Month: April 2018

At work, Jim Skorpik’s nickname is a handle better known for missiles: “Hellfire.”

As a longtime federal electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., he’s developed sensors to track missiles’ readiness for battle that measure heat or impacts that could damage them.

Lately, Skorpik has turned his know-how to schools.

He’s designed a system to identify a gunshot’s location and caliber. When it’s integrated with a security system it can alert authorities, train cameras on the area where shots were fired, lock doors, sound the building’s public address system and lock perimeter doors.

It started for him with the Sandy Hook shooting. Then a couple years later three of his grandchildren had a real-life lockdown of their own.

“The youngest one, she was like in kindergarten, and she came home pretty emotional,” Skorpik says. “She was in the gym and the teacher was covering the kids with gym mats.”

After that he applied for money to develop a sensor for schools to detect and locate gunfire within the building. EAGL Technology of Albuquerque has licensed the technology and it’s been installed and tested at Hermosa Elementary School in Artesia, N.M.

The gunshot detectors are each a little bigger than a pack of gum. Scott Simer, the facilities manager for the Artesia school district, points out one system — a detector and then its main frame, “the brains of it,” down the hallway.

Simer says the wireless, battery powered sensors can distinguish gunfire from other loud, percussive sounds: a textbook dropping, a ruler slapping a desk or even a firecracker.

“It’s sad that we’re in a society where we have to have stuff like this,” Simer says. “And that we are testing stuff like this in a school. But the reality is, it happens.”

Simer believes all this will work if they ever need it. During testing, they tried to fool it.

“We set off some M-80 firecrackers in the school,” he says. “It didn’t pick ’em up.”

When police shot real guns at the school during off hours the alarms went off and the doors locked like they were expected to.

Jennifer Russell is the co-owner of EAGL Technology, which sells the system for $60,000 to $150,000. (The pilot installation at Hermosa Elementary was free.)
“It’s automatic,” Russell says. “You don’t have to have a school resource officer or a principal or a superintendent or a teacher or any kind of administrator activate the system.”

She’s heard concerns that the automatic locking of doors could leave someone vulnerable in a hallway. The idea is to get as many people behind locked doors as fast as possible — like teachers and students practice in drills, and do in real lockdowns.

“The people in the building can worry more about getting the kids to safety and not having to call 911 when they are sitting under a desk trying to hide from the shooter,” Russell says.

It’s not the first, or only, gunfire locator system. Most are developed for outdoor use by police departments.

Tabatha Moreau, president of Hermosa Elementary’s Parent Teacher Organization, says she’s glad the school district has become an early adopter of this type of technology.

“As a parent, you want your school district to do everything they can to help protect our children,” she says.

She’s glad the sensors are small enough that the students likely aren’t aware of them.

“It’s not something that the kids see and notice and freak out,” Moreau says. “I think they need to know the risks, but I don’t want them fretting about it all the time.”

Artesia Public Schools plans to put in the detector systems in six more of its schools before classes start in the fall of 2018. Russell says EAGL has seen an increase in inquiries since the Parkland shooting in February.

A measure signed into law in Kentucky this past week would prevent federally-certified radiologists from judging X-rays in state black lung compensation claims, leaving diagnoses of the disease mostly to physicians who typically work for coal companies.

The new law requires that only pulmonologists — doctors who specialize in the lungs and respiratory system — assess diagnostic black lung X-rays when state black lung claims are filed.

Up until now, radiologists, who work in evaluating all types of X-rays and other diagnostic images, had been allowed to diagnose the disease as well.

Just six pulmonologists in Kentucky have the federal certification to read black lung X-rays and four of them routinely are hired by coal companies or their insurers, according to an NPR review of federal black lung cases.

The two remaining pulmonologists have generally assessed X-rays on behalf of coal miners but one is semi-retired and his federal certification expires June 1.

Among the radiologists excluded by the law is Dr. Brandon Crum, who helped expose the biggest clusters ever documented of complicated black lung, the advanced stage of the fatal disease that strikes coal miners.

“I do believe the coal industry is writing this bill to exclude certain doctors that they don’t like,” said Phillip Wheeler, an attorney in Pikeville, Ky., who represents coal miners seeking state black lung benefits.

Experts in reading X-rays

The changes are part of sweeping reforms to Kentucky workers’ compensation law, known as House Bill 2. Workers’ comp provides medical and wage replacement benefits for miners suffering from black lung.

Dr. Crum is the most visible of the excluded radiologists. His clinic in Coal Run Village, Ky., was the focus of a 2016 study by epidemiologists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). They verified 60 cases of complicated black lung that had been diagnosed in a period of about 20 months in 2015 and 2016.

NIOSH had previously reported 99 cases nationwide over a five-year period.

At the same time, NPR and Ohio Valley ReSource reported nearly 1,000 cases across central Appalachia, prompting NIOSH epidemiologists to declare it the worst epidemic of complicated black lung they’d ever seen. Our ongoing survey of black lung clinics and law offices has the current count of advanced black lung diagnoses at more than 2,200 since 2010.

“Throughout the United States, I know of nowhere where radiologists are taken completely out of the evaluation for potential black lung disease,” Dr. Crum said. “That’s what we’re primarily trained in.”

Physicians who read chest X-rays for work-related diseases like black lung are known as “B readers” and are certified by NIOSH for both federal and state compensation claims. B readers do not specifically have to be pulmonologists or radiologists, though they can be both.

Radiologists, on the other hand, focus entirely on reading multiple types of X-rays and other diagnostic images.

The law also bars out-of-state radiologists who are both NIOSH-certified B readers and medically-licensed in Kentucky. That includes Dr. Kathleen DePonte, a radiologist in Norton, Va., who has read more than 100,000 black lung X-rays in the past 30 years.

“It is curious to me that the legislators feel that the pulmonologist is more qualified to interpret a chest radiograph than a radiologist is,” Dr. DePonte said.

“This is primarily what radiologists do. It is radiologists who receive all the special training in reading X-rays and other imaging.”

Dr. Edward Petsonk, a pulmonologist at West Virginia University with decades of experience and research focused on black lung, points to a 1999 report of pass-fail statistics for physicians taking the NIOSH B reader examination. Two-thirds of the radiologists passed, while the success rate for pulmonologists was 54 percent.

Relying on the expertise of industry

Radiologists, pulmonologists and other physicians don’t necessarily read X-rays the same way. Those who work for coal companies tend to be conservative in assessing black lung because the coal companies or their insurers pay black lung benefits. Those reading X-rays on behalf of coal miners are often accused of being too liberal in their assessments.

Judges often decide which assessments count most.

This seemed to frustrate Rep. Adam Koenig, a Republican from Erlanger and the primary sponsor of the changes in the law.

During the House floor debate on the measure, Koenig said one B reader finds black lung 41 percent of the time while another’s rate is 91 percent.

“Obviously we do not have a standardized process so we are trying to standardize it,” Koenig said. “No one here is trying to deny anyone who does that work from getting their black lung claims.”

That’s precisely what the new law will do, argued Rep. Angie Hatton, a Democrat from Whitesburg.

“When we’re finding increased amounts of this illness it seems to me that this is when they need us the most,” Hatton said. “Why are we making it tougher for them to prove their illness?”

In an interview with NPR, Koenig said he “relied on the expertise of those who understand the issue — the industry, coal companies and attorneys.”

He’d heard “anecdotal stories,” he said, about lung cancer being misdiagnosed as black lung.

Early stages of lung cancer and black lung can leave similar masses on lungs, according to West Virginia University’s Dr. Petsonk.

But Dr. Petsonk also noted that coal miners exposed to silica dust “are at an increased risk of lung cancer. They do get lung cancer. Silica is a carcinogen.”

A miner reacts

Former coal miner William McCool believes he would have been denied state black lung benefits if the new law had been in place when he applied for compensation.

“It’d be pretty much impossible,” McCool said. “I’ve had lung doctors tell me I don’t have black lung.”

McCool said it took two years to win his state claim because the doctors working on behalf of a coal company were conservative in assessing his disease. But the 64-year-old from Letcher County ultimately prevailed and has been diagnosed with advanced disease.

The federal black lung compensation program continues to rely on all NIOSH-certified B readers, whether they are pulmonologists, radiologists or other physicians. But seeking federal benefits instead of state workers’ compensation is not necessarily an easy option.

Dueling assessments in the federal system mean that some miners have waited more than a decade for decisions on federal benefits. Some die before receiving them. State benefits have traditionally been quicker and more generous to miners.

That seems to be changing, said Evan Smith, an attorney at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Whitesburg.

Smith said the new state law “keeps Kentucky coal miners from using highly qualified and reliable experts to prove their state black lung claims [and] looks like just another step in the race to the bottom to gut worker protections.”

Koenig insisted that’s not the case.

“All we’re doing is making sure that qualified doctors are making these determinations,” Koenig said. “And if this process doesn’t work, I’ll be the first in line to figure out how to do it better.”

Updated at 10:15 p.m. ET

As predicted, China’s Tiangong-1 space lab fell from the sky on Sunday evening.

The city bus-sized craft, which almost entirely burned up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, broke into small pieces as it crashed over the South Pacific Ocean. The derelict spacecraft has been slowly falling out of its original orbit for several years.

It hurtled from orbit toward the South Pacific waters at about 8:16 p.m. ET, Space.com reports.

Scientists say the remaining debris that survived the fiery descent was likely small and relatively harmless, reports NPR’s Rebecca Hersher.

“The Chinese space agency had originally planned to bring the lab back in a more controlled way,” Rebecca says. “But after it stopped functioning in 2016, they decided to let it fall to earth on its own.”

As NPR’s Scott Neuman noted in our earlier reporting, the “space lab” was part of China’s planned research as it works toward a permanently staffed space station. (China does not participate in the operation of the International Space Station.) A second space lab, Tiangong-2, was launched in 2016.

“The 34-foot-long, 18,000 pound Tiangong-1, or ‘Heavenly Palace-1’ was launched in 2011 as China’s first attempt at an orbiting space lab,” Scott wrote. “It was occupied by two separate crews of three astronauts, or taikonauts, each – a mission in June 2012 included China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang. A year later, another crew included the country’s second woman in space, Wang Yaping.”

The demise of Tiangong-1 has been long anticipated.

In 2016, an amateur satellite tracker observed that the satellite appeared to be on track for an uncontrolled fall of orbit. That was months before the Chinese government acknowledged that the space lab would be re-entering the earth.

At the time, China had predicted a late 2017 re-entry, but later estimates pushed that date back into early 2018.

The “re-entry prediction window” from the European Space Agency, or ESA, had tightened significantly by Sunday morning, to a four-hour window centered on 1 a.m. UTC on Monday. In the continental U.S., that’s Sunday evening.

ESA previously projected the craft to fall between a vast swath of the planet, including the entirety of Africa, most of South America, the continental U.S. from Boston south, and much of China. “At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible,” the organization said.

“Space junk this size falls to Earth a few times a year,” NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reported, but “it’s usually something like a spent rocket stage — not a home-away-from-home for space travelers.”

That makes this re-entry an interesting one, she says. But it’s not particularly dangerous, Bill Ailor, of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, tells Nell:

“In 60 years of space exploration, only one person — an American woman named Lottie Williams — is known to have been struck by falling space junk, says Ailor, ‘and it was just like a piece of fabric material that kind of brushed her on the shoulder.’