Articles

TASA ID: 18867

Oil and gas pipeline construction in the U.S. has grown steadily over the years at a rate of approximately 10,000 miles per year. As of 2019, more than 2.6 million miles of natural gas and 219,000 miles of hazardous liquid pipelines were operating in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s PHMSA agency began tracking serious accidents in 2000. The latest failure rates reported by PHMSA show 0.01 failures per 1000 miles for hazardous liquid pipelines, 11 failures per 1,000,000 miles for gas distribution pipelines, and 0.008 failures per 1000 miles of gas transmission pipelines. Despite such low probabilities of failure, accidents do occur often making news due to the spectacular way they fail and the likelihood of deaths and injuries.

TASA ID: 18027

Chemical suicides are defined as “self inflicted death by mixing various chemicals designed to release toxic fumes in an enclosed space.”  This type of incident is also referred to as a “Detergent Suicide.”  It is “advertised as a quick and painless way to end one’s life.

This technique that is credited with starting in Japan and has gained popularity in the US thru instructions posted on the internet.  It is estimated that 500 Japanese men, women and children took their lives in the first half of 2008. There were a total of 208 persons that committed chemical suicide in a three-month period alone. They did so by following instructions posted on various Japanese websites that describe how to mix bath sulfur (bath salts) with a toilet bowl cleaner to create a poisonous gas (H2S). One site goes so far as to include an application to help calculate the portions needed of each ingredient in order to correctly fill a rooms volume with the deadly gas. It also has a downloadable PDF consisting of a ready-made warning sign to alert neighbors and emergency workers to the deadly hazard.

TASA ID: 13340

Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP) is currently providing input to the U.S. Dept. of HHS to preserve the 2016 CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline which is under some threat from the influence of the opioid pharmaceutical industry and some members of the pain community. This could also have positive implications for future legal cases for victims of opioid over-prescribing, especially in regard to the continued profit-driven malfeasance of these two sectors which have been largely responsible for the creation of the opioid epidemic. Will have more to say about this over the next few months.

TASA ID: 11934

This article was originally published in Transmission & Distribution World, www.tdworld.com, September 2016.

Typically, utilities have leaks that occur inside conduits, along cracks and at pipe penetrations. The conduit problem, for example, occurs where the conduit penetrates inside a structure such as a building foundation, a manhole or a vault. Water infiltration occurs inside the structures at the annular space between the cables and the conduit. This leakage can fill an underground vault with water, depending on the water table elevation. 

TASA ID: 13340

This article originally appeared in The Rheumatologist, 2008 - https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/perils-of-pain-meds/ and has been granted permission to be republished on The TASA Group website.

Over the last decade, an expansion in the use of opioids has been advocated by certain pain specialists as well as pharmaceutical companies. In my opinion, this has occurred in the absence of valid data that support the claims that opioids can effectively and safely be extended beyond cancer to most patients with chronic non-cancer pain with a low risk of addiction. Such claims have subsequently been found to be inaccurate, and the original
statement about the low rate of addiction to a common oxycodone sustained-release formulation has been shown to be false (as recently admitted by pharmaceutical company executives as a result of a Federal indictment).