NY Gas Smell

On this rainy, gloomy Monday, millions of New Yorkers got a scare this morning when a pervasive smell of gas permeated most of midtown Manhattan. As thousands evacuated offices, including ours, news operations speculated on everything from a massive leak at the main refineries and pipelines located across the river in New Jersey, to a terrorist attack.

On a dreary, humid, gray day, in which the mild weather continues well above normal for January, the rotten egg smell gave many people headaches, made others nauseous, caused officials for a time to suspend train traffic from New Jersey, and led thousands to evacuate their buildings or take other extreme measures.

Delaying a scheduled news conference for over an hour, as he worked hard to figure out what was going on, Mayor Bloomberg then reassured worried New Yorkers that whatever it was, it wasn't dangerous. But while this turned out to be benign it was a chilling reminder that cities like this one could be vulnerable to a terrorist attempt to poison the environment, like that 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
 
And then there was the news today out of Austin, Texas that cops there shut down 10 blocks of businesses in the heart of downtown after dozens of birds were found dead from an unknown cause.
 
Funny enough, the dead birds in Texas, the stink on the streets of New York, and the inconvenient truth that unseasonably warm weather is freaking out everybody in the North East also reminded me also of something crazy Pat Robertson said last week on television:  that God just confided in him that 2007 will be the year of the Apocalypse, saying, "...It's going to happen.  And I'm not saying necessarily nuclear.  The Lord didn't say nuclear, but I do believe that it will be something like that.  It'll be a mass killing, possibly millions of people."
   
But even with Robertson's rant, and all the scary smells, the only potential end of the world scenario you should really be worried about right now is the report that Israel has drawn up a secret plan to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.

In what would be the first attack with nuclear weapons since the 1945 atom bomb attacks on Japan, according to The London Sunday Times, two Israeli Air Force squadrons are training to use small, so-called tactical nukes to take out Iranian facilities that Israel and many others believe are being secretly used to produce nuclear weapons.

Although the attack plan is strenuously denied by Israel, which doesn't even admit to having nuclear weapons, what gives some pause for thought is the fact that Israel has resorted to a surprise air attack before to take out a potentially hostile nuke plant, successfully destroying Iraq's Osirak reactor more than 25 years ago.

Some believe Israel intentionally leaked the story in the hope of pressuring the world community to follow through on economic sanctions to get Iran to suspend its nuclear ambitions. Sort of a diplomatic, 'hold me back before I slug that guy'.

Hopefully, economic sanctions will work, Iran won't get the bomb, and God will tell Pat Robertson that he was only kidding. In any case, this was a stinker of a day.