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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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110689
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p36
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1990-09-22
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NATION, Page 36American Notes
TEXAS
"Like Being Inside a Bomb"
Danger is a constant companion of workers in the petrochemical
industry. But no one could be prepared for the explosions and the
fireball that last week reduced a Phillips Petroleum Co. plastics
plant near Houston to a blackened maze. "It was like being inside
a bomb," said purchasing agent Clay Howell, who was knocked out of
his chair 350 yds. from the blasts. Trying to stop the inferno was
"like spitting in the ocean," said Houston fireman Joseph Phillips.
Twenty-two employees were either killed or presumed dead.
The company suggested that a seal on one of the plant's
eleven-story-high reactors may have developed a leak, leading to
the ignition of a stream of gas. But workers contended that the
cloud was so dense that a valve must have been left open. In any
case, the disaster dramatized the need for greater concern for
safety by the chemical industry. Its lobbyists had persuaded the
Bush Administration to remove tougher safety restrictions on such
facilities from proposed legislation for renewing the Clean Air
Act.
GUNS
Targeting the Children
One appalling result of America's fixation with firearms was
disclosed last week. A study by the National Center for Health
Statistics found that 3,392 children ages 1 through 19 were killed
in homicides, suicides and accidents with guns in 1987, accounting
for 11% of deaths in that age group. No nation comes close to the
U.S. in such fatalities. In 1985 not a single teenage male was the
victim of gun-related homicide in England or Sweden.
The most frequent victims of the U.S. carnage were black males
ages 15 to 19: 49.2 per 100,000 in this group died in 1987 from the
homicidal use of guns. Among whites, the rate was 5.1 per 100,000.
Said Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan: "We are
losing our youth increasingly to injury and violence."
WASHINGTON
Down for The Count
For decades, Presidents have used the census as a patron age
honeypot, dispensing part-time counting jobs to allies at the grass
roots. Even Jimmy Carter, who championed civil service reform,
signed a waiver in 1979 so that his followers could be hired. But
George Bush has apparently missed the 1990 census gravy train.
The reason is an unusual mixture of efficiency and political
naivete at the Commerce Department, where Secretary Robert
Mosbacher did not ask Bush to sign a waiver until he knew there
would not be enough nonpolitical applicants to fill 2,700
management jobs, which pay up to $18 an hour.
By the time he did so on Sept. 2, his department had already
hired about two-thirds of the required census coordinators through
the civil service. Thus these nonpartisan supervisors will be able
to select most of the 400,000 door-to-door enumerators at up to $8
an hour. Republicans are livid. Complained Minnesota Congressman
Vin Weber: "Patronage is the lifeblood of politics in many
congressional districts. To have this slip by us for bureaucratic
reasons is just infuriating."
CONSERVATION
No Longer at Loggerheads
For years environmentalists and loggers have quarreled over the
fate of "old-growth" forests in the Pacific Northwest.
Conservationists contend that cutting the ancient trees on
federally owned land in Oregon and Washington State threatens the
habitat of the endangered spotted owl, which lives only in
old-growth forests. The lumber industry objects that a ban would
devastate the timber-based economies of the region. Last week
George Bush signed into law a compromise hammered out by a
congressional conference committee. It prohibits sales of timber
from areas where the spotted owl dwells, but permits 7.7 billion
board feet of wood to be harvested on nearby tracts where cutting
has been stalled by environmentalists' lawsuits. Environmentalists
can sue to prevent future logging of old-growth timber, but only
if they file within 15 days of the issuance of a federal permit.
Said Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin: "We protected habitat and
jobs."