Chapter 116

4/9/2006 

Ch 116 Better Living Through Chemistry

Organic Chemistry in our Lives                                 

Today’s newspaper had a terrific report on the MTBE problem. Having spent most of my life as an environmental water quality engineer and because Kevin had requested a water quality chapter, I had to add my perspective.

 The organic compound MTBE was a gasoline additive used to improve performance by increasing octane and reduce harmful lead pollution into the air, water and humans. However, it is an insidious chemical causing big problems in drinking water and now banned from gasoline in NY. Taking the good with the bad.

 Kevin, you see in this picture was one of these DEC spill response technicians along with Tony, shown on one our rainy night surveys for the taxpayers. Bill and I recorded the lowest water quality ever (zero oxygen) in Riverhead, Long Island summer 1979 due to combined discharges of LI duck waste and domestic sewage. Off hours we could relax a little. These guys should be writing this chapter (but they’re not- maybe when they retire!). The point is: living in today’s world is a complicated compromise and a balance between good and evil. Yes, there are evil doers out there.

Summer of '79. Peconic River at Riverhead

Zero dissolved oxygen below water quality standard of 3 mg/l found at mid depth deadly to aquatic life. Clear tested sample compared to yellow sample good D.O. on box. Whiteish cloudy bottle on box still not through processing (fixed with acid).

Take my hockey team for instance. It is predominantly made up of General Electric people (my DEC’s long time nemesis on the PCB issue). Yet these are my good friends now. One member, the versatile organic chemist Dr Florian Johan Schattenmann, sometimes called Flo-Jo is shown gulping the champagne after our championship and playing bass guitar at his 40th birthday party last summer. 

Flo, who was born in Munich, just announced he is leaving the team to return to Dusseldorf, Germany for a few years to oversee two silicone production plants there and in Geneva, Swiss. I believe he’ll be contending with the Rhine River that takes some serious hits from the huge chemical industry there. He is a great guy who loves our team and said his biggest regret leaving the GE Global Research Center here is leaving the hockey team. He was thrilled last fall when his friend and faculty advisor for his PhD at MIT, Richard Schrock won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/schrock.html Two steps forward one step back.

 Hockey players are not all barbarians either, like some of you think. The guy getting doused is part of our homeland security team, served in the Persian Gulf, and is a Navy warrant officer /nuclear engineer and instructor for the Navy’s Nuclear Submarine fleet program based at the secret Kesselring site in West Milton near here. The douser is a Lemoyne College computer science grad and management consultant. EMT behind him next to Shen school district computer networker.

 Keeping this short, reading about MTBE will make you sick. And probably the peabrain internet censors in govt and industry will block the web page access anyway!