Schools and colleges have stepped up to provide skilled manufacturing training
Fresno County offers employee training through the New Employment Opportunity program, which reimburses companies that hire through the program
Economic leaders/local government: bringing in diverse occupations and companies to the valley, including a medical complex in Clovis, which will house the first medical school in the valley
Industry: not enough highly skilled workers
Schools: not enough students going into high-paying jobs
Increasing jobs in Central Valley from large corporate warehouses, but those don't always come with high wages, can be dangerous
45% of Fresno Unified School District students take part in career and technical programs - better graduation rate, offers students work experience and skills
How are Data Gaps Worked Around:
Sarnia, and the surrounding area around chemical valley, have 9 air monitoring stations in which air pollutants are monitored from the nearby petrochemical complex. Until 2017, only data from one of these stations (the one on Christina Street in downtown Sarnia) was publicly available. This created a gap in accessiblility of important data for sarnia and the nearby AFN residents. In September 2015, the Clean Air Sarnia and Area group launched as a "community advisory panel made up of representatives from the public, government, First Nations, and industry, who are dedicated to providing the community with a clear understanding of ambient air quality in the Sarnia area." This group works to improve air quality in Sarnia by making information about air quality publicly available and by making recommendations to relevant authorities. In 2018, this group launched the website: https://reporting.cleanairsarniaandarea.com/ (also uploaded as an artifact) which allows public to access data from the air quality monitoring stations and understand how air quality compares to Ontario's standards. This site works to fill the gap of publicly available air quality data in Sarnia.
This report from Ecojustice shows a decline in air pollution compared to Ecojustice's first report released in 2007 for the area around Chemical Valley, yet Sarnia industries continue "to release far more pollution, and in particular far more SO2 , than comparable U.S. refineries." One contributor to the continued excessive emissions is Ontario's lagging air quality standards. The report notes that "Ontario’s AAQC and air quality standards are lagging behind current science on the health impacts of air pollutants, which may put the health of residents at risk." The report highlights pollutants where Ontario's standard is above the national standard or where Ontario has no standard at all. Additionally, Sarnia's benzene emissions are exempt from Ontario's health-based standard for this chemical and are instead regulated by "an industry technical-based standard" allowing benzene levels to be far higher than the health-based standard. The lagging, lack of, or exemption from regulation undercut efforts in monitoring and reducing emissions to a "safe" level as what is considered "safe" by standards is out of line with what is considered "safe" by health and other standards.
The author of this article is Scott Gabriel Knowles, the department head and an associate professor in the Drexel University Department of History Center for Science, Technology and Society. His focuses are on risk and disaster, with particular interests in modern cities, technology, and public policy. He also serves as a faculty research fellow of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and since 2011 he has been a member of the Fukushima Forum collaborative research community. His more recent works include:
The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).4
Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
"Defending Philadelphia: A Historical Case Study of Civil Defense in the Early Cold War" Public Works Management & Policy, (Vol. 11, No. 3, 2007): 217-232.
This article examines how disaster investigations in the United States have evolved over time, from the burining of the capitol building near the birth of the republic through the theater fires and boiler explosions of industrialization to the collapse of the world trade centers at the present, showing how the modern, bureaucratic system of disaster investigation was built.
This arguement is supported by looking at 4 specific case histories and examining the factors contributing to the investigations in each.
1. The 1814 Burning of the Capitol Building - Investigation of the disaster conducted by one engineer, B.H. Lathobe, who was given vast resources with very few obsticles, except for financial constraits and an impatient congress, to complete his investigation and reconstruct the building.
2. 1850 Hauge St. Explosion - After a major boiler explosion in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a pannel of "jurrors" and "experts" were called together to complete investigations, bring forth the history of the fauty boiler, and place the blame for the accident in an effort to "memorialize the dead and bring them justice." Because of the way this investigation was conducted, the blame could not be accurately placed so everyone involved was blamed for the failure.
3. 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire - John Ripley Freeman, a fireproof engineering expert and factory inspector, was brought in to complete a report and provided one of the first "modern" scientific disaster investigations. He utilized a new network of investigators, engineers, insurance companies, testing labs, and inter-industry coordination that characterizes modern disaster investigation.
1. "Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, comptetition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. And yet, even a brief historical review shows us that these elements are not unique."
2. "In this article, I will show that conflicts over authority, expertise, memory, and finally the attribution of responsibility suffuse the history of disaster in the United States."
3. "Blame, memorial, and reconstruction tend to outpace technical consensus."