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Archive: March, 2011
File this under the Dept. of I Honestly Don't Know How to Feel About This: While recently taking the 36 trolley, City Paper spotted a young woman snorting virtual coke on her iPhone. She used a virtual razor to cut up virtual lines, and then used a virtual rolled-up dollar bill to virtually snort them.
The young woman did this over and over for about 10 minutes, as CP watched, a bit in shock. Even more amazingly, she was sitting next to a sweater-donning elderly woman on the trolley all the while.
Apparently, she was using an app called iSnort.
It left CP with many questions: Does this app further normalize cocaine in a city plagued by drug problems, especially among younger people? Or does it make no difference at all? Or could it even help addicts, in a weird way, like drinking non-alcoholic beer does? And most importantly: Am I old?
Oh, also, just in case someone from Oklahoma is reading this, don't worry, you can't actually get high on iSnort! Sigh.
This just in: The City Managing Director's Office of Emergency Management is recommending that the Venice Loft apartments residents voluntarily evacuate their building in preparation for possible flooding tonight and into tomorrow. This comes from a press release sent out by the office of Councilman Curtis Jones Jr:
This rainfall may cause flash flooding of low lying areas; such as Manayunk, streams, creeks and moderate flooding on the Schuylkill River. Therefore, there is a recommendation of voluntarily evacuation for residents of Venice Loft, located at 4601 Flat Rock Road. Once again, the flood storm is anticipated to crest at over 12feet by tomorrow, Friday, March 11th at noon.
Now, if this sounds oddly familiar, it should: The apartments were infamously flooded while under construction, as you can see in these pictures from 2006.
In fact, as the Inquirer reported last October, when the apartments flooded again, the project had been initially blocked by a judge who ruled it "too great a risk to human life and property."
Despite that ruling, the development proceeded. When the complex flooded last October, developer Carl Dranoff told the Inky that [not his quote] "the structures were built to withstand the flooding that occurs on the Schuylkill every five or 10 years. The development includes a bridge that allows people to leave, and machinery was placed on higher levels."
And [his quote] "The buildings are performing exactly as planned ... Every precaution was taken in the design of the buildings. There's no harm to people."
Unless our math is off. it's been slightly less than ten years since October 2010 — we'll see if the Venice Lofts flood this time.
View galleryThe Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) is considering a set of regulations that would govern natural gas drilling in the watershed, and has invited the public to comment.
But the DRBC hasn't yet held a public hearing about the regulations in Philadelphia, so Philadelphia held one itself on Tuesday night at City Hall. It was organized by Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, Clean Water Action and other environmental groups, and the testimony gathered there will be sent to the DRBC. City Paper counted at least 100 people in attendance, maybe more.
Fifty-six people testified at the hearing. Only one person who testified spoke out in support of the natural gas drilling industry. Denise Furey, a West Philadelphian, said that drilling had created thousands of jobs, that "recent media accounts ... have been proven be inaccurate," and that additional regulations would not enhance the public's safety.
Furey did not mention her work background during her testimony, but City Paper later found that she was once a senior director of Enron. Reached over the phone, Furey confirmed that the online biography CP found was accurate. She said she currently works as a private financial consultant, but declined to be more specific.
"I've been a financial analyst following the energy sector for 25 years," she said.
Furey said she'd found a flier about the hearing in the neighborhood, and critiqued Brown's office for not reaching out to more people like her.
Other attendants included everyone from Grid coverwoman Iris Marie Bloom to City Council candidate Jeff Hornstein to a high schooler.
The attendants called for many different things — moratoriums on drilling, an extended public comment period on the DRBC's regulations (it's currently until April 15), a cumulative impact study for the Delaware River Basin, and much more. One thing that testifiers repeatedly brought up was a recent New York Times article, which found that confidential studies by both the E.P.A. and the drilling industry "concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways." But, according to the article:
The E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008. ... The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water.
According to the DRBC, the Marcellus Shale — where much recent gas drilling is taking place — "underlies about 36 percent of the Delaware River Basin," which is a source of Philadelphia's drinking water. In other words, the DRBC's proposed regulations could have far-reaching effects, even here.
Many attendants were upset that the DRBC hasn't held a public hearing in Philadelphia. A document that was being circulated by Bloom, the aforementioned Grid coverwoman who is director of Protecting Our Waters, read: "We are not protected from high levels of radioactivity in gas drilling waste; this in an outrage! You must hold hearings downriver, including in the state of Delaware."
Hornstein, the Council candidate, testified, "We must insist that the DRBC extend the moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in the Delaware Basin until the cumulative impact study is done and the EPA’s study of hydrofracking’s threat to groundwater is completed."
Marjorie Lofland said, "Anything that we do is not going to stop them ... we have to behave like killer bees!"
One of the final testifiers, Rebecca Trabin, darkly joked, "Our forefathers did not steal land from Native Americans just to make it uninhabitable."
Read more about the proposed regulations here, and for the science and politics behind drilling for gas in the Marcellus Shale, read Isaiah Thompson's story Drill, Baby, Drill!
First: City Paper's website is not dead, it's just broken. And it's being fixed. We really hope. Readers may find broken links and missing content. The best we can tell you right now is to keep trying, give it a little time, and email us if and when you experience difficulty or desperately need to read our amazing content.
Believe you us, we don't like it either.
As for the sudden disappearance of "The Clog," we offer this bedtime tale:
Once upon a time, there was an alternative newsweekly whose content only appeared on "paper" — a fabric made from the mashed, dried tree pulp.
Something called the Internet came along and, though the weekly found this Internet attractive and full of alluring possibilities, the weekly wasn't sure just how to approach starting up a relationship with it.
Looking around, the weekly noticed that a lot of other weeklies seemed to be starting "blogs," and hastened to start one itself. Having little experience in the matter, it began shoving content of every sort into a single blog which it named, appropriately, "The Clog."
Over time, the Clog gave birth to other blogs with their own identity: Critical Mass, and arts and entertainment blog and Mealticket, a food blog.
The Clog itself slowly morphed into the weekly's daily (sometimes) online news presence.
But it still had that same old name: The Clog.
When the weekly — okay, it's the City Paper — had its website overhauled this week, its editors thought it high time to give the Clog a better name, one that reflected its purpose and ambition. So we've renamed it "The Naked City," — the same name as our weekly "print" news section.
That's right: in one fell swoop we've broken down the barrier between web and print — for everyone, for eternity. Something like that, anyway.
It's going to take us a little while yet to get things going, but we see this as a chance to start providing better and more news of the great city of Philadelphia — and we define 'news' broadly: feral chicken stories, breaking scandals, investigative reporting, even more pictures Mayor Nutter and a chiuaua in birthday hats.
What's our RSS feed, you ask? It ... doesn't exist or something. But it will. In the meantime, just check in here.
We beg your patience.
Check out the list below of all the candidates who filed nominating petitions by the deadline yesterday, which was provided by City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione's office.
One piece of election news that hasn't been reported already is that Tracey Gordon — the Democratic committee person who was unseated by a ward leader last year, in part, because she wanted to shake up the Democratic party — is running for the 2nd District Council seat. (I also wrote a follow-up piece this week about activists who have tried — unsuccessfully — to meet with Congressman Bob Brady about Gordon's ousting.)
Another interesting tidbit: Lewis Harris, Jr. is running for Traffic Court as both a Democrat and Republican.
Our very own Isaiah Thompson is on WHYY right now, discussing Mayor Nutter. Listen here (or, if you're getting to it later, check out the archives here)!
On Tuesday night, more than 100 people came out to the city's public hearing on the Delaware River Basin Commission's proposed natural gas regulations.
Fifty-six people testified at the hearing, and as far as City Paper could tell, only one of them was in support of the natural gas industry. (CP had to step out for a moment, but Clean Water Action confirmed this number.)
Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown organized the meeting, along with Clean Water Action and other environmental groups. The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) has not organized a hearing in Philly regarding their proposed regulations, which is partially why activists and community members advocated for one. The public comments given at the hearing will be submitted to the DRBC, according to Clean Water Action, before the April 15 deadline.
Check back on The Naked City blog later today for more on the hearing, including photographs and individuals' testimony.
A few weeks back, in CP’s February 17 edition of “A Million Stores,” I wrote about Lou’s Jewelry and Pawn – a small pawnshop in Upper Darby that had been targeted in 2006 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence for selling a disconcerting number of guns to criminals. Dubbed “Lethal Lou’s” in this report, ATF maintained that Lou’s owner, Stanton Myerson, had willfully supplied guns to folks who weren’t allowed by law to have them.
The CP story, while making note of those facts, was less an indictment of Lou’s business tactics than of my own lack of knowledge about firearms; the “action” of the story involved me mistaking a paintball gun at the pawnshop for some kind of assault rifle. But apparently the story irritated Myerson enough – and elicited enough shocked comments from regular Lou’s customers – that the longtime proprietor of Lou’s Jewelry and Pawn invited me back to the shop to clarify a few things.
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