with contaminated tissues.

Actually, maybe the most healthy thing for us right now is to panic.

CNN: Ebola is here: 5 reasons not to panic

Do you normally kiss and hug people you don't know in a taxi…something got aerosolized?

Everybody in the taxi died   

Meanwhile the West Africa outbreak, which began in Guinea in February, has reached the neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. More than 1,300 cases have been reported so far, of whom 729 have died.

The disease is believed to have spread from Guinea to Liberia in March, carried by a woman who since died – as did her sister who cared for her. Before dying, the sister traveled by shared taxi to visit her husband on the other side of Liberia. The other passengers caught the disease and died.

The double message

I mean you get it, the media editors are thinking scaring the piss out of people don't sell newspapers and and others.

Yet unlike the flu, for instance, Ebola can only spread through physical contact, not the air. To catch it, a person's mucous membranes (or any cut in the skin) must come into direct contact with infected fluids - blood, urine, saliva, semen or feces, reports Scientific American. Direct contact with clothing or bed linen contaminated with these fluids can also lead to infection.          

You can't catch it from a door-knob, they elaborate. And crucially, a pre-symptomatic carrier isn't infectious.

Any nuclear worker would tell you those paper suits are an extremely poor barrier for protection from contaminants. Many of us got dressed up in three layers of coveralls and were supplied by an air supply..let alone rain gear.

Europe

See, these scumbag infected missionaries are running back to their home countries to die?

Ebola: Several Britons across the UK quarantined at home after returning from West Africa

Several Britons are quarantined across the UK with suspected Ebola, public health officials admitted on Tuesday.

Nigeria.

I'd be watching how it spreads in Nigeria.

"Four probable cases have now been reported in Nigeria, fuelling fears the virus could be spreading from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone into Africa's most populous nation.

So far,Nigerian authorities identified 59 people who came into contact with him, including airline employees and health workers, and tested 20 of them. None of them were positive, The Associated Press reported.

Lagos has eight suspected cases of Ebola, all in people who came into contact with Nigeria's first victim who died last month, the health commissioner said on Tuesday, with one case confirmed."

Now they are running out of volunteers who track down potential contact people…you see how astronomically this thing grows at.  

Others may have been infected in Lagos, a city with a population of about 21 million, before doctors suspected that Sawyer had Ebola. They put him in isolation about 24 hours after he arrived at the hospital.

The eight quarantined people, who include the doctor, are among 14 who had "serious direct contact" with Sawyer, most of them at the hospital, Idris said. Authorities are following the conditions of a total of 70 people who had primary contact with Sawyer, and now they are tracking the secondary contacts of the eight people in quarantine, Idris said.

He said volunteers are needed to track down all the people who potential carriers of the disease had been in contact with. 

Spain?

Madrid (AFP) - A Spanish missionary working in Liberia has tested positive for the deadly Ebola virus, the aid organization he works for said Tuesday.

During an interview broadcast on Monday, Pajares said he and the other missionaries in quarantine would like to be taken to Spain for treatment.

Halfwit missionaries don’t trust their own missionaries to care for them.

To USA, through London…

The big fallacy in this whole deal is most people will lie through their teeth for their own self-interest.

Maybe hit Europe first?

So the CDC and UN are saying you can only catch Ebola by coming in direct contact with bodily fluids. By they are warning West Africans not to eat the plums and fruits favored by the bat carriers and they are spraying the homes of the sick with chlorine spray because the house itself is a transmission vector. There is a disconnection in these official statements. Can you even imagine how this will play out in these sewer insufficient high population cities?  

This could make the 2008 world wide economic collapse look like child's play.   

It is obvious you can catch it by sitting on a toilet seat or touching a door knob that has Ebola on it. And it stays active for a considerable amount of time. Right, we are basically talking about events in an extremely poor, isolated, rural and undeveloped environment…we don’t know the transmission rates in NYC or Calcutta.

I approve of the missionaries coming to the USA as "lab specimens" and all that we can learn about Ebola from them. These guys aren’t a threat to us.   

We just trained West Africa...your only hope if you got this disease is to come to America? If this doesn't pan out as a legitimate Ebola case...I am certain a case will show up in a week or two.

A New York City hospital is examining a sick patient who recently returned from a West African country where the deadly ebola virus has been spreading, but authorities emphasize no diagnosis has been made.

The man was admitted to the Mount Sinai Hospital emergency room Monday with a high fever and gastrointestinal symptoms, according to hospital officials. He had recently traveled to a West African country where ebola was reported.

The patient was put into strict isolation and is undergoing medical screenings as doctors try to determine the cause of his symptoms.

"All necessary steps are being taken to ensure the safety of all patients, visitors and staff," the hospital said in a statement.

The risk of ebola spreading to the U.S. is very small. It's only spread by close contact, and ebola strikes patients so quickly they'd be unlikely to be able to fly from the three affected countries.

In the unlikely case ebola ever reached New York City, health officials say hospitals are prepared.

"We are prepared, to the best of our knowledge, for any patient who comes here who's suspected of ebola virus," Dr. Ross Wilson, who's in the charge of New York City's 11 hospital emergency rooms, told NBC 4 New York last week.

The deadly virus is causing the worst outbreak ever seen, according to NBC News, but it's been contained to Guinea, Sierra Leon and Liberia.

There is such a stigma and USA medical help has become so discredited, the true scope of the spread of this disease in severely under counted.

And don't forget how little faith in government most people have. Can you even imagine how the right winger and Obama haters would play this?

Remember the panic will cause a lot more damage than the results of the disease. The 21 day incubation period countdown has just begun. Many west Africans are heading to the USA. All hell is going to break out when a secondary infection happens...when somebody in the USA catches Ebola.

Just one organism is sufficient to infect a new host

Just how much Ebola virus does it take to infect someone? Alarmingly, as the Public Health Agency of Canada explains, “1 – 10 aerosolized organisms are sufficient to cause infection in humans.” (8)

Read that again: it takes just ONE aerosolized organism (a microscopic virus riding on a dust particle) to cause a full-blown infection in humans. This is why one man vomiting on an international flight can infect dozens or hundreds of other people all at once.

Nobody is yet talking about what all this might mean if a large U.S. city shows an outbreak of infections. Will the federal government use the military to quarantine an entire city? Ultimately, it must! And make no mistake: this possibility is already written up and on the books for national emergencies. One declaration of martial law is all that’s required to seal off an entire U.S. city at gunpoint

Another CBS News article reports: (4)

“If it gets into a big city, that’s everybody’s worse nightmare,” said Dr. Tim Geisbert, a professor of microbiology and immunology at University of Texas Medical Branch, in an interview with CBS News. “It gets harder to control then. How do you quarantine a big city?”

The answer, by the way, is by deploying America’s armed forces against its own citizens in a domestic national emergency scenario. Everybody in the federal government already knows that. It’s only the mainstream media that pretends such plans don’t already exist.

All hell is going to break out if somebody in that ER comes down with Ebola...

Right, the way to handle this is anyone coming in contact with somebody who has Ebola is mandatory isolation. Anyone coming from West Africa is put in mandatory isolation...

We might see the day where these early events in the USA were utterly stupidity.

Black swan theory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.

Unlike the earlier philosophical "black swan problem", the "black swan theory" refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.^[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Lectures on Probability and Risk in the Real World: Fat Tails (Volume 1), Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as "stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability".^[2]

Background

Black swan events were introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book Fooled By Randomness, which concerned financial events. His 2007 book The Black Swan extended the metaphor to events outside of financial markets. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as "black swans"—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the September 2001 attacks as examples of black swan events.^[3]
The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan"; 6.165).^[4] In English, when the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.
Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.^[5] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,^[6] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.^[7]
Taleb asserts:^[8]

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

The NRC Selectively Enforces the Laws

So why didn't the NRC OIG step in before purchasing the new steam generator?  

San Onofre NRC OIG Report

 

Nuke regulator faulted for California plant oversight

By Timothy Cama - 10/08/14 10:46 AM EDT

Nuclear enforcement officials failed in 2009 to predict that a California power plant’s steam generators would cause problems, government auditors said.

The revelations came in a lengthy report released Tuesday on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego on the Pacific coast.

The plant shut down last year, but it had been idle since 2012 after it was found that faulty new steam generators had been rapidly deteriorating, causing a small leak of radiation.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Office of Inspector General faulted the agency for “shortcomings” in the 2009 inspection that approved the generator change.

Auditors also questioned how Southern California Edison, the plant’s operator, was allowed to install the new steam generators without amending its operating license.

“There is no assurance that NRC reached the correct conclusion in its 2009 inspection that [San Onofre] did not need a license amendment for its steam generator replacement,” the report concluded.

Some NRC officials questioned whether the agency was making the right decision in allowing the swap to move forward without licensing changes or believe that in hindsight, but the process went through nonetheless.

A former regional NRC official told investigators that the generators were “basically unlicensable” and should not have been approved.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, agreed with the findings.

“When Southern California Edison decided to completely replace their steam generators in order to increase their profit margin, they failed to apply for an amended license as they are required to do, and NRC stood by and did nothing,” she said in a statement.

Boxer said she has initiated her own investigation into the matter and plans to hold a December hearing with NRC officials to discuss the inspector general’s findings.

Ginna Must Be Taking Shortcuts losing $100 Million

These guys lose $100s of million dollars due to botched maintenance...that is 75% of the problem. 

How many nukes are in the same boats.  

Ginna's future in jeopardy

By Jeremy Moule@jfmoule

The owner of the R.E. Ginna nuclear power plant says that the facility may close unless it gets a new contract for the sale of its electricity. And even that may only be enough to keep the aging nuclear plant going for a few more years, the owner says.

Ginna's cloudy future is a matter of economics. Its majority owner, Constellation Nuclear Energy Group, says in a recent filing with the State Public Service Commission that the price it's getting for its electricity won't be enough to cover the plant's operating and investment costs.

Prior to June, Rochester Gas and Electric was contractually obligated to purchase 90 percent of Ginna's output. But the 10-year agreement expired that month, and Ginna has since started selling its electricity into New York's competitive marketplace. Even under the RG&E contract — at times, the utility paid above market prices for power, at others it paid below market prices — the plant was running in the red. The commission's filing says that Ginna's losses have significantly exceeded $100 million over the last three years.

That's why Constellation, a subsidiary of nuclear energy giant Exelon, is asking state utilities regulators to clear the way for a new, albeit temporary contract with RG&E; the utility would buy power from Ginna on an as-needed basis at negotiated prices. The so-called reliability support services agreement would forestall Ginna's retirement, Constellation's filing says.

Without the contract, Constellation management will recommend the plant's retirement to the company's board of directors, the filing says. The filing doesn't say how much of an impact the contract would have on the plant's bottom line, and the company declined to discuss details of its request.

"The filing is a proactive step to ensure grid reliability and continue the station's positive economic impact on the local community and the Central New York region," Maria Hudson, a spokesperson for Ginna, says in an e-mailed statement.

Hudson says that the plant will continue operating as the Public Service Commission reviews its request, and that Constellation will keep working to "identify market-based solutions that enable us to keep operating Ginna."

So what does any of this mean to Rochester-area electric customers? Unfortunately, there's no clear answer. Using a temporary contract to prop up the plant could cost RG&E customers if its terms include above-market prices. But letting the plant go offline could also bump up utility bills, since filling supply gaps would likely carry some costs.

Rochester Gas and Electric hasn't taken a firm position on Constellation's request.

"If the commission directs us to, RG&E will negotiate an RSSA with the best interests of our customers in the forefront, while recognizing the importance of reaching reasonable terms for all parties," Mark Lynch, RG&E president and CEO, says in a statement.

But Constellation's request does have critics, including owners of other New York power plants. They're concerned that the company is essentially trying to get special treatment by skirting the commission's process for plant retirements. That process has firm, detailed rules that are meant to protect other power providers, utility companies, electricity customers, and the state's competitive market, they say.

"There [are] a whole lot of lawyers representing the competition who want to see those boundaries maintained," says Mike Jacobs, a senior energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national environmental organization that says it's not for or against nuclear power.

The commission doesn't have a deadline to complete its review of Ginna's request, according to a commission spokesperson. In its petition, Constellation says that it wants to have the temporary contract with RG&E filed by December 1, and for it to go into effect no later than January 11, 2015.

Nuclear power plant owners have been shutting down financially underperforming reactors across the country. And analysts at major financial research firms, including Moody's and Standard and Poor's, have warned that more economically stressed plants are likely to close before their federal licenses expire.

In their reports, the analysts have repeatedly said that Ginna is a likely candidate for closure, since it's a smaller plant selling into a competitive market dominated by cheaper electricity sources.

Fracking plays a big role in this trend. Over the past few years, large supplies of natural gas have been extracted from shale formations in Pennsylvania, Texas, Wyoming, and other states. As a result, the price of natural gas has plummeted, which has enabled power plants that run on the fuel to produce lots of electricity much more cheaply than they previously could.

The way that New York's deregulated electricity market works, all generators are essentially paid the same base rate for their power. That rate is set through an intricate process, but it's basically an average of what the different plants charge for the power they are able to produce. And when a group of plants can produce a lot of energy cheaply, which is what natural gas plants have been able to do, it drives down the price paid to all power plants.

This is exactly how New York's power market is supposed to function. It was designed to drive down what consumers pay for electricity by giving an incentive to efficient plants and encouraging the retirement of less-efficient plants.

The nuclear industry once backed this approach, known generally as utility deregulation. But now, nuclear industry representatives say that the competitive electricity markets are flawed. A policy brief from the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, says that the market operators set power prices for nuclear electricity too low.

The brief also says that market operators undervalue nuclear's contributions to states' electric systems, particularly the protection that nuclear offers against volatility in natural gas prices and supplies. To illustrate that need, nuclear energy supporters point to the natural gas shortages that occurred during a period of harsh cold last winter. In Upstate New York and much of the Northeast, tight gas supplies drove up the cost of generating power, and many customers saw a spike in their utility bills.

The contract that Ginna wants would temporarily prop up the plant, though it may not make it profitable.

And Constellation says that there is still need for Ginna's power. Its petition to the Public Service Commission is built around a reliability study from the New York Independent Systems Operator, the organization that manages the state's power grid. The study, conducted at Constellation's request, says that without Ginna or some other power source equal to that plant's output, the Rochester-area electric system could experience reliability problems through 2018 — meaning that there's an outside chance that there won't be enough power to go around when demand is at its peak.

Tentatively, RG&E officials expect to have a significant transmission upgrade, the Rochester Area Reliability Project, completed in 2018. Constellation's filing says that the need for Ginna's power is tied to that transmission project.

But RG&E officials say that the project is not intended to replace Ginna. If Ginna retires, further transmission systems upgrades would probably be necessary, they say.

Constellation's request has supporters, including a handful of elected officials who have submitted comments backing the temporary contract. House Representatives Dan Maffei and Tom Reed made a joint submission supporting the agreement; State Senator George Maziarz, who chairs his chamber's energy committee, submitted supportive comments; and Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks has given it her backing.

Ginna's owners and supporters also tout economic benefits from continued operation of the plant. Ginna regularly employs 700 people and is the largest taxpayer in Wayne County — in 2012, it paid $10 million in local and state taxes. Owners also say that the plant offers environmental benefits to the state. It'd be harder and more expensive for the state to meet its greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals without Ginna, the company's commission filing says.

Brooks says that Ginna is a critical part of the local power infrastructure and that she doesn't know how its power would be replaced.

"Nuclear power is still one of the most cost-effective ways of providing power to a lot of people," Brooks says.

But opponents of Constellation's request say that the company is asking the state's utilities regulator to do something unprecedented.

The Public Service Commission has an established and detailed process for retiring power plants. And that process doesn't start until a plant owner makes a formal filing stating that the decision has been made to close.

From there, the commission orders studies to examine whether the plant's power supply is needed for reliability purposes and for how long. Through that process, plant owners can get contracts to keep the facilities running temporarily.

But the closing proceedings also open up a process where other power providers, large and small, can offer proposals to meet identified electricity supply needs.

In a filing, New York City officials asked the commission to reject Constellation's petition because of the precedent it could set. In that city's market, any retiring generator would probably cause a reliability issue, they say. And they worry that plant owners could try to hold utilities and their customers captive by threatening to retire unless they get a reliability support services contract.

The Alliance for a Green Economy, a coalition of environmental social justice groups including the state Sierra Club chapter, also wants the commission to reject Constellation's petitions. In general, the organization wants New York to phase out nuclear power plants. (Many environmentalists oppose nuclear power; they see it as potentially unsafe and take issue with some of the ecological impacts, particularly the plants' use of large quantities of water.)

The group says that straying from the established plant retirement process limits other possibilities for filling identified electricity needs, including renewables development or large-scale energy efficiency projects.

"There needs to be a really good process to figure out is this plant really needed for reliability, which we're skeptical of," says Jessica Azulay, program director for AGREE. "If they are, how long are they actually needed, and what can we do to phase them out as quickly as possible in a way that is the most environmentally friendly and the best for ratepayers?".

Jacobs, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says that the situation facing Ginna is more political than regulatory. It hinges on a question of whether the public and government officials want nuclear plants to keep running, he says. And if that's the case, he says, are they willing to offer heftier subsidies to the plants?

Jacobs says that the state Public Service Commission doesn't have an established mechanism or process to grant Constellation's request. But he says that there are other avenues that the company — and other New York nuclear plant owners — could take if it wants to improve Ginna's financial performance. For example, it could petition the Public Service Commission to set a higher carbon price, which would increase generating costs for fossil fuel generators in the state.

Azulay and Jacobs say that Ginna's situation highlights a bigger issue around electric system planning. Pretty much all nuclear plants were built at a time when natural gas and electricity prices were higher. The utility industry isn't sure how to handle the new reality, where other large generators can out-price them.

But the utility industry has also been warned that these closures might come, they say. Utility companies, grid operators, regulators, and policymakers should be planning ahead, they say.

The comments from New York City officials echo that point, and say in particular that Ginna's potential closure should come as no surprise. In fact, city officials' comments are blunt on that point, and lay the problem at the local utility's feet.

"Rochester Gas and Electric Corporation should have been preparing for the closure of Ginna, but apparently has not," their filing says.