QUEST Community Science Blog Author: Amy Miller

All Posts by Amy:

Producer's Notes – Born Too Soon: Pre-term Births on the Rise

July 28th, 2009 by Amy Miller

Amy Miller and the two year-old twins Devon and FelixIt’s been two years since my twins, Felix and Devon were born on July 27, 2007. In that time pretty much every mother with grown children has advised me to “enjoy it while you can” because this wondrous time will seem like it flew by. “They’ll never be babies again!” they say. “Good”, I reply.

I wish I could say that the time has flown by but the fact is that the first year and a half were pretty challenging for us as first-time parents. Don’t get me wrong. I count my blessings every minute of every day. I have two beautiful, healthy, happy little boys. But it’s only been recently that Alex and I feel that we’ve found a rhythm with them and we’re starting to actually have fun. They are talking, singing, dancing, running and just recently, interacting and playing more with each other. They make us laugh all the time. Who knew that toddlers had such a sense of humor?

As a result of the QUEST story, my pregnancy became more of a public event than I expected it to be. Naturally, after the boys were born, there were several inquiries as to our well-being. Here’s what happened:

After lying in bed at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco for 30 days, I was very close to the end of my rope. Bed rest is infinitely more difficult that I could have ever imagined. When I was 34 weeks and 5 days pregnant, after an evening of crying to Alex that I couldn’t take much more of it, I decided to wind down and go to sleep. Normally, Alex would drive back to Oakland, where we lived at the time. But it was 1AM and even though he had to be at work at 6AM, he was too tired to go home. We asked a nurse to bring him a cot to sleep on in my room. Thank goodness we did. About 10 minutes after we turned off the lights, I felt my water break. If he’d gone back across the Bay Bridge, he would have missed the birth. We called the nurses and doctors and they decided to deliver the boys via caesarian section. Devon, or “baby A” as he was called at that time, was still breech and doctors will not deliver twins vaginally if the first baby is breech.

By 3:30AM, I had two little pink, wrinkly babies. Baby A was 4lbs. 12 oz., Baby B was 4 lbs., 6 oz. They stayed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for 2 weeks then we took them home. They were perfectly healthy but just needed to gain a bit of weight and be able to keep their temperatures up without the help of an incubator. The rest, as they say, is history. They are now developing normally; growing and learning new things every hour, it seems. Life is good.

I’m also very happy to report that the other two families in the QUEST story are doing very well, too. Trynne Miller and David Prince’s identical twin daughters, Kate and Charlotte, were born at 28 weeks and 5 days gestation. Average gestation for twins is 35-36 weeks. For a singleton, it’s approximately 40 weeks. Kate weighed 2 lbs. 8 oz., Charlotte was 2 lbs., 5 oz. They were in the NICU for 8 weeks before going home. Today, according to father, David:

Kate and Charlotte Miller-Prince

"They have 'caught up to their age' in terms of their height and weight, and I suspect also
their skills, as they're dancing and talking up a storm. Charlotte (aka Charlie) is speaking in complete, well-formed paragraphs… but we can only understand a few of the words of them."

Josephine Tooley Boyd at age 2

The other child in the story, Josephine Tooley Boyd was born at 28 weeks, 2 days. She was 2 lbs., 12 oz. at birth. She spent 55 days in the hospital before going home at 4 lbs., 6oz. Mother Sarah and her husband moved the family to Oregon in early 2009. According to Sarah, Josephine is “doing great” and quite a big girl. She’s already in the 99th percentile for height and weight for her actual age, not even her “adjusted” age, which is a common parameter for preemies. She’s a talker, speaking in three word sentences and seemingly possesses above average motor skills. She loves playing outdoors and especially loves tractors.

All three children were enrolled in UCSF’s longitudinal MRI study to monitor development of preemies through the first couple of years of their lives. No problems were ever detected with any of these children. But they were the lucky ones. In our society today, preterm birth affects more than 530,000 children and the numbers continues to rise.

In November 2008, the March of Dimes released a “report card” for the nation on prematurely, which assigns grades to both the nation overall as well as to states which are based on how well they address the issue of prematurity.

The U.S. earned a “D” and not a single state received and “A”. The only state to earn a "B" was Vermont. Eight others earned a "C," 23 states earned a "D," and 18 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia got failing grades of "F."

There’s lots of good research being done but we still have a long way to go before we understand enough about why prematurity occurs that we can prevent it. Until then, visit the March of Dimes website for important information for all pregnant women that will help them recognize the early signs of preterm labor and possible risks for premature birth.

Sometimes, I think back to those thirty days when I was hospitalized prior to their birth and I remember all the things that I was fretting about. Would the boys be healthy? Will I be a good mother? Will our relationship weather the turmoil of two newborns? Will I love them? Will they love me? How will we be able to afford two children? How can we manage to both work full-time when I go back to QUEST in a few months? Believe me, if there was an issue to worry about, I did it. I think that’s pretty normal for first time mothers but lying in a hospital bed with nothing else to do immediately prior to being forced to deal with these issues really amplified those concerns for me.

Now that I’m an old hand at motherhood, I can look back and realize that many of these issues have a way of working themselves out. We figure things out as we go. We adjust to the changes that come along with parenthood because we have no choice but to do so. And thankfully, we did not have any short or long-term health issues to deal with as a result of their premature birth.




Watch the Born Too Soon: Pre-term Births on the Rise television story online.







37.76355, -122.458




Posted in Biology, Health, KQED, TV | Please Comment

Producer's Notes – Profile: Sylvia Earle

July 7th, 2009 by Amy Miller

From left to right: Associate Producer, Joan Johnson, Sylvia Earle and Producer, Amy MillerEveryone knows who Sylvia Earle is, right? Not so. Despite the fact that she's been at the forefront of marine science and ocean exploration for more than 40 years, she is not a household name. But she REALLY should be. She began diving with early SCUBA gear when she was in college and since then, has accumulated more than 7000 diving hours studying marine plants and animal life all over the world.

A turning point in her career came in 1970 when she led a team of woman Aquanauts in a two week research expedition in an underwater lab called Tektite. When the women emerged from their decompression chamber after living underwater for two weeks, the world embraced them as heroes. She was thrust into a spotlight as an ocean expert and pioneer of saturation diving and underwater research. Since then, she has continued to travel the globe and speak passionately and persuasively on ocean conservation.

We were thrilled to have a chance to meet Dr. Sylvia Earle and profile her on QUEST. Joan Johnson, the Associate Producer of the segment, was especially excited: Dr. Earle has been one of her idols since her former life as a marine biologist. Although I was also a burgeoning biologist at one point in my life, I had not heard of Dr. Earle until a couple of years ago when we featured her former husband and design partner, Graham Hawkes, in a earlier QUEST episode. We've wanted to feature her since then but she’s incredibly busy, traveling and speaking about ocean issues most of the year. In the two month window in which we wanted to film her, she was going to be on the road (in the air, under the water) no less than 50 days, with trips to Monaco, Rome, Mexico and the South Pacific.

Although I had envisioned a story where we actually get to know her, meet her family, spend time with her at her home in Oakland, cooking, playing with her dog on the beach; you know, find out what makes her "tick," I had to make due with three hours total in our KQED studio. So, Joan and I had to be VERY creative when figuring out the content of our story. Put another way, the only material that we shot of Sylvia Earle ourselves was a 2 hours interview. All the other footage in the story had to be researched, located, acquired and paid for. Thankfully, Sylvia Earle's life has been pretty well-documented in film and photography. But I know that if not for Joan's incredible resourcefulness and passion for the subject, this story would not have been possible. I had the easy part of the job: having a long conversation with an INCREDIBLE woman then writing about it. And I now have a new hero as well.




Watch the Profile: Sylvia Earle television story online.







36.796846, -122.025000




Posted in Environment | 3 Comments

Producer's Notes: Wastewater Woes – Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo!

May 26th, 2009 by Amy Miller

The guts of the system are hidden underground.
Right about the time I started researching the story about sewage spills in the Bay Area, I also started the preliminary stages of potty training my nearly-two-year-old twin boys. This involves first getting them familiar and comfortable with the whole process of using the toilet. So for the last couple of months, I’ve been dutifully inviting them into the bathroom with me when I go “potty”.

They LOVE announcing like, squawking little birds, exactly what it is I'm doing in there. They knock each other over for the chance to flush the toilet. But it seems the best part of all is giving it a hero’s send-off: "Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo! Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo! Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo!" Apart from it just being sort of fun to say, I don’t think that I’m imagining that they are experiencing a kind of satisfaction in making it go away. Call me jaded but I think my own enthusiasm for the process has faded somewhat since I was their age. But after producing Wastewater Woes: Sewage Spills in SF Bay, I've learned some things about sewage collection and wastewater treatment systems that are good to be aware of.

When one of the 47 wastewater treatment plants around the bay has a spill or an overflow during wet weather, it's unlikely that Bay Area residents consider that it was caused by anything that we've done or neglected to do. But I learned that one of the main reasons for so many sewage spills in San Francisco Bay- both from the treatment plants and the collection systems underground- is that those of us who use and depend on the sewage system don't really understand it. Water and sewage customers need to be conscious of a few key facts:

• The water that's flushed down the toilet, used to wash clothes or dishes, or runs while we brush our teeth ultimately ends up getting treated then is discharged into the bay or the ocean.
  

• Putting grease down the drain, flushing rags, feminine hygiene products or anything but toilet paper down the toilet can lead to blocked sewage pipes and dangerous spills in the collection systems.
  

• Years of neglecting our cracked and crumbling sewage collection systems, including privately-owned sewage lateral pipes that connect every single home and business to the city-owned sewage mains, has resulted in the inflow of great volumes of rainwater to the collection system as well as spills and overflows downstream at treatment plants.

Sure, sewage is not the most pleasant thing to contemplate and it's understandable that most people don’t give it a second thought because the guts of the system are hidden underground. But it is precisely this "out of sight, out of mind" mentality that has led to untreated sewage spills in San Francisco Bay becoming a significant source of pollution that can have harmful impacts on people, animals and habitat. The cost of fixing the Bay Area's systems is estimated at several billion dollars. Obviously, that won't happen overnight. So in the meantime, have your own lateral inspected and repaired and don’t be surprised if your sewage rates continue to creep up.

For my own part, I will strive to teach my boys responsible flushing and instill in them a little bit of curiosity about what exactly happens AFTER we flush the toilet.




Watch the Wasterter Woes: Sewage Spills in SF Bay television story online.







37.896564, -122.528112




Posted in Biology, Environment | 1 Comment

Producer's Notes: Asteroid Hunters

March 23rd, 2009 by Amy Miller

A few weeks ago, this asteroid came really close to hitting Earth.On March 3rd, 2009 at 1:40PM GMT, just a mere month after we'd finished the Asteroid Hunters segment, an asteroid of up to 165 feet in diameter snuck up on us, coming within approximately 37,000 miles from a direct impact with Earth. That's almost seven times closer than the distance to the Moon and about twice the distance of some communications satellites that orbit the earth.

Called “2009 DD45”, the asteroid was estimated to be around the same size as the one that exploded in the atmosphere near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia on June 30th, 1908, flattening 80 million trees across eight hundred square miles of remote forest. Of course, if an asteroid of this size were to hit a city or in an ocean offshore from a populated area, tens of thousands of people would likely die.

Then, just as the last of the night sky observers were completing their collective sighs of relief, on March 17th, 2009 another Tunguska-class asteroid, 2009 FH, passed by about 53,000 miles from Earth. Thankfully, neither of these asteroids actually hit us. But astronomers didn’t even observe 2009 DD45 until 4 days before its closest approach. It's orbit was calculated and it was determined that it would miss the Earth. But it's likely that asteroids of this size are fairly frequently buzzing by the Earth. And until recently, most of them have been undetected.

In 1998, NASA started the Spaceguard Survey which set out to discover 90% of those Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) 1 km in diameter and larger. An impact by an asteroid this size would likely cause global destruction and an end to much of life as we know it so it’s definitely reassuring that 10 years after its inception, the Spaceguard Survey had found about 80% (CK) of them. But unfortunately, once we’ve found them, there’s still no international concensus or infrastructure in place in how to deflect or destroy them. But the Survey is limited by its mandate to find those mass extinction-sized asteroids as well as by the size and sophistication of the telescopes that are dedicated to searching the skies.

As former Apollo 9 astronaut, Rusty Schweickart said in a recent phone conversation, "in the process of finding the big ones, you also find a bunch of small ones, and the smaller ones are obviously far more numerous than the large ones." But it will take many more resources and new telescopes to continue searching for and tracking the smaller ones. And unfortunately, once we’ve found them, there's still no international consensus or infrastructure in place in how to deflect or destroy them. Raising awareness and building alliances amongst governments and space agencies is Schweikart's current "mission". He founded the B612 Foundation and Association of Space Explorers to tackle these goals on different fronts.

The message that I hope is conveyed with the Asteroid Hunters TV segment is that we are not immune from asteroid impacts here on Earth. Rusty Schweikart puts it best in a portion of his interview that didn’t make it into the final program:

"Well, asteroids and comets are good news and bad news, you know? But for them we wouldn’t be here, and on the other hand, if we don't actually take some action now, at some point we won’t be here anymore, because there's no question that we will be hit by asteroids, and we’ll probably be hit by, we would be hit by comets as well. Unless, we use the technology that we have and the brains that we have in order to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts, and we can do that. We can basically now, with current technology, assure that no asteroid ever hits the Earth again. That can do any serious damage."
-Rusty Schweikart

Here's a little exercise from Rusty that you can do to get a sense of what we know today about exactly what's out there:

• Go to: neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk
• See two tables, the first table says "Recently Observed Objects" and the table below says "Objects not recently observed." You’ll notice in the bottom table that Apophis is the 4th one listed.
• Click on "Apophis". At the top you see a bunch of boxes, like the diameter at .27 km, or 270 meters.
• Down below that you see 3 lines, those are the 3 potential impacts. The first one is April 13, 2036. Go over to the right on that line you'll see the column "Impact Probability" is 2.3 x 10-5 – click on that. So there is the probability, 1 in 43,000 of that particular impact.
• Now if you go back to the main table you can do the same thing with every single one of those lines.
• Now go to the very top of the page and hit "Discovery Statistics." Scroll down to a blue and red graph "Known Near-Earth Asteroids". This shows the discovery rate beginning back in 1980 going up to almost current time. Notice the knee in that curve in 1998 – that’s when the Spaceguard Survey began.
• Scroll down to table just below the graph and look across that table to the far right side, to see that a a total of 6166 NEOs (of ALL sizes) have been discovered.

Rusty concludes that, "…what we really care about is not only the things that large, we care about things that can hurt us. Things that can hurt us go down to 40 to 45 meters or so. Instead of there being 940 of them, there are more like 600,000 of them. So the new charge for NASA, which they have so far ignored, is to find 90% of the objects 140 meters and larger by 2020. You can't reasonably set a goal to find everything down to 40 meters because it's just beyond the capability of telescopes and the money available. So NASA, working with Congress, set the goal at 140 meters. Now nevertheless, when you are looking for 140 meter objects, it’s going to take bigger telescopes than the ones to find a kilometer. Therefore we are going to find many many smaller objects as well. So 10 to 15 years from now, instead of that number on the far right hand column being 6000, it will be 1 million."




Watch the Asteroid Hunters television story online.







37.819208, -122.181393




Posted in Astronomy, Engineering, KQED | Please Comment

Producer's Notes for Your Photos on QUEST: Laura Watt

March 17th, 2009 by Amy Miller

Photo: Laura WattThe Flickr set submitted by photographer, sailor & environmental scientist Laura Watt for Your Photos on QUEST (YPOQ) is all about Water. She's a prolific presence on Flickr, sharing thousands of images with the site's community of photographers. But it only takes a quick stroll through her 360+ pages of photo sets to see that she has a special talent for capturing the infinite moods and textures of the water that defines the lives of everyone who lives in the Bay Area.

The mark of a good photographer is their ability not only to capture a moment in time but to first explore, discover and see the world around us. Laura Watt shares that entire process with her viewer. We follow her along the path of becoming interested in a subject then obsessively exploring its essence through the act of photographing it. The results are poetic, personal, intimate and beautiful.

Laura's professional background also adds dimension to her work. She's a teacher of Environmental Studies at Sonoma State University and her own research explores the interface between the natural world and the cultural history of a place. Specifically, she's working on a book with about what has happened to both the natural and cultural landscape of Point Reyes since the National Park Service began managing it as a park in the 1960’s and how becoming a park affected that area's cultural legacy. That book will also include her photos.

For me as TV storyteller, I think I was most excited when I discovered that along with Laura Watt's sumptuous images comes a compelling family narrative. Both parents are biologists and photographers and she and her sister spent most of their summers at a field research station in Colorado's Rocky Mountains where her Dad studies high altitude butterflies. Her parents took beautiful photographs of the family, many of which Laura scans and shares on her Flickr pages. Her personal notes and descriptions of many of her photos are especially touching, like this one that accompanied a gorgeous photo of Laura’s "grandmahelen" as a young woman.

Today in my yoga class, our wonderful teacher Peggy told us a story during a particularly intense hip stretch (probably to take our minds off it!) — her grandmother passed away last Thursday, at the age of 105 — and she and her sisters were able to go be with her in the hospital & say goodbye — and her grandmother was speaking in a somewhat sing-song voice, and in the mix said that she was riding her bike to god — they all looked at each other and asked her, what did you say? and she clarified that she was riding her bike WITH god — a particularly wonderful image, because in all her 105 years, she'd never learned to ride a bike — but there she was, on one now!

Despite my own religious agnosticism/disbelief, I absolutely love this idea — the image has stuck with me all afternoon. my own grandmothers both lived long, rich lives — grandmahelen died in 2002, a month shy of her 92nd birthday, and my paternal grandmother grammie passed last summer at the age of 94 — and i love to think of them both riding bikes up in the sky somewhere…

We interviewed Laura on her boat, where she lives with her cats Sophie and Louise. We talked for an hour for two minutes of TV and she showed us a sample of her 15 cameras which she uses to differing effect in her photographs. It's interesting to look at her photo sets on Flickr as they are grouped by the types of cameras she uses. One can really begin to understand that each camera is like a different instrument playing the same note but sounding completely distinct and having different tones.

For a more selective sample of Laura Watt's photography, visit her shutterpixie pages.




Watch the Your Photos On Quest: Laura Watt television story online.




For those of you who are interested in entering your photos for consideration in future YPOQ episodes, sign up for our email newsletter to get an announcement for the next submission call, or head on over to our Flickr photo group for KQED QUEST.




37.973038, -122.482989




Posted in Biology, Environment, KQED | Please Comment

Producer's Notes: Inside an Explosion

November 25th, 2008 by Amy Miller

We see or hear about explosions practically every day on TV–
most people have no idea what an explosion really is.We were asked to surrender all of our communications devices before entering the High Explosives Applications Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. After handing over our cell phones, checking our IDs and getting our badges, we were led through a labyrinth of Cold War-era concrete hallways where there is a definite atmosphere of secrecy and caution.

It’s true that the majority of the work done there is in support of Department of Defense and Department of Energy programs. But contrary to what one might imagine, the scientists there are work that goes on there isn't ALL about figuring out how to protect the U.S. from Communism. The scientists here are chemists, physicists and engineers who are delving into everything from warhead electrical systems to enhanced mammography.

We’re led into the "firing chamber" to meet our explosives guy, Jon Maienschein, who has promised to blow something up for us. I’m excited. It’s hard to make a bad TV segment when an explosion is involved. If you watch television, you will see that many shows live and die by that rule. Maienshein is surprisingly mild-mannered for a guy who blows things up for a living. After interviewing him for about 30 minutes on camera, we finally had a very basic understanding of what’s happening during a detonation.

There are several different kinds of explosions: chemical, natural, mechanical and nuclear, electrical, astronomical, etc. The most common "artificial" explosives are chemical usually involving a violent, rapid oxidation reaction. The fine folks at LLNL demonstrated just such and explosion for us then gave us the super-cool, ultra-slow-motion footage that they shoot in order to study what actually goes on inside an explosion.

We see or hear about explosions practically every day on TV, the movies and in the news, most people have no idea what an explosion really is. What’s happening on the chemical and molecular level? And how do the people who know about explosives actually study explosions? And why is it necessary to understand this stuff? The whole thing is surprisingly complex.




Watch the Inside an Explosion television story online.






37.762611, -122.409719




Posted in Chemistry, Engineering, Physics, TV | Please Comment

Producer's notes for Your Photos On Quest: John Albers-Mead

November 18th, 2008 by Amy Miller

Photo: John Albers-MeadWe put out a call for submissions for this Your Photos on Quest segment a little late. As a result, we only got a handful of submissions. Thankfully, John Albers-Mead was one of them. Everyone who looked at his photos inevitably ended up calling a nearby colleague over to their computer screen saying, "Wow, you've GOT to take a look at this photo!" We were amazed by the details, the light, the colors, the textures and the compositions of his images. And we were especially blown away when we learned that he does not do any underwater photography! Looking at his photos, you would swear that his camera is in an underwater housing. In fact, we really didn't believe it and I ended up asking him about it three times just to make sure.

If you've ever tried to photograph something beneath the water's surface, you know how challenging it is to make sure there's enough light on the object to reveal its details but at the same time, to be careful not to get reflections on the water, thereby obstructing the view. It takes patience. And time. Albers-Mead says he composes the whole photograph based on the light. At one point in the interview, he told me (with the giddiness of a child at Christmas) that one time, he lay at the lip of a single tide pool for 2 hours waiting for the right light. He was perfectly happy just observing the tide pool drama unfolding, in which a couple of nudibranchs munched on each other. He is the quintessential "amateur," meaning he makes these trips to the tide pools a couple of times a month for the LOVE of it.

He shares his photos on Flickr and has quite a following. But he is also a docent at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Moss Beach. If folks have an interest in tide pools, this is the place to go. Of course, this area is also prime real estate and it wasn't so long ago that this area was slated for development. Now, with rising sea levels and temperatures, as well as the acidification of ocean water, these tide pools may not be around forever. But while they are, I would recommend looking at John Albers-Mead's Flickr set BEFORE you go see them in person. I guarantee that you will have a deeper appreciation for the tide pools when you first see them through his loving eyes.




Watch the Your Photos On Quest: John Albers-Mead television story online.




For those of you who are interested in entering your photos for consideration in future YPOQ episodes, sign up for our email newsletter to get an announcement for the next submission call, or head on over to our Flickr photo group for KQED QUEST.




37.524161, -122.517864




Posted in Biology, Environment, KQED | 1 Comment

Producer's Notes: Geothermal Heats Up

November 18th, 2008 by Amy Miller

Geothermal power production could significantly add to the electric power generating capacity in the United States." That's the attention-grabber at the top of a September 2008 press release from the U.S. Geological Survey announcing the release of their first geothermal resource assessment in 30 years.

When I first began researching this story for QUEST, I was surprised that I hadn't heard more about geothermal power. It's never lumped into that renewable energy laundry list that's recited by politicians and journalists alike — you know, "…solar, wind, hydroelectric and biofuels". But it turns out that geothermal energy has really great potential.

To start, it's reliable. Geothermal is base load power, which means that the plants generate power at a constant rate around the clock. In fact, geothermal plants often have capacity factors of 86-95%, well above traditional base load generation such as coal.

It's clean. Geothermal power plants give off little or no sulfur compared to fossil fuel-fired power plants and they emit no nitrogen oxides. Emissions of CO2 per megawatt-hour are extremely low or absent for the newer flash plants. A typical geothermal plant may produce 1 lbs. of CO2 per MW hour. This figure compares with 1030 lbs. per MW hour of CO2 for a natural-gas fired plant, 1600 lbs. per hour of CO2 for an oil-fired plant, and 1820 lbs. per MW hour for a low grade coal-fired plant.

And, if the USGS assessment is accurate, and it probably is, geothermal power is abundant. According to the study:

"the power generation potential from identified geothermal systems range from 3,675 MWe (95% probability) to 16,457 MWe (5% probability); the power generation potential from undiscovered geothermal systems range from 7,917 MWe (95% probability) to 73,286 MWe (5% probability); and the power generation potential from Enhanced Geothermal Systems range from 345,100 MWe (95% probability) to 727,900 MWe (5% probability)."

So, what's wrong with it? As we touched on in the TV segment, there are several little drawbacks that no doubt should be considered. These include induced seismicity (little earthquakes that are triggered by geothermal developments), the initial expense of geothermal exploration and development, and the challenges of connecting the electricity generated by a geothermal plant to the grid at a point where there is sufficient available capacity to sell the electricity.

However, I was never really able to find a strong reason why geothermal energy should not be in everyone's renewables laundry list. And considering Obama included geothermal energy in his list during his last debate against John McCain, I would imagine we will all be hearing more and more about geothermal energy development in the months to come and beyond.




Watch the Geothermal Heats Up television story report online. And don't miss the steamy, behind-the-scenes photos for this story.







38.736843, -122.662212




Posted in Engineering, Environment, Geology, KQED, Partners, TV | 2 Comments

Producer's Notes: Ghost Fleet

August 12th, 2008 by Amy Miller




UPDATE on 10/23/09: From the San Francisco Chronicle – "Two World War II cargo ships moored among Benicia's fabled "ghost fleet" since the late 1940s will be towed out of Suisun Bay next month, scrubbed clean in dry dock and ultimately sent to Texas to be broken up and sold for scrap".

Read more about the clean-up effort in the Chronicle here.


On the surface of the story, the Ghost Fleet of Suisun Bay (commonly called the "Mothball Fleet" but most accurately referred to as the Suisun Bay National Defense Reserve Fleet) is leaking toxic waste in the form of peeling ship paint containing nasty heavy metals into an already stressed bay ecosystem. Bad guys: Mothball Fleet. Good guys: Enviros who are suing. Simple, right?

But when we began digging into the story, we found the origins of the problem and current impasse to be a bit more convoluted. I'll attempt to quickly summarize: The fleet has been there since the 1940's. It wasn't until 2006 that it came to light that the exterior paint is peeling from the ships and falling into the bay. Many tons of toxic heavy metals have already fallen into Suisun Bay and there's a lot more to be had. Oddly enough, the story was initially triggered by a study that was commissioned by the federal body who oversees the fleet, the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, or MARAD for short. So the Contra Costa Times got a hold of a draft of that report and now, the ships are at the center of a different kind of battle long after they've been decommissioned.

Environmental groups (NRDC, Arc Ecology and San Francisco Bay Keeper), community leaders and water regulators justifiably want MARAD to either remove or better maintain the ships so that they are not polluting these waters that serve as both fishing and nursery grounds for several fragile or threatened species. That includes humans who are often out there catching fish for dinner. Historically, MARAD has been regularly removing and dismantling the ships but like most federal bodies whose charter was drafted during WWII, alacrity is not at the top of their mission statement.


Check out a larger map of the fleet

The real issue now seems to be that MARAD has had to completely stop removing ships because they can't clean their hulls of potentially hazardous invasive biological species (to comply with the U.S. Coast Guard's National Aquatic Invasive Species Act of 2003) without scraping more paint into the bay. So, until someone develops a system to clean the hulls that doesn't scrape more paint into the water, the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board says that MARAD can't remove the ships.

The one possible solution that everyone pretty much agrees upon is to dismantle the ships locally so that they don’t have to be cleaned of invasive species. There are currently no ship dismantlers operating on the West Coast but there's a company called Allied Defense Recycling located on Vallejo's Mare Island Naval Shipyard that's chomping at the bit to tear those ships apart. But they've also run into red tape. And while they await permits and approvals from multiple parties, the ships continue to rot and pollute.

It's always easier to write a story with clear heroes and villains. But to me, it does seem that MARAD, environmental groups and water regulators all agree that we have a problem that must be addressed. So, what now? I guess we wait. Perhaps this lawsuit will kick start some aspect of the clean-up process but in the meantime, frustration mounts for all parties involved and many pointing index fingers are suffering from overuse.

Watch the "Ghost Fleet" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, check out the online photo set of the ships and behind the scenes images.




38.077398, -122.097694




Posted in Engineering, Environment, KQED, TV | 1 Comment

Producer's Notes: Tracking Raindrops

July 22nd, 2008 by Amy Miller



Riding to work on BART, about a week before I was to begin shooting this story, I ran into a former colleague of mine whom I had not seen since 2001. He and I had worked together for something like 9 years at KUSF, a non-commercial community radio station in San Francisco. The station -and this particular guy- have always had a reputation for being fairly progressive. OK, that might be an understatement: he's a militant vegan, Critical-Mass-bicycle-riding, anti-automobile, bleeding heart liberal who played a lot of 60's Psychedelia and Prog Rock like the Fugs, the 13th Floor Elevators and Frank Zappa on his radio shows.

After explaining to him that I was working on a story about the impact that global warming is having on the Earth’s supply of fresh water, I was shocked to find myself arguing with him about the very existence of climate change. He claimed that it was all a bunch of sensationalism and that the Earth's climate has always had dramatic changes and that what we are experiencing now is anecdotal and has nothing to do with humans. He said that even if it is happening, longer growing seasons in northerly regions would be beneficial to world food supply and that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause plants to grow even better. Sure, I’ve heard these types of arguments before but usually not in San Francisco. It was definitely a timely reminder to me about why the media should cover the kind of scientific work that’s being done on this issue.

Given my conversation with BART guy, one of the reasons the Keck Hydrowatch Project is so interesting to me is that Inez Fung, Todd Dawson and the rest of the team aren’t actually setting out to prove the existence of climate change. The researchers are embarking from the position that without question, global climate change is happening and what we are experiencing today is just the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. And you know what? I believe them. So, they are dedicating the next four years of their lives to understanding how these changes will affect the availability of fresh water for use by humans, plants and land animals. So far, their predictions are "rather grim", as Fung says in the story. It will rain but because we've cut down so many forests, altering the natural landscape that allows the water to cycle back into the atmosphere, much of it will fall in the middle of the ocean where we can't access it. This will result in widespread drought and famine in the not so distant future. Yikes. Being an environmental reporter in this day and age can be a bit disheartening.

So, I was curious how scientists like Fung and Dawson, whose research leads to predictions of widespread climatic chaos and environmental meltdown, are able to cope with their frequently depressing findings. And what do they hope to do with their results? Well, according to Todd Dawson and others on the Keck Hydrowatch team, this project can serve as a model for understanding water movement throughout the globe in order to more fairly allocate water for future human use in a dryer world. But also, and perhaps most importantly, this research can drive home the point that because climate change is largely the result of human activities, its solutions also reside with us.

Watch the "Tracking Raindrops" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.




39.730422, -123.644708




Posted in Biology, Chemistry, Environment, KQED, TV | Please Comment
Next Page »