ECHOES AND UPDATES

Asbestos [AtE Nov 89]: Engineering consultant J.E. Kinney, to whom I had submitted my editorial for corrections, was out of town and corrected two points when the issue was already printed. Both of them make US policy look even worse than I had claimed. The concentration before removal in schools is usually 0.00009 fibers/cc (not 0.0009), and the connection to the Third World is not just general, but the World Bank and the US will discontinue aid to these countries if they use any asbestos for concrete water and sewage pipes (or for anything else), even the harmless, serpen-tine kind found in America.

Were the cases of asbestosis and other diseases of the workers in the US shipyards a hoax, then? Not at all. In a ship you need asbestos that will stand up to acid and brine (as well as to the lung's efforts to dissolve it), and that is why the amphibole type, not found in America, was imported from S. Africa for this special purpose. It was dangerous and it did claim its victims. But the vast majority (99% then, 100% today) of the asbestos used in the US is of the serpentine type which is rejected and even dissolved by the lung and has not been shown to cause any problems. Both fear monger Brodeur and EPA chief Reilly engage in the most despicable demagoguery by not distinguishing the two types.

Many years ago, I put aside the article "Goodbye, San Fran-cisco," by Martin Koughan, Harper's, pp. 30-36 (mid-to-late 70s, but in my sloppiness I did not mark the date on the clipping) to await the next San Francisco earthquake. Koughan, who also wrote (writes?) for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, predicted 100,000 dead and 500,000 injured. Now that it has hap-pened, the real number, when compared to the 25,000 dead of the Armenian earthquake, is a triumph for capitalism and its building technology. Had it not been for the collapsed freeway, built in the 1950s and difficult to reinforce by retrofit, only a handful of people would have been killed; even so, the number is incredibly small. And Diablo Canyon (like the nuclear power plant at Yerevan) never missed a beat. The only energy facilities that threatened dis-aster were the large gasoline tanks that burst and spilled, but the gasoline was caught in reservoir ditches dug for that purpose. Luckily it was not ignited by electric sparks or other agents.

And here is another episode that didn't happen in Yerevan. Philippe Kahn, a French graduate student in the US, reputedly borrowed the money to sell his program Sidekick, now known to almost every PC user in the US. Then his company, Borland Inter-national, shocked, battered, and sometimes killed the competition by a number of programmers' programs at double the speed for half the money, bringing the price of software within reach of the small guy all over the US (myself, I swear by Borland's Turbo C). Its headquarters in Scotts Valley, now with annual sales of $72 mil-lion, were heavily damaged by the earthquake. But by the time telephone service was restored (within hours, in many places), Kahn's people were taking orders in the parking lot and came through without substantial shipping delays. It is a sick epoch that gives artificial publicity to Luddite impostors like Nader, Lovins or Ritkin, while a hero like Philippe Kahn remains pretty well un-known.

When you live under a totalitarian government, you automat-ically assume that it is always lying. Glasnost is now playing havoc with that false assumption, witness the antinuclear hysteria and the widespread belief in Lovinsian utopia as a cure for the decimated Soviet environment. Another weird side effect appeared last month when TASS announced (and did not retract for some time) the arrival of 8-ft tall creatures with small heads, straight from outer space, at a field near Voronezh.