The entire front page is an editorial. It stands up for the thousands of Penn State alumni and supporters who live in Central Pennsylvania. It stands up for the rule of law. And it stands up for children who are the victims of sexual crimes.

To the editorial board of the Patriot-News, bravo.

Highlight sentences:

The most famous coach in college football history must be held to a higher standard.

…

A man who has spoken with such affection for 46 years about “his kids” failed real kids when they needed him most.

…

It might always be honor with an asterisk, admiration with a shake of the head. Joe will have to live with that.

The Patriot-News wasn’t alone. The newspapers of Central Pennsylvania stepped up today. They put their communities, and their responsibilities to them, first. They collectively mounted the kind of pressure necessary to oust an iconic figure who long ago aged past his ability to control his organization, his staff, and his team.

The York Daily Record reminds us all that whenever anyone even suspects that a child is being abused, “…the first call, the most important call, must be to the authorities.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer wants Paterno to step down at the end of this season, too, saying his “oft-discussed retirement would be timelier than ever – even though leaving amid this scandal will provide a sad coda to an otherwise stellar career for the man who, until now, served as the reassuring public face of Penn State.”

The Williamsport Sun-Gazette underscores that no one did the right thing: “It’s clear no one at the university acted aggressively enough as they were being informed of these allegations. There was one call to be made when they were informed. Immediately. To state police.”

The Scranton Times-Tribune echoed the point that “Penn State’s obligation hardly ends with the legal process.”

There are a couple exceptions to this set of newspapers who stepped up and addressed our state’s highest and mightiest public university, though—as of this writing, there’s not a peep about PSU amongst the editorials in the Lancaster or Reading newspapers.

If you so much as suspect that a Pennsylvania child is being abused, call ChildLine at 800-932-0313.

More about Penn State football on LancasterPaBlog.com:
In the Middle of College Football Season, Injustices of the NCAA Revealed

The in-depth report comes at a time when the number of Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania are expected to increase from 6,400 today to no fewer than 50,000 in 2031.

What the waste water looks like. Thumnail of the photo by Jessica Kourkounis.

The article, by Ian Urbina, reveals that, in a process that defies belief, radioactive waste water from the drilling process is being sold to municipalities in our state to use for de-icing roads, because the waste water is high in salts.

Natural gas is extracted from the Marcellus Shale formation in our state by injecting millions of gallons of water to break up rock and release the natural gas. The problem is that 10 to 40 percent of that water comes back to the surface within two weeks of its use. And at that point it is contaminated with salts and radioactive elements including barium and strontium.

One partial solution to this problem has been for drilling corporations to capture this waste water and reuse it at new drilling sites. This is a flawed solution, however, because it leads to waste water with even higher concentrations of contaminants, and the water is not reusable forever—it must eventually be disposed. Adding insult to injury, the New York Times reports that “the total amount of recycling in the state is nowhere near the 90 percent that the industry has been claiming over the past year.” It gets worse:

In the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. But at least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced, according to state data posted Tuesday. Those 260 million gallons would fill more than 28,800 tanker trucks, a line of which would stretch from about New York City to Richmond, Va.

On March 11, 2009, a meeting was held between natural gas drilling industry officials and “state regulators and officials from the governor’s office.” The subject of the meeting was a modest proposal requiring drilling corporations to track each load of waste water from the extraction site to the disposal point. Without that requirement, drillers could dump the waste water on the side of the road and no one would be the wiser. What happened during and after that meeting is horrifying:

After initially resisting, state officials agreed, adding that they would try to persuade the secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to agree, according to the notes. In the end, the state’s proposed manifest system for tracking was not carried out.

Three of the top state officials in the meeting — K. Scott Roy, Barbara Sexton and J. Scott Roberts — have since left their posts for jobs in the natural-gas industry.

The article, “Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process,” is required reading for all Pennsylvanians.

Give it a read and leave your thoughts here.

(While I could not have anticipated the details of this ongoing disaster, I told you so.)

I don’t have any new facts, just photos. For the full story, see the LancasterOnline article.

Everyone is free to use these photos for any purpose, and no need to ask me for permission or give me credit.

Digging for fossil fuel is never safe. It’s never safe for humans, and it’s never safe for the wild areas in which we humans allow the digging. The inconceivably massive oil spill we are witnessing on the Gulf Coast should remind us of that. BP, world champion of corporate green-washing, is responsible.

The corporations who dig up fossil fuel need to be watched closely by competent regulators. Regulation costs money. The corporations that make money by digging up fossil fuel should cover the cost of the outside regulators.

That’s why I voted a strong “yes” in the Central Penn Business Journal’s current Question of the Week, “Should Pennsylvania impose taxes on drilling in Marcellus Shale?”

It’s never clean. It’s never safe. It’s always risky.

Pennsylvania needs regulators to protect the most basic interests of society from sloppiness of the corporations that dig up the fossil fuel here in our state. We should mandate the corporations to foot the bill for those regulators themselves.

This List is Causing Tension

I didn’t expect these weekly re-posts of a list available on the city’s website to be as polarizing as they have been. I’ll continue to re-post the list each week, because I believe:

1. Spreading information on wanted criminals is helpful to the common good.
2. These posts spark conversation, and public discourse in an inherent good.
3. True controversy about local issues causes us to think and to hear other ideas, and as such is also an inherent good.

In response to last week’s post, a senior member of the city administration wrote on my Facebook wall:

Daniel, just so you know, the Warrant Top Ten is not at all intended to be a list of the Lancaster’s “most wanted”. It is as it is described on the Police website; a list of the ten people who have the most outstanding warrants. As it happens, most of these happen to be warrants for unpaid parking tickets. The Police have many other ways of locating those with outstanding warrants for serious criminal activity.

I honor and respect that perspective and intent. I am not, however, won over to change the title of these re-posts here on this blog to “Warrant Top Ten List” because:

1. That’s not how actual people think or search. A number of people find these posts (and thus the information on wanted criminals) by searching “Lancaster most wanted” on Google and other search engines. No one is searching for “Lancaster warrant list” or even “Lancaster outstanding warrants.”
2. A “most wanted” list is by common practice a list of criminals that the police are so interested in catching that they recruit the public’s help. That’s what this Warrant Top Ten list is.
3. The national Most Wanted list has lead the to capture and imprisonment of thousands of known criminals. Whether they intend to or not, Lancaster city police are sending this message to local citizens: “Don’t worry about it; we’ve got it covered when it comes to the really bad guys. You just help us track down the people who don’t pay for parking.” It seems time to trust the citizens enough to give us a real role to play in identifying local criminals. The police regularly releases information on wanted criminals to the local media; why not collect that information and release it in addition to the “Warrant Top Ten” list?

Keep on Commenting, Please

I hope you’ll continue to share your thoughts on this issue in teh comments on this blog. Lancaster has a crime problem, and how we handle that problem is an issue of public concern. We can’t just leave it for others to address.

This Week’s List

For now, we get an extra treat this week: the number one offender doesn’t have a parking problem; he has a drinking problem.

Thanks for the lively discussion (in the comments and on Facebook and Twitter) about last week’s most wanted list. The strong consensus was that the police department’s list is an embarrassment. Lancaster has a crime problem, and the only people the police need our help to find are folks with a lot of parking tickets.

I don’t know why police chief Keith Sadler generates the “most wanted” list in this way, and I hope someone interviews him soon to find out. Perhaps our city cops like to think they have the violent cases under control, and that it’s instead those darn bad parkers who elude their detectives.

For now, I’ll continue reposting the most wanted list and allow you to make up your own mind about it… and encourage you to speak your mind in the comments.

Today I’m kicking off a new category on this blog, Public Safety, with what I expect will be a weekly reposting of the city police department’s most wanted.

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I am also planning future entries looking for trends in local crime data.