Last set of articles for a while, I hope!
Sep. 1st, 2010 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
With Neighbors Unaware, Toxic Spill at a BP Plant
TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.
For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.
Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.
Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company, seeking fines of about $600,000.
BP maintains three air monitors along the fence around the plant and two in the surrounding community, and they did not show a rise in pollution during April and May, the company said. “BP does not believe there is any basis to pay claims in connection with this event,” said Michael Marr, a spokesman for the company.
But scores of Texas City residents said they experienced respiratory problems this spring, and environmentalists said the release of toxic gases ranked as one of the largest in the state’s history.
Neil Carman of the Lone Star Sierra Club said the release was probably even larger than BP had acknowledged, because the company estimated that more than 98 percent of the pollution was burned off by a flare, an overly optimistic figure in the eyes of many environmental scientists.
He also said there were too few air monitors to accurately assess what had happened. “There are huge gaps in the monitoring network,” Mr. Carman said.
Dionne Ramirez, 29, who lives about a mile from the refinery, said she had little doubt that elevated pollution harmed her family. Not only have both she and her husband had coughs, but all three of their young sons have suffered from severe chest congestion, sore throats and endless coughing since April. Her 4-year-old had to be hospitalized for two nights because he could not stop coughing, she said.
When the news of the pollution was made public on June 4, Ms. Ramirez was irate. “I didn’t know why they were getting sick or what was going on,” she said. “They are healthy little kids.”
Her experience was echoed by other families living in the shadow of the jumbled smokestacks, pipelines, cylindrical tanks and giant globes of the refinery. Nearly every household on one block of First Avenue, just a half-mile from the BP complex, had someone fall ill during May, residents there said.
“We all became real sick — throwing up, diarrhea, couldn’t keep anything down — and we just thought it was something that was going around,” said Khristina Kelley, who lives with her husband and four children on the street. “But then everybody around here got it.”
Ms. Kelley said the release of chemicals was less troubling to her than the company’s silence. “I’m worried that one day I’ll take my kids to the doctor and something that could have been prevented wasn’t prevented because we didn’t know to the last moment,” she said.
Officials in Texas City said they were not informed of the scale of the release until it was over. BP said it met the requirements of state law by informing state officials of the release in writing on April 7, then filing a final report on June 4, after the equipment was fixed.
That final report said the release of chemicals had gone on for 959 hours, until May 16. Among other pollutants, the plant had released 17,000 pounds of benzene; 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which can cause respiratory problems; and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide. Another 262,000 pounds of various volatile organic compounds also escaped.
“The state’s investigation shows that BP’s failure to properly maintain its equipment caused the malfunction and could have been prevented,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Mr. Marr, the BP spokesman, declined to comment on those accusations.
The trouble started when a fire broke out on the seal of a hydrogen compressor, which traps noxious chemicals and returns them to be used as fuel in other parts of the plant. The compressor was part of the refinery’s “ultracracker unit,” which can process 65,000 barrels of oil per day and mostly produces high-octane blending components for gasoline. The company sent the gases to a flare at the end of a smokestack, 300 feet in the air, hoping to burn off the hazardous chemicals. But a monitor at the top of the stack showed that the emissions were far higher than permitted.
The attorney general’s office alleges in its complaint against BP that the fire started because workers had allowed iron sulfide to build up on the seal of the compressor.
Violations are nothing new at the plant, federal and state officials say. In 2005, an explosion at the refinery killed 15 people and injured more than 170, and BP was fined $87 million by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for safety lapses that led to that blast. This month, BP agreed to pay $50.6 million, a record.
On air pollution, the refinery has a similarly checkered history, a pattern of breaking limits on air pollution and being slow to report those events, state officials claim in legal complaints. In 2009, Mr. Abbott, the attorney general, sued BP for violating clean-air standards 72 times in the previous five years.
Still, the refinery is a major employer in Texas City, a town with about 45,000 residents, modest frame houses, fast-food restaurants and dollar stores on the coastal plains across a channel from Galveston. The refineries dwarf the clapboard abodes of workers here, thrusting up into tropical skies in utilitarian ugliness and painting the azure with smoke. Those smokestacks mean jobs, and many people are skeptical about those claiming they have gotten sick.
“This is just money-hungry money grubbers is all it is,” said Pete Fernandez, a longtime resident. He called the lawsuits “frivolous — completely, totally frivolous.”
Yet some longtime refinery workers are among those suing. Robert L. Sukiennik, 45, has worked at a refinery operated by Valero here for two decades. In early May, he started to cough and felt weak. He finally saw a doctor in mid-July, who became alarmed at his white blood cell count. A CT scan a week later revealed abnormal spots on his kidneys, and he was referred to an oncologist for more tests. Leukemia was a possibility, he was told.
It is impossible to know for certain if Mr. Sukiennik’s sudden decline in health is connected to the emissions from BP, but he says that the refinery has had so many troubles over the years, he is filled with suspicion that it might be the root of his problems.
“Every day they have some problem over there,” he said. “I don’t think BP itself really cares about the community. They are not trying for safety; all they care about is the big bucks.”
An article on our antiquated transportation
AMERICANS, take heed. Here is what it takes to bring one of the world’s great transportation networks to its knees: a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys, installed nearly a century ago.
The scenario played out last week at the Long Island Rail Road, steward of more than 100,000 daily commutes in and out of New York, after a pair of cables short-circuited and set fire to a single 1920s-era signaling machine that left the railroad unable to run trains through a crucial hub station. Delays and canceled trains plagued commuters for days, and as the workweek ended officials still could not say when full service would be restored. The ancient machine had been due for a multimillion-dollar upgrade, but it turned out the program was over budget and behind schedule.
Normally blasé New Yorkers seemed stunned at the vulnerability of their railroad, but in that, they should not have felt alone. The combination of antiquated hardware and delayed maintenance is far from uncommon in America’s infrastructure, a Colossus often held together by spit and glue.
Consider the nation’s dams, on average a half-century old. Despite their monumental size, the dams can be weakened by foraging gophers and squirrels, whose holes undermine the foundations. Or even by simple operator error. A major gate at Folsom Dam in California burst in 1995 after the wrong lubricant was used on its gears.
Tree stumps and rusting pipes can undermine levees in Sacramento. Water systems in Alaska and Washington State depend on wood pipes dating back to pioneer days. And locks on inland shipping routes can be weakened by simple flotsam like discarded tires.
The causes may be small, but the consequences can be grand: national commerce, essential utilities, and the homes of thousands can be threatened if these antiquated systems suddenly give out.
Here are just five examples:
Central California
Hundreds of levees protect against floods in California’s 450-mile-long Central Valley, and many date back to the Gold Rush era of 1850. “All it takes is one weak link in the basin to flood the area,” said Mike Inamine, principal engineer at the state’s Department of Water Resources. Levee failures in the region could threaten the drinking water supply for two-thirds of the state, but the consequences could quickly spread beyond California. The levees protect land where a quarter of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are produced for sale, according to federal statistics. Serious breaks occurred in 1986 and 1997.
A tiny ancient relic can cause havoc: tree stumps and pipes, buried decades ago in an earthen levee’s innards, can rot or rust, undermining the structure with no outward sign of trouble. “We had a flood site at a pumping station in 2006,” said Stein Buer, who directs the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. The cause? “We dug down about 70 feet and pulled out a rusty and wooden pipe.” Remote sensing techniques to spot such problems are being developed but have yet to be perfected.
And trespassing tree stumps aren’t the only threat. “There were near-failures in 2006 as a result of just ground squirrels, who had infested a bypass levee in San Joaquin Valley,” Mr. Inamine said. “Beavers and squirrels can do a lot of damage.”
Des Moines
Levees are not alone in their vulnerability to pests. In Iowa, engineers say the appetites of gophers and muskrats can endanger dams across the state. The dam at Fort Des Moines Park, for example, has a large hole created by rodents, along with overgrown vegetation blocking an emergency passageway. It is one of 31 dams in the state that authorities consider deficient. In July, a 92-year-old dam near Delhi, Iowa, failed, destroying a beloved lake. Another dam at Lake Ponderosa, surrounded by 730 homes, was also deemed unsafe.
Simple mechanical wear and tear can threaten enormous floods, according to Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources. The gates used by dams to regulate water flow are vulnerable to a Catch-22: dam operators are reluctant to raise the gates, which resemble king-size garage doors, fearing they will seize up, but failing to move them allows gears to rust and become inoperable.
Pittsburgh
The Monongahela River, a major inland shipping route, houses two of the nation’s oldest continually operated locks; each is a half-century past its intended lifespan. “It’s the largest, oldest and arguably most fatigued inland waterway system in the United States,” said Jeff Hawk, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Everyday detritus, like car rims, tires and logs floating in the river, can damage the underwater wooden seals used by the lock’s gate system, which allows vessels in and out. “Steel cables fall out of commercial tugboats and smash the wood seals,” said Charlie Weight, the lockmaster. The seals are original: wood has been shunned by lock manufacturers since the 1950s. Steel bolts at important locations also have a tendency to become loose.
The lock at Elizabeth, Pa., dates from 1907, and through it travels about 12 million tons of cargo a month. Maintenance costs $2 million annually; Mr. Hawk compared maintaining it to “working on an old junker in the yard.” A breakdown would snarl the region’s coal distribution, clogging highways with extra tractor-trailers and pushing up gas and electricity rates throughout the Pittsburgh region. Federal funds to replace the lock have not been forthcoming. “This thing was supposed to be blown out of the water several years ago,” Mr. Hawk said cheerfully.
New York City
In 2005, at a kitchen-size relay room in the Chambers Street station in Lower Manhattan, a fire destroyed hundreds of antique switches and circuits, nearly crippling two subway lines for months and disrupting the commutes of 580,000 New Yorkers. It could happen again tomorrow. The subway system has about 480 relay rooms, 25 of which still use technology that was in place when the subway opened in 1904. Only two companies in the world can repair the antiquated signals, which help locate trains in the tunnels. In 2005, it could have been worse: officials said the room that caught fire was one of the least critical in the system.
Anchorage
Surprise: This fossil lives. In Anchorage, home to an estimated 285,000 people, parts of the subterranean water system still use wooden pipes, carved of white cedar and wrapped in wire, a relic of pioneer days when hollowed-out logs were the water conveyance of choice. But Alaskans, apparently, need not worry about splinters in the throat. “What we’ve found, kind of unbelievably, is that the wooden water mains wrapped in that wire actually perform better than ductile iron,” said James Weise, who manages the state’s drinking water program. “They are less susceptible to fracture due to earthquake activity, and they are more flexible.” Although Mr. Weise said the Depression-era wooden mains never leak, they are gradually being replaced with ductile iron pipes. “They pull them up, and the wood looks incredibly fresh,” he said. It could be another century before we know if those new pipes are as durable.
On the politics of ma'am
It's not spelled out in the article, but most of these "examples" seem to be women who have a specific rank or title they want respected.
CLASSES are now underway at Pennsylvania State University, and Judith Kroll, a professor of psychology, linguistics and women’s studies, will soon be greeting her undergraduate students with the usual brief spiel. “I get up and say, you can call me Dr. Kroll, or professor, or Judith if you like, but do not call me Mrs.,” she said. “I am not Mrs. Kroll. I kept my name when I got married and my husband kept his name.”
There is one other honorific that Dr. Kroll dislikes and that she dearly wishes she could bar from the classroom: ma’am. Whenever a student says, “Yes ma’am” or “Is that going to be on the test, ma’am?” Dr. Kroll says she cringes and feels weird. Yet because ma’am, unlike Mrs., isn’t factually incorrect, Dr. Kroll resists the urge to scold. “My first take has got to be, this person is just trying to be polite,” she sighed.
Another day, another ma’am-ogram: you may not want it; it may make you feel flattened, desexualized, overripe and nearly through; but trust me, ma’am, we’re doing it all for you.
There are weightier problems in the world. Still, if you’re a woman born any time before the Clinton administration, chances are you’ve been called ma’am on more than one occasion — by solicitous waiters asking whether you were “Done working on that, ma’am?” and hovering store clerks wondering if they can “help you find anything, ma’am,” and traffic cops telling you to “Move your car, ma’am, this isn’t a parking lot,” and the perky, hardworking fellows at the farmers’ market who see you week after week but will always cram so many ma’ams into every transaction that you realize there’s no turning back, you’ve been ma’amed for life.
Ma’am is, of course, a contraction of madam, and its usage varies by region. Southerners and Midwesterners will ma’am with greater frequency than do the residents on the East and West Coasts, said Deborah Tannen, author of “You Just Don’t Understand” and a linguistics professor at Georgetown. “You’re more likely to hear ma’am when somebody is annoyed.”
In theory, ma’am is a courtesy term, meant to convey respect and graciousness lightly salted with deference. Yet much evidence suggests that when it comes to fomenting a sense of good will ma’am fails even more spectacularly than “Have a nice day.”
Certainly in popular culture, many female characters rebel against the ma’am tag. In the mordant, high-end medical soap, “Nurse Jackie,” when a policeman struggling to help subdue a disturbed patient made the mistake of referring to Edie Falco’s eponymous character as “ma’am,” Nurse Jackie shot back, “So help me God, do not call me ma’am — uncuff him!”
Helen Mirren, playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison on the crime series “Prime Suspect” told her male subordinate: “Listen, I like to be called governor or the boss. I don’t like ma’am. I’m not the bloody queen, so take your pick.” To which came the inevitable answer, “Yes, ma’am, anything you say.”
In the premier episode of “Star Trek: Voyager,” Kate Mulgrew as Capt. Kathryn Janeway informed a young male ensign that “ma’am is acceptable in a crunch, but I prefer captain,” and when, a few moments later, the ensign called her ma’am, the captain retorted, “It’s not crunch time yet — I’ll let you know when.”
If ma’am is meant as a verbal genuflection to power, the message is lost on many real-life powerful women, like Senator Barbara Boxer, who told a brigadier general to refer to her as “senator” rather than “ma’am” at a hearing last year. “I worked so hard to get that title,” she said, “so I’d appreciate it, yes, thank you.”
I put together a completely unscientific poll of my own, courtesy of the online service, SurveyMonkey, and asked some three-dozen professional women how they felt about the word “ma’am.” The group included lawyers, writers, scientists, policymakers, business executives and artists, who ranged in age from 20 to 65. Of the 27 women who responded, only 2 said they liked being called ma’am, applauding the word as “polite” and “because it amuses me”; 10 were neutral; and the remaining 15 disliked it to varying pH levels of causticity. As Jill Soloway, a Los Angeles-based writer who worked on the HBO series “Six Feet Under,” explained: “It makes me think I’m fat and old, like an elderly aunt.”
There are other reasons to dislike the term ma’am — for its whiff of class distinctions, for being dismissive, stiff and drab. “If someone calls me ma’am, it’s superficially a sign of respect, but it’s also creating distance,” Dr. Kroll said. “It’s saying, I’m not going to have a serious conversation with you; I’m not going to engage with you.”
Katha Pollitt, the columnist and poet, said, “It’s part of those routine word packages that are forever flying by.”
Behind the link between “ma’am” and “old” is the familiar feminist observation that, whereas a man remains “mister” and “sir” from nursery to nursing home, a woman’s honorifics change depending on her marital status and, barring that, her age. A young miss walks a few miles, and, wedding ring or no, wham, she’s a ma’am. For many women, then, the insertion of the word “ma’am” into an otherwise pleasant social exchange can feel like a tiny jab, an unnecessary station-break to comment on one’s appearance: Hello, middle-aged- to elderly-looking woman, how may I help you this evening? Thanks, prematurely balding man with the weak chin, I’ll take that table over there, in the corner.
Defenders of ma’am consider it a dignified term. Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column, is one of them. She pointed out that in England ma’am is used to address royalty of whatever age, and she attributed women’s ma’am-aphobia to the “prudishness” of modern society. “Everyone is in denial about age,” she said. “Why would you want to do away with showing respect for age? What do you gain by saying don’t treat me with respect just because I’m older? What sort of devil’s bargain is that?”
Maybe we just need a jazzier term. “How about madame?” suggested Ms. Pollitt, with that final E lending the second syllable a theatrical drawl. “Madame sounds glamorous and powerful, like you’re a serious and effective person in the world.” Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton biologist said she was perfectly happy to be called “Your Highness.”
Or how about nothing? Does nothing work for you? In my survey I posed a series of hypotheticals. For example: You’re at a restaurant with friends, and the waitress wants to warn you that your plate is hot. Would you prefer she say, “Careful, ma’am, that plate is very hot,” or, “Careful, miss,” or, “Careful, dear.” More than 80 percent of the respondents chose option number four: “Careful, that plate is very hot.” For one moment, a ma’am you’re not.
The Last Smokers in the City
“WHEN,” announced Luis Davila, glancing at the clock: 11 a.m.
“When,” repeated his colleague, Oana Marian, confirming the code.
The two grabbed their cigarettes, punched G in the elevator and zipped down 28 floors to one of the last remaining refuges for the New York City smoker: the sidewalk, in this case a concrete canyon separating the two wings of the old MetLife building across Madison Avenue from Madison Square Park.
Parliament, Marlboro, Winston, Benson & Hedges glow throughout the day in this canyon as smoker after smoker dashes down, lights up and vanishes again like a wisp of smoke. Between drags, they gab into their cellphones, soak in the solitude, pace to the curb and back, or chat briefly, most conversations lasting only as long as the ember at the tip of their cigarettes.
They know one another’s faces and throw a quick nod or wave this way and that, but the names and back stories go mostly untold. Ms. Marian, 51, first lighted up in her native country, Romania, where everyone smoked, inhaling her first stream of nicotine along with the mountain air at a summer camp outside of Bucharest. Mr. Davila, 36, who straddled New Jersey and Ecuador as a child, remembers buying two packs a day for his dad. Linda Greene’s father bribed her not to smoke; she pocketed the cash and lighted up anyway. Up the canyon, there is a Vietnam War veteran, a pack-a-day man who wakes up every morning determined to quit.
They are the holdout smokers. The ones who have survived the ever-scarier health warnings (and the social stigma that made the Vietnam veteran ask that he not be identified in this article); the ones who have persisted despite legislation banning butts from bars, restaurants and office buildings; the ones who keep paying those rising taxes, the latest of which, starting this summer, raised the typical price in New York City to $11 a pack. The ones who can’t, won’t or just don’t give it up.
The city’s health department, in a 2008 study, found that 959,000 adults in New York, or 15.8 percent of that population, smoked. A bit more than half of those are 25 to 44 years old (as are 46 percent of the city’s population); 53 percent of them are men (compared with 46 percent of the city); 41 percent are white (39.5 percent). People who live in the Bronx and on Staten Island are more likely to smoke than those in Queens and Manhattan. Unemployed people are much more likely; 23 percent of them smoke, and they account for 15.5 percent of the smokers, compared with 9.3 percent of the overall population. Nineteen percent of New Yorkers born in the United States smoke, compared with 11 percent of immigrants.
They all hope to quit, at some point, and they are even known to celebrate their dwindling numbers. When a woman on Mr. Davila’s team at HRG, a travel management company, quit two years ago — with the help of prescription medication — colleagues decorated her cubicle with congratulations. Mr. Davila, an operations supervisor at the company, said he would stop if he became a parent. For sure.
“Oh, yeah, I’m going to quit,” he said. “Eventually, when I’m ready, I’ll quit.”
There was a time, not so long ago, that no one lingered, cigarette in hand, between the MetLife buildings on East 24th Street. They smoked at their desks, or, later, in a smoking lounge. Then in 1995, City Hall started rolling out its restrictions and the herding began: big room to small room, inside to outside, public to private, acceptable to anathema.
Today, the stigma runs deeper than ever. “They look at you like you just clubbed a baby seal,” Mr. Davila said.
Once in a while, he and the others point out that their smoke rings are nothing compared with the fumes buses belch out onto city streets. They wonder aloud why the city does not address that hazard. Not that they don’t know: People need buses. People don’t need smokers.
So they stand in ever-shrinking clusters all over New York, their turf continually circumscribed, or so it seems. A few months ago, a new sign went up at the MetLife buildings: No smoking within 25 feet. The smokers, by now regulated into submission, mostly complied by moving from the front door to the side of the building. When it rains, they crowd under a tiny overhang near the loggia and hope the security guard won’t shoo them away like loiterers at a convenience store.
The latest $1.60 cigarette tax, which the state passed in June to help close a $9 billion budget gap, has inspired some of them to roll their own. Others are downgrading to cheaper, harsher brands, including some made in China — “One cigarette and you have throat cancer,” Mr. Davila complained. New Jersey residents make sure to stock up at home, and when Mr. Davila announced he was going on a business trip to North Carolina — Mecca for smokers — Ms. Marian was quick to ask for a carton.
“So, are you doing anything this weekend?” he said to Ms. Marian, his partner in exile. The clock was ticking. Back to work.
“NOBODY knew how bad it was,” said the Vietnam veteran, a man of 64 with a ruddy face and a slight paunch who prefers short answers to long questions.
Back in ninth grade, maybe 10th, at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, he tapped that first Chesterfield out of the pack and put it to his lips. It was the early 1960s, the era of “Mad Men,” when cigarettes oozed charm and the only place you really couldn’t light up was at church.
He grew up in Yorkville, in Manhattan, and, after school, took the bus to Spanish Harlem to help his father run the family candy store, where newspapers jostled for space on overstuffed racks. Cigarettes were 35 cents a pack, give or take. Unlike many other dads, his smoked only a couple a day; his mom, a homemaker, didn’t have a taste for tobacco at all.
But when their son picked up the habit, they didn’t blink. A teenager without a cigarette during the Kennedy era was like a young woman out on the town without a set of heels. Not easy to find.
He was a good student, a math whiz who studied chemical engineering at Manhattan College. In 1968 he joined the Air Force and, inevitably, shipped out to Vietnam, where he was a combat photographer for 15 months in the Central Highlands, an area that suffered some of the war’s heaviest fighting.
“Basically, they trained me on the aircraft cameras,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ Most of my pictures appeared in Stars and Stripes or were classified.”
Back in the United States, he scrounged around for a job like so many other returning servicemen, and landed at Irving Trust, where he met his wife; they married in 1971. He never left banking or lost his taste for cigarettes. (He would not allow the name of his current company to be published — that anti-smoking stigma again.)
His wife managed to quit six or seven years ago. “She was getting emphysema and stuff like that,” he said. So he smokes outside, on the deck of his Staten Island house, or at the front door. None of his friends smoke; his daughter does, but not his two sons.
These days, he zips down for a Marlboro Light twice in the morning, at lunch, and twice in the afternoon. Sure, he feels winded when he climbs stairs. But it’s not as if he was planning on running a marathon. “My doctor used to smoke in the office with me,” he noted. “Now he says, ‘You know I have to tell you to stop smoking.’ ”
He has tried quitting. Acupuncture worked for a couple of weeks. Cold turkey lasted a day. A prescription pill he took briefly was deemed harmful. The nicotine patch did nothing; he smoked while wearing it. The gum — “a waste of time.” Hypnosis: a disaster.
“Everybody who got hypnotized threw their cigarettes on the back table,” he said. “I walked out and grabbed my cigarettes, and all theirs, too.”
“I’VE never been a heavy smoker,” Mr. Davila explained after putting out his Parliament Ultralight. “I like it, but not that much. Plus, I know that it’s really bad for me.”
This is a common refrain among those who line the canyon. They classify themselves mostly as dabblers — a few cigarettes a day, no more than half a pack. They don’t feel enslaved to their addiction because they don’t feel the need to light up right after dinner, on the train, on a plane, in the house, in the car. They comfortably sidestep the word addict.
Like the Vietnam veteran, Mr. Davila started as a teenager, 20 years ago, while attending an American school in Ecuador, where his parents were born. He and his best friend, Chris, were out shopping at a mall. “Chris said, ‘I’m going to light up,’ and I said, ‘What’s that like?’ ” he recalled. It was menthol. “I thought, ‘If this is what a cigarette is like, I want one.’ ”
After that, Mr. Davila smoked a few when he went out with friends. He kept it hidden from his parents, who wouldn’t have approved. The habit followed him to Jersey City, where he went to St. Mary’s High School, back when cigarettes cost $4 a pack, and then to Saint Peter’s College.
Clubbing was his weakness. Hard not to smoke with a drink in his hand. He doesn’t drink much anymore. And now he has rules: he and Ms. Marian go down to the street once in the morning, once at lunch and once more in the afternoon. He seldom smokes on weekends, never in the Montclair, N.J., home he shares with his wife. “She hates it,” he said.
His father-in-law is a chef, a skill passed on to his wife, and, tempting as it is to light up after a sumptuous meal, he takes a pass nowadays. That’s progress. Before, he said, “after eating, if I didn’t have a cigarette in my hand, I would go berzerko.”
“And I don’t smoke in the car, no way,” he said. “I don’t want to smell like an ashtray.”
Though Mr. Davila long ago made peace with living on the wrong side of acceptable, the latest commandment, “no smoking within 25 feet of the building,” unnerved him.
“Where do you draw the line?” he said. “What’s next? That’s the whole thing. You feel like you’re a second-class citizen, worse than before.”
“I always thought it would have made me sick or made me cough,” Ms. Marian said as she recalled her first drag, at 16, at that summer camp in Romania. “But it was like I had always smoked.”
Her father was a journalist and her mother worked at the National Theater; both smoked. Her father’s position brought them privilege — a nice apartment in the center of Bucharest, the summer camp. Ms. Marian attended a government school that focused on physics.
She smoked off and on, mostly at a cafe over a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t until she moved to Haifa, Israel, with her mother, after her father died, that she bought her first pack. She was a student again, studying electromagnetic engineering at Technion, Haifa’s polytechnic university. Everyone smoked, so she smoked more.
She met her husband there. He was studying civil engineering. They began as friends in 1981 and romance seeped in. In 1986, they married. In time, she tossed engineering aside to help a friend with corporate accounts at a travel agency.
“I always liked to travel,” she said. “All these nice places. It spoke to me.”
Moving to the United States was a key goal. She settled into Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1990 with her husband and had a son, who graduated from Bronx High School of Science two years ago. He is 19 now, a sophomore at the State University at Stony Brook. She worked first as manager of an Israeli restaurant in Queens, then jumped to reservations at a travel agency, and now coordinates travel road shows for clients of HRG, a huge firm specializing in corporate travel.
She became a citizen in 2000 and, like many immigrants, is fiercely loyal and proud of her adopted country. “If anybody asks what I am, I say American,” she said.
But, like a parent with a gifted child who doesn’t live up to expectations, she has been occasionally disappointed. She expected a meritocracy, where hard work and intelligence rule the day, and found that whom you know and how you present yourself can best the best. The smoking rules, too, bring back a few memories of her childhood.
“Land of the free, I envisioned it that way,” she added. “I probably idealized it. Being born and raised in a Communist regime, I was looking for the exact opposite — capitalism, free market, individual freedoms.”
“I really try to be a courteous smoker,” Ms. Greene said. “If I’m smoking a cigarette on the street and run into a friend, I won’t have them stand downwind.” If someone is visiting her apartment who does not like cigarettes, she does not light one. “I use Febreze all the time,” she said, “on the rugs and on the furniture.”
At 62, Ms. Greene is an executive assistant for a large financial services organization whose identity she wants to keep to herself. She stands alone on the sidewalk, which is how she began her smoking life. She was 15 and stole a Pall Mall from her sister’s pack — no filter — then ran into a cornfield that was shouting distance from her home in Conyngham, Pa.
“I got sick,” she recalled. “Nauseous.”
She persevered: “Everyone was doing it, advertising it, glamorizing it.” Her father, who owned a heavy-equipment business, had quit before she was born and was determined to keep cigarettes away from his three daughters. He made a bargain: every month, he forked over $100 to each girl as long as she did not smoke. Taking a chapter from “King Lear,” the girls smoked anyway, just out of his line of vision.
“After dinner we would all get up, and he would say, ‘Where are you going, dollies?’ ” Ms. Greene recalled. “It went on a couple of years. He knew it didn’t work. He was just pleased we didn’t smoke in front of him.”
In New York, she landed a job at Alcoa and smoked at her desk, at the movies, on a plane, at the dentist’s office. “Even on a plane, I always asked someone next to me if it bothered them,” she said. “I did have one nun who said yes. I was furious.”
She doesn’t know why she smokes. She likes it. What more is there? Why she doesn’t quit is easier to pinpoint. “I don’t want to gain weight.” Once in a while, when her husband gets fed up with the haze in their one-bedroom apartment a quick walk from Madison Square Park, he’ll demand that she put out “that damn cigarette,” Ms. Greene said. “I just say no.”
She does limit it to about 10 per day, or her chest hurts. She knows she has the will power to quit: She lost 40 pounds three years ago and stopped a lifelong habit of cracking her knuckles before that. But it will be on her terms. “I have to decide I’m going to quit,” Ms. Greene said. “It can’t be someone else who decides.”
TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.
For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.
Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.
Neither the state nor the oil company informed neighbors or local officials about the pollutants until two weeks after the release ended, and angry residents of Texas City have signed up in droves to join a $10 billion class-action lawsuit against BP. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has also sued the company, seeking fines of about $600,000.
BP maintains three air monitors along the fence around the plant and two in the surrounding community, and they did not show a rise in pollution during April and May, the company said. “BP does not believe there is any basis to pay claims in connection with this event,” said Michael Marr, a spokesman for the company.
But scores of Texas City residents said they experienced respiratory problems this spring, and environmentalists said the release of toxic gases ranked as one of the largest in the state’s history.
Neil Carman of the Lone Star Sierra Club said the release was probably even larger than BP had acknowledged, because the company estimated that more than 98 percent of the pollution was burned off by a flare, an overly optimistic figure in the eyes of many environmental scientists.
He also said there were too few air monitors to accurately assess what had happened. “There are huge gaps in the monitoring network,” Mr. Carman said.
Dionne Ramirez, 29, who lives about a mile from the refinery, said she had little doubt that elevated pollution harmed her family. Not only have both she and her husband had coughs, but all three of their young sons have suffered from severe chest congestion, sore throats and endless coughing since April. Her 4-year-old had to be hospitalized for two nights because he could not stop coughing, she said.
When the news of the pollution was made public on June 4, Ms. Ramirez was irate. “I didn’t know why they were getting sick or what was going on,” she said. “They are healthy little kids.”
Her experience was echoed by other families living in the shadow of the jumbled smokestacks, pipelines, cylindrical tanks and giant globes of the refinery. Nearly every household on one block of First Avenue, just a half-mile from the BP complex, had someone fall ill during May, residents there said.
“We all became real sick — throwing up, diarrhea, couldn’t keep anything down — and we just thought it was something that was going around,” said Khristina Kelley, who lives with her husband and four children on the street. “But then everybody around here got it.”
Ms. Kelley said the release of chemicals was less troubling to her than the company’s silence. “I’m worried that one day I’ll take my kids to the doctor and something that could have been prevented wasn’t prevented because we didn’t know to the last moment,” she said.
Officials in Texas City said they were not informed of the scale of the release until it was over. BP said it met the requirements of state law by informing state officials of the release in writing on April 7, then filing a final report on June 4, after the equipment was fixed.
That final report said the release of chemicals had gone on for 959 hours, until May 16. Among other pollutants, the plant had released 17,000 pounds of benzene; 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which can cause respiratory problems; and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide. Another 262,000 pounds of various volatile organic compounds also escaped.
“The state’s investigation shows that BP’s failure to properly maintain its equipment caused the malfunction and could have been prevented,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Mr. Marr, the BP spokesman, declined to comment on those accusations.
The trouble started when a fire broke out on the seal of a hydrogen compressor, which traps noxious chemicals and returns them to be used as fuel in other parts of the plant. The compressor was part of the refinery’s “ultracracker unit,” which can process 65,000 barrels of oil per day and mostly produces high-octane blending components for gasoline. The company sent the gases to a flare at the end of a smokestack, 300 feet in the air, hoping to burn off the hazardous chemicals. But a monitor at the top of the stack showed that the emissions were far higher than permitted.
The attorney general’s office alleges in its complaint against BP that the fire started because workers had allowed iron sulfide to build up on the seal of the compressor.
Violations are nothing new at the plant, federal and state officials say. In 2005, an explosion at the refinery killed 15 people and injured more than 170, and BP was fined $87 million by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for safety lapses that led to that blast. This month, BP agreed to pay $50.6 million, a record.
On air pollution, the refinery has a similarly checkered history, a pattern of breaking limits on air pollution and being slow to report those events, state officials claim in legal complaints. In 2009, Mr. Abbott, the attorney general, sued BP for violating clean-air standards 72 times in the previous five years.
Still, the refinery is a major employer in Texas City, a town with about 45,000 residents, modest frame houses, fast-food restaurants and dollar stores on the coastal plains across a channel from Galveston. The refineries dwarf the clapboard abodes of workers here, thrusting up into tropical skies in utilitarian ugliness and painting the azure with smoke. Those smokestacks mean jobs, and many people are skeptical about those claiming they have gotten sick.
“This is just money-hungry money grubbers is all it is,” said Pete Fernandez, a longtime resident. He called the lawsuits “frivolous — completely, totally frivolous.”
Yet some longtime refinery workers are among those suing. Robert L. Sukiennik, 45, has worked at a refinery operated by Valero here for two decades. In early May, he started to cough and felt weak. He finally saw a doctor in mid-July, who became alarmed at his white blood cell count. A CT scan a week later revealed abnormal spots on his kidneys, and he was referred to an oncologist for more tests. Leukemia was a possibility, he was told.
It is impossible to know for certain if Mr. Sukiennik’s sudden decline in health is connected to the emissions from BP, but he says that the refinery has had so many troubles over the years, he is filled with suspicion that it might be the root of his problems.
“Every day they have some problem over there,” he said. “I don’t think BP itself really cares about the community. They are not trying for safety; all they care about is the big bucks.”
An article on our antiquated transportation
AMERICANS, take heed. Here is what it takes to bring one of the world’s great transportation networks to its knees: a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys, installed nearly a century ago.
The scenario played out last week at the Long Island Rail Road, steward of more than 100,000 daily commutes in and out of New York, after a pair of cables short-circuited and set fire to a single 1920s-era signaling machine that left the railroad unable to run trains through a crucial hub station. Delays and canceled trains plagued commuters for days, and as the workweek ended officials still could not say when full service would be restored. The ancient machine had been due for a multimillion-dollar upgrade, but it turned out the program was over budget and behind schedule.
Normally blasé New Yorkers seemed stunned at the vulnerability of their railroad, but in that, they should not have felt alone. The combination of antiquated hardware and delayed maintenance is far from uncommon in America’s infrastructure, a Colossus often held together by spit and glue.
Consider the nation’s dams, on average a half-century old. Despite their monumental size, the dams can be weakened by foraging gophers and squirrels, whose holes undermine the foundations. Or even by simple operator error. A major gate at Folsom Dam in California burst in 1995 after the wrong lubricant was used on its gears.
Tree stumps and rusting pipes can undermine levees in Sacramento. Water systems in Alaska and Washington State depend on wood pipes dating back to pioneer days. And locks on inland shipping routes can be weakened by simple flotsam like discarded tires.
The causes may be small, but the consequences can be grand: national commerce, essential utilities, and the homes of thousands can be threatened if these antiquated systems suddenly give out.
Here are just five examples:
Central California
Hundreds of levees protect against floods in California’s 450-mile-long Central Valley, and many date back to the Gold Rush era of 1850. “All it takes is one weak link in the basin to flood the area,” said Mike Inamine, principal engineer at the state’s Department of Water Resources. Levee failures in the region could threaten the drinking water supply for two-thirds of the state, but the consequences could quickly spread beyond California. The levees protect land where a quarter of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are produced for sale, according to federal statistics. Serious breaks occurred in 1986 and 1997.
A tiny ancient relic can cause havoc: tree stumps and pipes, buried decades ago in an earthen levee’s innards, can rot or rust, undermining the structure with no outward sign of trouble. “We had a flood site at a pumping station in 2006,” said Stein Buer, who directs the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. The cause? “We dug down about 70 feet and pulled out a rusty and wooden pipe.” Remote sensing techniques to spot such problems are being developed but have yet to be perfected.
And trespassing tree stumps aren’t the only threat. “There were near-failures in 2006 as a result of just ground squirrels, who had infested a bypass levee in San Joaquin Valley,” Mr. Inamine said. “Beavers and squirrels can do a lot of damage.”
Des Moines
Levees are not alone in their vulnerability to pests. In Iowa, engineers say the appetites of gophers and muskrats can endanger dams across the state. The dam at Fort Des Moines Park, for example, has a large hole created by rodents, along with overgrown vegetation blocking an emergency passageway. It is one of 31 dams in the state that authorities consider deficient. In July, a 92-year-old dam near Delhi, Iowa, failed, destroying a beloved lake. Another dam at Lake Ponderosa, surrounded by 730 homes, was also deemed unsafe.
Simple mechanical wear and tear can threaten enormous floods, according to Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources. The gates used by dams to regulate water flow are vulnerable to a Catch-22: dam operators are reluctant to raise the gates, which resemble king-size garage doors, fearing they will seize up, but failing to move them allows gears to rust and become inoperable.
Pittsburgh
The Monongahela River, a major inland shipping route, houses two of the nation’s oldest continually operated locks; each is a half-century past its intended lifespan. “It’s the largest, oldest and arguably most fatigued inland waterway system in the United States,” said Jeff Hawk, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Everyday detritus, like car rims, tires and logs floating in the river, can damage the underwater wooden seals used by the lock’s gate system, which allows vessels in and out. “Steel cables fall out of commercial tugboats and smash the wood seals,” said Charlie Weight, the lockmaster. The seals are original: wood has been shunned by lock manufacturers since the 1950s. Steel bolts at important locations also have a tendency to become loose.
The lock at Elizabeth, Pa., dates from 1907, and through it travels about 12 million tons of cargo a month. Maintenance costs $2 million annually; Mr. Hawk compared maintaining it to “working on an old junker in the yard.” A breakdown would snarl the region’s coal distribution, clogging highways with extra tractor-trailers and pushing up gas and electricity rates throughout the Pittsburgh region. Federal funds to replace the lock have not been forthcoming. “This thing was supposed to be blown out of the water several years ago,” Mr. Hawk said cheerfully.
New York City
In 2005, at a kitchen-size relay room in the Chambers Street station in Lower Manhattan, a fire destroyed hundreds of antique switches and circuits, nearly crippling two subway lines for months and disrupting the commutes of 580,000 New Yorkers. It could happen again tomorrow. The subway system has about 480 relay rooms, 25 of which still use technology that was in place when the subway opened in 1904. Only two companies in the world can repair the antiquated signals, which help locate trains in the tunnels. In 2005, it could have been worse: officials said the room that caught fire was one of the least critical in the system.
Anchorage
Surprise: This fossil lives. In Anchorage, home to an estimated 285,000 people, parts of the subterranean water system still use wooden pipes, carved of white cedar and wrapped in wire, a relic of pioneer days when hollowed-out logs were the water conveyance of choice. But Alaskans, apparently, need not worry about splinters in the throat. “What we’ve found, kind of unbelievably, is that the wooden water mains wrapped in that wire actually perform better than ductile iron,” said James Weise, who manages the state’s drinking water program. “They are less susceptible to fracture due to earthquake activity, and they are more flexible.” Although Mr. Weise said the Depression-era wooden mains never leak, they are gradually being replaced with ductile iron pipes. “They pull them up, and the wood looks incredibly fresh,” he said. It could be another century before we know if those new pipes are as durable.
On the politics of ma'am
It's not spelled out in the article, but most of these "examples" seem to be women who have a specific rank or title they want respected.
CLASSES are now underway at Pennsylvania State University, and Judith Kroll, a professor of psychology, linguistics and women’s studies, will soon be greeting her undergraduate students with the usual brief spiel. “I get up and say, you can call me Dr. Kroll, or professor, or Judith if you like, but do not call me Mrs.,” she said. “I am not Mrs. Kroll. I kept my name when I got married and my husband kept his name.”
There is one other honorific that Dr. Kroll dislikes and that she dearly wishes she could bar from the classroom: ma’am. Whenever a student says, “Yes ma’am” or “Is that going to be on the test, ma’am?” Dr. Kroll says she cringes and feels weird. Yet because ma’am, unlike Mrs., isn’t factually incorrect, Dr. Kroll resists the urge to scold. “My first take has got to be, this person is just trying to be polite,” she sighed.
Another day, another ma’am-ogram: you may not want it; it may make you feel flattened, desexualized, overripe and nearly through; but trust me, ma’am, we’re doing it all for you.
There are weightier problems in the world. Still, if you’re a woman born any time before the Clinton administration, chances are you’ve been called ma’am on more than one occasion — by solicitous waiters asking whether you were “Done working on that, ma’am?” and hovering store clerks wondering if they can “help you find anything, ma’am,” and traffic cops telling you to “Move your car, ma’am, this isn’t a parking lot,” and the perky, hardworking fellows at the farmers’ market who see you week after week but will always cram so many ma’ams into every transaction that you realize there’s no turning back, you’ve been ma’amed for life.
Ma’am is, of course, a contraction of madam, and its usage varies by region. Southerners and Midwesterners will ma’am with greater frequency than do the residents on the East and West Coasts, said Deborah Tannen, author of “You Just Don’t Understand” and a linguistics professor at Georgetown. “You’re more likely to hear ma’am when somebody is annoyed.”
In theory, ma’am is a courtesy term, meant to convey respect and graciousness lightly salted with deference. Yet much evidence suggests that when it comes to fomenting a sense of good will ma’am fails even more spectacularly than “Have a nice day.”
Certainly in popular culture, many female characters rebel against the ma’am tag. In the mordant, high-end medical soap, “Nurse Jackie,” when a policeman struggling to help subdue a disturbed patient made the mistake of referring to Edie Falco’s eponymous character as “ma’am,” Nurse Jackie shot back, “So help me God, do not call me ma’am — uncuff him!”
Helen Mirren, playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison on the crime series “Prime Suspect” told her male subordinate: “Listen, I like to be called governor or the boss. I don’t like ma’am. I’m not the bloody queen, so take your pick.” To which came the inevitable answer, “Yes, ma’am, anything you say.”
In the premier episode of “Star Trek: Voyager,” Kate Mulgrew as Capt. Kathryn Janeway informed a young male ensign that “ma’am is acceptable in a crunch, but I prefer captain,” and when, a few moments later, the ensign called her ma’am, the captain retorted, “It’s not crunch time yet — I’ll let you know when.”
If ma’am is meant as a verbal genuflection to power, the message is lost on many real-life powerful women, like Senator Barbara Boxer, who told a brigadier general to refer to her as “senator” rather than “ma’am” at a hearing last year. “I worked so hard to get that title,” she said, “so I’d appreciate it, yes, thank you.”
I put together a completely unscientific poll of my own, courtesy of the online service, SurveyMonkey, and asked some three-dozen professional women how they felt about the word “ma’am.” The group included lawyers, writers, scientists, policymakers, business executives and artists, who ranged in age from 20 to 65. Of the 27 women who responded, only 2 said they liked being called ma’am, applauding the word as “polite” and “because it amuses me”; 10 were neutral; and the remaining 15 disliked it to varying pH levels of causticity. As Jill Soloway, a Los Angeles-based writer who worked on the HBO series “Six Feet Under,” explained: “It makes me think I’m fat and old, like an elderly aunt.”
There are other reasons to dislike the term ma’am — for its whiff of class distinctions, for being dismissive, stiff and drab. “If someone calls me ma’am, it’s superficially a sign of respect, but it’s also creating distance,” Dr. Kroll said. “It’s saying, I’m not going to have a serious conversation with you; I’m not going to engage with you.”
Katha Pollitt, the columnist and poet, said, “It’s part of those routine word packages that are forever flying by.”
Behind the link between “ma’am” and “old” is the familiar feminist observation that, whereas a man remains “mister” and “sir” from nursery to nursing home, a woman’s honorifics change depending on her marital status and, barring that, her age. A young miss walks a few miles, and, wedding ring or no, wham, she’s a ma’am. For many women, then, the insertion of the word “ma’am” into an otherwise pleasant social exchange can feel like a tiny jab, an unnecessary station-break to comment on one’s appearance: Hello, middle-aged- to elderly-looking woman, how may I help you this evening? Thanks, prematurely balding man with the weak chin, I’ll take that table over there, in the corner.
Defenders of ma’am consider it a dignified term. Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated Miss Manners column, is one of them. She pointed out that in England ma’am is used to address royalty of whatever age, and she attributed women’s ma’am-aphobia to the “prudishness” of modern society. “Everyone is in denial about age,” she said. “Why would you want to do away with showing respect for age? What do you gain by saying don’t treat me with respect just because I’m older? What sort of devil’s bargain is that?”
Maybe we just need a jazzier term. “How about madame?” suggested Ms. Pollitt, with that final E lending the second syllable a theatrical drawl. “Madame sounds glamorous and powerful, like you’re a serious and effective person in the world.” Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton biologist said she was perfectly happy to be called “Your Highness.”
Or how about nothing? Does nothing work for you? In my survey I posed a series of hypotheticals. For example: You’re at a restaurant with friends, and the waitress wants to warn you that your plate is hot. Would you prefer she say, “Careful, ma’am, that plate is very hot,” or, “Careful, miss,” or, “Careful, dear.” More than 80 percent of the respondents chose option number four: “Careful, that plate is very hot.” For one moment, a ma’am you’re not.
The Last Smokers in the City
“WHEN,” announced Luis Davila, glancing at the clock: 11 a.m.
“When,” repeated his colleague, Oana Marian, confirming the code.
The two grabbed their cigarettes, punched G in the elevator and zipped down 28 floors to one of the last remaining refuges for the New York City smoker: the sidewalk, in this case a concrete canyon separating the two wings of the old MetLife building across Madison Avenue from Madison Square Park.
Parliament, Marlboro, Winston, Benson & Hedges glow throughout the day in this canyon as smoker after smoker dashes down, lights up and vanishes again like a wisp of smoke. Between drags, they gab into their cellphones, soak in the solitude, pace to the curb and back, or chat briefly, most conversations lasting only as long as the ember at the tip of their cigarettes.
They know one another’s faces and throw a quick nod or wave this way and that, but the names and back stories go mostly untold. Ms. Marian, 51, first lighted up in her native country, Romania, where everyone smoked, inhaling her first stream of nicotine along with the mountain air at a summer camp outside of Bucharest. Mr. Davila, 36, who straddled New Jersey and Ecuador as a child, remembers buying two packs a day for his dad. Linda Greene’s father bribed her not to smoke; she pocketed the cash and lighted up anyway. Up the canyon, there is a Vietnam War veteran, a pack-a-day man who wakes up every morning determined to quit.
They are the holdout smokers. The ones who have survived the ever-scarier health warnings (and the social stigma that made the Vietnam veteran ask that he not be identified in this article); the ones who have persisted despite legislation banning butts from bars, restaurants and office buildings; the ones who keep paying those rising taxes, the latest of which, starting this summer, raised the typical price in New York City to $11 a pack. The ones who can’t, won’t or just don’t give it up.
The city’s health department, in a 2008 study, found that 959,000 adults in New York, or 15.8 percent of that population, smoked. A bit more than half of those are 25 to 44 years old (as are 46 percent of the city’s population); 53 percent of them are men (compared with 46 percent of the city); 41 percent are white (39.5 percent). People who live in the Bronx and on Staten Island are more likely to smoke than those in Queens and Manhattan. Unemployed people are much more likely; 23 percent of them smoke, and they account for 15.5 percent of the smokers, compared with 9.3 percent of the overall population. Nineteen percent of New Yorkers born in the United States smoke, compared with 11 percent of immigrants.
They all hope to quit, at some point, and they are even known to celebrate their dwindling numbers. When a woman on Mr. Davila’s team at HRG, a travel management company, quit two years ago — with the help of prescription medication — colleagues decorated her cubicle with congratulations. Mr. Davila, an operations supervisor at the company, said he would stop if he became a parent. For sure.
“Oh, yeah, I’m going to quit,” he said. “Eventually, when I’m ready, I’ll quit.”
There was a time, not so long ago, that no one lingered, cigarette in hand, between the MetLife buildings on East 24th Street. They smoked at their desks, or, later, in a smoking lounge. Then in 1995, City Hall started rolling out its restrictions and the herding began: big room to small room, inside to outside, public to private, acceptable to anathema.
Today, the stigma runs deeper than ever. “They look at you like you just clubbed a baby seal,” Mr. Davila said.
Once in a while, he and the others point out that their smoke rings are nothing compared with the fumes buses belch out onto city streets. They wonder aloud why the city does not address that hazard. Not that they don’t know: People need buses. People don’t need smokers.
So they stand in ever-shrinking clusters all over New York, their turf continually circumscribed, or so it seems. A few months ago, a new sign went up at the MetLife buildings: No smoking within 25 feet. The smokers, by now regulated into submission, mostly complied by moving from the front door to the side of the building. When it rains, they crowd under a tiny overhang near the loggia and hope the security guard won’t shoo them away like loiterers at a convenience store.
The latest $1.60 cigarette tax, which the state passed in June to help close a $9 billion budget gap, has inspired some of them to roll their own. Others are downgrading to cheaper, harsher brands, including some made in China — “One cigarette and you have throat cancer,” Mr. Davila complained. New Jersey residents make sure to stock up at home, and when Mr. Davila announced he was going on a business trip to North Carolina — Mecca for smokers — Ms. Marian was quick to ask for a carton.
“So, are you doing anything this weekend?” he said to Ms. Marian, his partner in exile. The clock was ticking. Back to work.
“NOBODY knew how bad it was,” said the Vietnam veteran, a man of 64 with a ruddy face and a slight paunch who prefers short answers to long questions.
Back in ninth grade, maybe 10th, at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, he tapped that first Chesterfield out of the pack and put it to his lips. It was the early 1960s, the era of “Mad Men,” when cigarettes oozed charm and the only place you really couldn’t light up was at church.
He grew up in Yorkville, in Manhattan, and, after school, took the bus to Spanish Harlem to help his father run the family candy store, where newspapers jostled for space on overstuffed racks. Cigarettes were 35 cents a pack, give or take. Unlike many other dads, his smoked only a couple a day; his mom, a homemaker, didn’t have a taste for tobacco at all.
But when their son picked up the habit, they didn’t blink. A teenager without a cigarette during the Kennedy era was like a young woman out on the town without a set of heels. Not easy to find.
He was a good student, a math whiz who studied chemical engineering at Manhattan College. In 1968 he joined the Air Force and, inevitably, shipped out to Vietnam, where he was a combat photographer for 15 months in the Central Highlands, an area that suffered some of the war’s heaviest fighting.
“Basically, they trained me on the aircraft cameras,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ Most of my pictures appeared in Stars and Stripes or were classified.”
Back in the United States, he scrounged around for a job like so many other returning servicemen, and landed at Irving Trust, where he met his wife; they married in 1971. He never left banking or lost his taste for cigarettes. (He would not allow the name of his current company to be published — that anti-smoking stigma again.)
His wife managed to quit six or seven years ago. “She was getting emphysema and stuff like that,” he said. So he smokes outside, on the deck of his Staten Island house, or at the front door. None of his friends smoke; his daughter does, but not his two sons.
These days, he zips down for a Marlboro Light twice in the morning, at lunch, and twice in the afternoon. Sure, he feels winded when he climbs stairs. But it’s not as if he was planning on running a marathon. “My doctor used to smoke in the office with me,” he noted. “Now he says, ‘You know I have to tell you to stop smoking.’ ”
He has tried quitting. Acupuncture worked for a couple of weeks. Cold turkey lasted a day. A prescription pill he took briefly was deemed harmful. The nicotine patch did nothing; he smoked while wearing it. The gum — “a waste of time.” Hypnosis: a disaster.
“Everybody who got hypnotized threw their cigarettes on the back table,” he said. “I walked out and grabbed my cigarettes, and all theirs, too.”
“I’VE never been a heavy smoker,” Mr. Davila explained after putting out his Parliament Ultralight. “I like it, but not that much. Plus, I know that it’s really bad for me.”
This is a common refrain among those who line the canyon. They classify themselves mostly as dabblers — a few cigarettes a day, no more than half a pack. They don’t feel enslaved to their addiction because they don’t feel the need to light up right after dinner, on the train, on a plane, in the house, in the car. They comfortably sidestep the word addict.
Like the Vietnam veteran, Mr. Davila started as a teenager, 20 years ago, while attending an American school in Ecuador, where his parents were born. He and his best friend, Chris, were out shopping at a mall. “Chris said, ‘I’m going to light up,’ and I said, ‘What’s that like?’ ” he recalled. It was menthol. “I thought, ‘If this is what a cigarette is like, I want one.’ ”
After that, Mr. Davila smoked a few when he went out with friends. He kept it hidden from his parents, who wouldn’t have approved. The habit followed him to Jersey City, where he went to St. Mary’s High School, back when cigarettes cost $4 a pack, and then to Saint Peter’s College.
Clubbing was his weakness. Hard not to smoke with a drink in his hand. He doesn’t drink much anymore. And now he has rules: he and Ms. Marian go down to the street once in the morning, once at lunch and once more in the afternoon. He seldom smokes on weekends, never in the Montclair, N.J., home he shares with his wife. “She hates it,” he said.
His father-in-law is a chef, a skill passed on to his wife, and, tempting as it is to light up after a sumptuous meal, he takes a pass nowadays. That’s progress. Before, he said, “after eating, if I didn’t have a cigarette in my hand, I would go berzerko.”
“And I don’t smoke in the car, no way,” he said. “I don’t want to smell like an ashtray.”
Though Mr. Davila long ago made peace with living on the wrong side of acceptable, the latest commandment, “no smoking within 25 feet of the building,” unnerved him.
“Where do you draw the line?” he said. “What’s next? That’s the whole thing. You feel like you’re a second-class citizen, worse than before.”
“I always thought it would have made me sick or made me cough,” Ms. Marian said as she recalled her first drag, at 16, at that summer camp in Romania. “But it was like I had always smoked.”
Her father was a journalist and her mother worked at the National Theater; both smoked. Her father’s position brought them privilege — a nice apartment in the center of Bucharest, the summer camp. Ms. Marian attended a government school that focused on physics.
She smoked off and on, mostly at a cafe over a cup of coffee. But it wasn’t until she moved to Haifa, Israel, with her mother, after her father died, that she bought her first pack. She was a student again, studying electromagnetic engineering at Technion, Haifa’s polytechnic university. Everyone smoked, so she smoked more.
She met her husband there. He was studying civil engineering. They began as friends in 1981 and romance seeped in. In 1986, they married. In time, she tossed engineering aside to help a friend with corporate accounts at a travel agency.
“I always liked to travel,” she said. “All these nice places. It spoke to me.”
Moving to the United States was a key goal. She settled into Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1990 with her husband and had a son, who graduated from Bronx High School of Science two years ago. He is 19 now, a sophomore at the State University at Stony Brook. She worked first as manager of an Israeli restaurant in Queens, then jumped to reservations at a travel agency, and now coordinates travel road shows for clients of HRG, a huge firm specializing in corporate travel.
She became a citizen in 2000 and, like many immigrants, is fiercely loyal and proud of her adopted country. “If anybody asks what I am, I say American,” she said.
But, like a parent with a gifted child who doesn’t live up to expectations, she has been occasionally disappointed. She expected a meritocracy, where hard work and intelligence rule the day, and found that whom you know and how you present yourself can best the best. The smoking rules, too, bring back a few memories of her childhood.
“Land of the free, I envisioned it that way,” she added. “I probably idealized it. Being born and raised in a Communist regime, I was looking for the exact opposite — capitalism, free market, individual freedoms.”
“I really try to be a courteous smoker,” Ms. Greene said. “If I’m smoking a cigarette on the street and run into a friend, I won’t have them stand downwind.” If someone is visiting her apartment who does not like cigarettes, she does not light one. “I use Febreze all the time,” she said, “on the rugs and on the furniture.”
At 62, Ms. Greene is an executive assistant for a large financial services organization whose identity she wants to keep to herself. She stands alone on the sidewalk, which is how she began her smoking life. She was 15 and stole a Pall Mall from her sister’s pack — no filter — then ran into a cornfield that was shouting distance from her home in Conyngham, Pa.
“I got sick,” she recalled. “Nauseous.”
She persevered: “Everyone was doing it, advertising it, glamorizing it.” Her father, who owned a heavy-equipment business, had quit before she was born and was determined to keep cigarettes away from his three daughters. He made a bargain: every month, he forked over $100 to each girl as long as she did not smoke. Taking a chapter from “King Lear,” the girls smoked anyway, just out of his line of vision.
“After dinner we would all get up, and he would say, ‘Where are you going, dollies?’ ” Ms. Greene recalled. “It went on a couple of years. He knew it didn’t work. He was just pleased we didn’t smoke in front of him.”
In New York, she landed a job at Alcoa and smoked at her desk, at the movies, on a plane, at the dentist’s office. “Even on a plane, I always asked someone next to me if it bothered them,” she said. “I did have one nun who said yes. I was furious.”
She doesn’t know why she smokes. She likes it. What more is there? Why she doesn’t quit is easier to pinpoint. “I don’t want to gain weight.” Once in a while, when her husband gets fed up with the haze in their one-bedroom apartment a quick walk from Madison Square Park, he’ll demand that she put out “that damn cigarette,” Ms. Greene said. “I just say no.”
She does limit it to about 10 per day, or her chest hurts. She knows she has the will power to quit: She lost 40 pounds three years ago and stopped a lifelong habit of cracking her knuckles before that. But it will be on her terms. “I have to decide I’m going to quit,” Ms. Greene said. “It can’t be someone else who decides.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 05:58 pm (UTC)I can see how if you've earned a different honorific that you'd want that one used instead, but I have no other honorific I can fairly claim other than Reverend, and usually my reverend status isn't applicable to the situation. Nor would someone who doesn't know me well know that it applies. So, "ma'am" seems like the best option of the ones someone is likely to use. "Madame" has problems in that a madame is also someone who runs a house of ill repute, which I am not. So, basically you can call me "ma'am" or you can call me "sir". I don't mind either of those. But I don't like the idea of males being addressed as "sir" and females getting no honorific at all.
Oh, and absolutely nobody on the planet has the right to call me "young lady". There was a time when my parents had that right. Now they do not and nobody else should be doing that. "Young lady" is a term of address for disciplining a female child, and I am no longer subject to child rearing forms of discipline. That's up there with the levels of disrespect reserved for abominations like "sweetie" coming from someone I'm not on familiar terms with.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 11:38 pm (UTC)(I would swear I've seen "madame" in print as the lady-who-runs-the-brothel, but I can't remember if it was a misusage or not.)
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 11:55 pm (UTC)But it's like asking how two, to, and too are said differently. They're not, but if you spell it wrong people call you stupid.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-02 07:51 am (UTC)So, same stress as you, but I have an English TRAP vowel in the second syllable of "madame", not a (pseudo-)French vowel like PALM.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-02 04:18 am (UTC)(I also feel this way when I leave the refrigerator door open and turn my back to it to pour a glass of milk.)
The exception is those times when I've waited tables, in which case it's "honey," "sweetie," "sugar," whatever'll get me the most tips, in the thickest drawl I can bring myself to pour out. Seems to work.
And, of course, significantly older women that I do know well, like my roommate's mother, are "Miss So-and-so."