![]() The government first has to decide which threats are realistic and then decide what can be done to prepare. Just tending to this vast stash costs a bundle - the stockpile program's budget is more than half a billion dollars a year.Īnd figuring out what to buy and put in the stockpile is no easy task. In fact, everything here has to be inventoried once a year, and expiration dates have to be checked. Not only that-the ventilators get sent out for yearly maintenance. "If you look down to the side you'll see there's electrical outlets so they can be charged once a month," she says. Mabry explains that they're kept in a constant state of readiness. Just outside it, there are rows upon rows of ventilators that could keep sick or injured people breathing. It's a giant freezer packed with products that have to be kept cold. Shirley Mabry, the logistics chief for the stockpile, says that's for medicines like painkillers that could be addictive, "so that there's no pilferage of those items."Īs we walk, I hear a loud hum. I notice that one section of the warehouse is caged off and locked. The inventory includes millions of doses of vaccines against bioterrorism agents like smallpox, antivirals in case of a deadly flu pandemic, medicines used to treat radiation sickness and burns, chemical agent antidotes, wound care supplies, IV fluids and antibiotics. Since then, even though the details aren't public, it's clear that it has amassed an incredible array of countermeasures against possible security threats. The Strategic National Stockpile got its start back in 1999, with a budget of about $50 million. "But we would be foolish not to prepare for those events that we could predict might happen." So it's kind of a strange place," says Burel. "We have the capability, if something bad happens, that we can intervene in a positive way, but then we don't ever want to have to do that. I was told I was the first reporter ever to visit a stockpile storage site. I recently asked to go take a look at one of the warehouses, and was surprised when the answer was yes. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. What gets in the warehouse and where does it go after the warehouse, and how fast does it go to people, is where we have questions," says Dr. ![]() "The warehouse is fine in terms of the management of stuff in there. What he will reveal is how much the stockpile is worth: "We currently value the inventory at a little over $7 billion."īut some public health specialists worry about how all this would actually be deployed in an emergency. "If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can't fix," says Burel. ![]() (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what's in them is secret. If there is a weather god, we aren’t it, yet.The location of these warehouses is secret. Filming of the new Bond, Spectre, was disrupted earlier this month by strong winds in snowy Austria. Robock is right to raise concerns over who will control any climate-shaping technologies that are proven to work but the omens from James Bond are good. Climate scientists dismiss such theories and evidence such as the long list of patents for climate-altering tools tends to demonstrate the boundless scope of the human imagination rather than the more limited reach of operational technology. Some believe the weather is already being shaped by “chemtrails” – aeroplane contrails deliberately laced with toxic chemicals – and mysterious weather warmongers are, for reasons unknown, making the eastern US unbearably chilly and California stricken by drought. The argument that if we grasped how to control the climate then evildoers would already be doing it doesn’t hold water with conspiratorial thought, however. If HAARP really was so successful, it would probably not be closing this year. In recent years, the US military’s HAARP research programme has sown a blizzard of theories about how this secretive Alaskan facility has manipulated weather patterns with its investigation of the ionosphere. ![]() Like so many military experiments, these trials failed but cloud seeding became a reality in 1967/8 when the US’s Operation Popeye increased rainfall by an estimated 30% over parts of Vietnam in an attempt to reduce the movement of soldiers and resources into South Vietnam.
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