Monday, March 9, 2015

The Town From "True Blood" Is Filled With Toxic Explosives the EPA Fears Will Blow Up ~Tim Murphy, Mother Jones 
~For the past few years, tiny Doyline, Louisiana, best known as the Southern Gothic setting of HBO's True Blood, has been perched next to a powder keg. Next month, the Environmental Protection Agency will decide whether to light a match. In 2012, an explosion at Camp Minden, a former military base just outside of town that had become a hub for munitions contractors, sent a 7,000-foot mushroom cloud into the Louisiana sky. The blast rattled homes as far away as Arkansas and forced Doyline residents to evacuate. "I thought I was in Afghanistan," one resident told the Associated Press. State police investigators, who raided Camp Minden soon after, discovered that Explo Systems Inc., a munitions recycling company that operated there, was storing 15 million pounds of toxic military explosives on-site—with some of it in in paper sacks, cardboard boxes, or even outside. After the raid, the company, at the direction of state officials, moved the munitions into old bunkers the Louisiana National Guard had made available on the base in order to reduce the risk of an explosion caused by a fire or a lightning strike. ~Read more.
New Orleans filmmaker cleared in cold-case murder; false positive highlights limitations of familial DNA searching ~Jim Mustian, N.O. Advocate