Bridgewater official under investigation for alleged financial misconduct

BRIDGEWATER -- The chairman of the town's Board of Finance has resigned from the board in the wake of reports he has been fired from his place of employment and is under investigation for alleged possible misdeeds.

Gregory Buchholz was terminated two weeks ago from his investment adviser position with Raymond James Financial Services Inc. in Southbury, a company spokesman, Anthea Penrose, said Tuesday.

According to the spokesman, Buchholz was fired after the company learned he was under investigation for alleged misappropriation of investors' funds.

Penrose said the financial firm was contacted by authorities about the investigation, and it terminated Buchholz's employment.

The company closed its Southbury branch office, where Buchholz had worked.

Penrose would not say how much money may have been misappropriated.

A publicly traded company, Raymond James Financial Services is regulated by the Federal Commerce Commission. The investigation is being conducted on a local and federal level, Penrose said.

"Raymond James confirms a former ... financial services adviser, Gregory Buchholz, is being investigated for allegedly misappropriating client funds. The firm ... is cooperating fully with authorities in the investigation of this matter," a prepared statement by the company reads.

Calls to Buchholz's home Tuesday were not returned.

Bridgewater First Selectman Bill Stuart said he was stunned by the allegations.

"I just can't believe it," Stuart said. "When this happens with someone who has been on one of your boards for a long time and who's done a good job, it's hard to believe."

Stuart said Buchholz came to Town Hall on Tuesday morning and told him he would be resigning from the finance board and also from theBridgewater Board of Trustees, of which Buchholz was vice chairman.

Buchholz served on the finance board since 2001 and was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2007.

"The last thing people ought to be doing is speculating on matters yet to be proven," said Ned Bandler, chairman of the Board of Trustees.

"I've worked closely with George," Bandler said. "He has been a valued colleague, a strong contributor in the work of managing the town's trust funds."

Bandler said Buchholz did not manage any money for the board.

The present allegations of mismanagement of funds are not the first to be made against Buchholz.

In February 1999, the state Department of Banking's Securities and Business Investments Division issued a consent order, restricting Buchholz's work as a financial agent.

It required Raymond James Financial Services to give prior approval to any trades Buchholz made with clients' mutual funds, according to a department securities bulletin.

The consent order was based on allegations that while he was associated with Edward D. Jones & Co., Buchholz "engaged in unsuitable investment strategies with respect to certain mutual fund transactions," the bulletin says.

Contact Susan Tuz

at stuz@newstimes.com

or 860-355-7322.

Read more...

San Bruno Fire Pictures: "Hell on Earth" in California

Photograph by Jeff Chiu, AP

A firefighting plane dumps retardant onto the San Bruno fire, which engulfed several northern California blocks on September 9.

Though the gas flow was stopped and the fire mostly contained by late Thursday, extinguishing street gas-line fires is notoriously tough, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Until the source of the gas is found, the pressure of the fuel and volatility of the escaping gas creates flames too forceful for firefighters to tackle.

(Read a National Geographic article on increasing fires in the U.S. West.)

Published September 10, 2010

Read more...

Giant Underwater Plume Confirmed—Gulf Oil Not Degrading

Christine Dell'Amore

National Geographic News

Published August 19, 2010

A giant plume from BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been confirmed deep in the ocean—and there are signs that it may stick around, a new study says.

Many scientists had predicted that oil-eating bacteria—already common in the Gulf due to natural oil seeps—would process much of the crude leaked fromBP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead, which was capped July 15. (Read more about how nature is fighting the oil spill.)

But new evidence shows that a 22-mile-long (35-kilometer-long), 650-foot-high (200-meter-high) pocket of oil has persisted for months at depths of 3,600 feet (1,100 meters), according to a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

(Related: "Much Gulf Oil Remains, Deeply Hidden and Under Beaches.")

The oil plume's stability is "a little unexpected," study leader Richard Camilli, of WHOI's Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department, said at a Thursday press briefing in Washington, D.C.

"We don't have any clear indication as to why it set up at that depth."

It's unclear why the Gulf's microbes aren't eating the oil plume, but the organisms are infamous for being unpredictable, said study co-authorChristopher Reddy, a marine chemist at WHOI.

Counting on microbes to quickly clean up an oil spill is "like asking a teenager to do a chore. You tell them to do it on a Friday, to do it when it's most advantageous, and they do it on a Saturday," Reddy told National Geographic News earlier this month.

Further studies are needed to figure out why the plume isn't degrading, Reddy said during the press briefing: "We don't live in the world of the TV show CSI. ... Patience is a virtue."

Hard Evidence for Gulf Oil Plume

During a ten-day research cruise in June, the WHOI team used autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), free-swimming probes that are the "next generation" of remotely operated vehicles, Camilli said during the briefing.

The team's AUVs were equipped with mass spectrometers—devices that measure the masses of molecules. The spectrometers collected thousands of samples in various regions near the spill site.

Most of these samples detected hydrocarbons—ingredients of oil—at concentrations of 50 micrograms a liter.

Using this data, the scientists were able to piece together the shapes and sizes of two oil plumes: the large, deep plume and a more diffuse plume spread out between depths of 160 and 1,600 feet (50 and 500 meters).

University of South Florida (USF) chemical oceanographer David Hollander said the discovery of stubborn oil in the deep sea "falls right into line" with his recent findings.

"These hydrocarbons are plentiful, and will be around for a long time," Hollander said by email.

Hollander and a USF team announced this week that oil may have been found deep on the Gulf seafloor, and that it appears to be toxic to phytoplankton, small plants that live in the deep ocean and make up the base of the marine food chain.

It's too early to say whether the plume is harmful to marine life in the area studied by WHOI, expedition member Reddy said.

But the research does show that the oil plume hasn't yet spurred oxygen depletion in the Gulf, which can create a dead zone—a swath of ocean largely devoid of life-forms—according to Ruoying He, a physical oceanographer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was not involved in the new research.

(Related: "Gulf Oil Spill a 'Dead Zone in the Making'?")

He added that the new study—published today in the journal Science—is "extremely important," in part because it offers hard evidence of the suspected oil plume in the Gulf.

"I'm happy to see some in situ observations published so quickly," he said.

How Far Will Gulf Oil Plume Go?

The study raises another fundamental question that North Carolina's He is currently modeling: How far will the Gulf oil spill travel?

The plume has already fanned out a considerable distance from the BP wellhead, He noted. At the time of the survey, the plume was migrating about 4 miles (6.5 kilometers) a day southwest from the spill site, according to the study.

And with oil-eating bacteria taking their time, it's possible that the oil could be transported even farther from the well before the crude gets degraded, WHOI's Camilli said.

(See "Gulf Oil Spill Could Reach East Coast Beaches.")

It's also possible the oil plume is already gone: "We don't know what the fate of this plume now is—this was a forensic snapshot in late June, and we have not been back there since," Camilli cautioned.

Deep-Ocean Focus Needed for Oil Cleanups

Since the toxic effects of oil and chemical dispersants are not fully known, "there is great room for debate and contrasting interpretation as to what the impacts will be," Robert Carney, a biological oceanographer at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, said by email.

(Learn more about how dispersants may be harming wildlife.)

At this point, though, a "far more valuable undertaking" would be to start figuring out how to prevent doing further harm to the deep ocean, he said.

"Through this all we have witnessed an aged and untested bit of dogma dominate response decisions: Protect the beach," Carney said. (See: "Oil Found in Gulf Beach Sand, Even After Cleanups.")

"Quite obviously, it is the whole ocean that we must protect and effectively manage," he said. "We are badly in need of new ideas."

Read more...

"Firecane" Myth Busted—No Danger on Katrina Anniversary

                                                               Brian Handwerk

                                                              for National Geographic News

                                              Published August 25, 2010

With the Gulf oil spill largely gone, at least at the surface, you can rest easy that the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's Gulf Coast landfall won't be marked with a "firecane" or "black rain"—and it never would have been.

Flaming hurricanes and flammable rain are scientifically impossible, according to myth-busting scientists.

Ignited online, the firecane rumor has been covered by publications includingNew York magazine (read "Firecane!") and debated on Web forums such asMyth-Weavers, where one participant summed up how firecanes might be born:

Hurricane
Hurricane sucks up oil
Lightning ignites oil
FIRECANE!

But—surprise—the scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny, according to Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground website.

In an oil spill, Masters explained, it's the vapors from volatile compounds that burn, not the liquid oil itself. And most of those flammable volatiles evaporate and disperse soon after oil enters the water.

Even at the oil slick's worst this summer, the oil at the surface of the Gulf of Mexico (map) was largely a type of thick crude loaded with "heavy compounds" called asphaltenes, which don't burn easily under any conditions, Masters said.

(Satellite Pictures: Gulf Spill's Evolution.)

This summer, for example, BP had a hard time starting even the intentional burns meant to deplete the slick, according to environmental chemist Barry Dellinger. In a marine oil spill, he added, there's simply too much water mixed with the crude to allow for a sustained blaze.

"They actually use napalm to start the burns, or they can't get enough heat," said Dellinger, of Louisiana State University.

(See "Oil Slick May Be Burned to Help Stop U.S. Rig Spill" [April 27].)

Unlike napalm, the slow-burning fuel made infamous in the Vietnam War, "lightning would be a quick strike," he said.

"I wouldn't think that you could have enough sustained heat from that to continue to have oil vaporize and burn."

Even if lightning could somehow ignite a hypothetical oily storm, the fire would quickly be quenched, according to Weather Underground's Masters.

"Hurricane winds and rain chop up the water so much," Masters said. "It would be very hard to sustain a fire in those kinds of conditions."

And that's assuming the oil could make it into hurricane winds and clouds in the first place.

Black Rain?

If oil from an ocean spill were to impregnate storm clouds, you might theoretically end up with oily rain turning Gulf cities into tinderboxes. Just this June unsubstantiated videos purported to show "black rain" (for example,"Raining Oil in Louisiana?" on the Huffington Post).

But because seawater must evaporate to reach clouds and possibly turn to rain—and because the floating crude in an oil spill is as hard to evaporate as it is to burn—black rain is pure science fiction.

If a hurricane strikes an oil slick, "the amount of oil that's going to be able to evaporate is very, very tiny," said Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

"So any concentration of oil in the rain would be puny and the rain not much different at all from that found in a regular hurricane."

In addition, the seawater that makes it into clouds—even when an oil slick is present—is naturally clean, Weather Underground's Masters said.

The very process of evaporation filters out impurities, which is why it's used to make distilled water, he noted. "So that's not a good way to get oil into rain."

Oil on Land, Minus the Pyrotechnics

There are ways for an ocean oil slick to end up on land—for example via storm surges, tornado-like waterspouts, and strong winds. (See pictures of oil and tarballs on Gulf beaches in May.)

None of those methods, though, promise fire in the sky or combustible rain.

"The idea of a firecane, or oil raining down from the sky," NOAA's Landsea said, "those are really just impossible scenarios."

Read more...

Not a "firecane": A storm rages as debris from Hurricane Andrew burns in Homestead, Florida, in 1992.

Photograph by Raymond Gehman, National Geographic

With the Gulf oil spill largely gone, at least at the surface, you can rest easy that the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's Gulf Coast landfall won't be marked with a "firecane" or "black rain"—and it never would have been.

Flaming hurricanes and flammable rain are scientifically impossible, according to myth-busting scientists.

Ignited online, the firecane rumor has been covered by publications includingNew York magazine (read "Firecane!") and debated on Web forums such asMyth-Weavers, where one participant summed up how firecanes might be born:

Hurricane
Hurricane sucks up oil
Lightning ignites oil
FIRECANE!

But—surprise—the scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny, according to Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground website.

In an oil spill, Masters explained, it's the vapors from volatile compounds that burn, not the liquid oil itself. And most of those flammable volatiles evaporate and disperse soon after oil enters the water.

Even at the oil slick's worst this summer, the oil at the surface of the Gulf of Mexico (map) was largely a type of thick crude loaded with "heavy compounds" called asphaltenes, which don't burn easily under any conditions, Masters said.

(Satellite Pictures: Gulf Spill's Evolution.)

This summer, for example, BP had a hard time starting even the intentional burns meant to deplete the slick, according to environmental chemist Barry Dellinger. In a marine oil spill, he added, there's simply too much water mixed with the crude to allow for a sustained blaze.

"They actually use napalm to start the burns, or they can't get enough heat," said Dellinger, of Louisiana State University.

(See "Oil Slick May Be Burned to Help Stop U.S. Rig Spill" [April 27].)

Unlike napalm, the slow-burning fuel made infamous in the Vietnam War, "lightning would be a quick strike," he said.

"I wouldn't think that you could have enough sustained heat from that to continue to have oil vaporize and burn."

Even if lightning could somehow ignite a hypothetical oily storm, the fire would quickly be quenched, according to Weather Underground's Masters.

"Hurricane winds and rain chop up the water so much," Masters said. "It would be very hard to sustain a fire in those kinds of conditions."

And that's assuming the oil could make it into hurricane winds and clouds in the first place.

Black Rain?

If oil from an ocean spill were to impregnate storm clouds, you might theoretically end up with oily rain turning Gulf cities into tinderboxes. Just this June unsubstantiated videos purported to show "black rain" (for example,"Raining Oil in Louisiana?" on the Huffington Post).

But because seawater must evaporate to reach clouds and possibly turn to rain—and because the floating crude in an oil spill is as hard to evaporate as it is to burn—black rain is pure science fiction.

If a hurricane strikes an oil slick, "the amount of oil that's going to be able to evaporate is very, very tiny," said Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

"So any concentration of oil in the rain would be puny and the rain not much different at all from that found in a regular hurricane."

In addition, the seawater that makes it into clouds—even when an oil slick is present—is naturally clean, Weather Underground's Masters said.

The very process of evaporation filters out impurities, which is why it's used to make distilled water, he noted. "So that's not a good way to get oil into rain."

Oil on Land, Minus the Pyrotechnics

There are ways for an ocean oil slick to end up on land—for example via storm surges, tornado-like waterspouts, and strong winds. (See pictures of oil and tarballs on Gulf beaches in May.)

None of those methods, though, promise fire in the sky or combustible rain.

"The idea of a firecane, or oil raining down from the sky," NOAA's Landsea said, "those are really just impossible scenarios."

Read more...

Walking Into the Stone Ag

On the third day of an international conference in France of experts on prehistoric rock art, National Geographic Digital Media senior producer Andrew Howley makes his first visit into caves adorned with images painted 13,000 years ago.

By Andrew Howley

Tarascon-sur-Ariège, France--Today the laptops were shut and the projectors powered down, as the participants in the IFRAO conference on prehistoric rock art around the world piled into buses with people who shared their language for tours of some of the region's most beautiful and important decorated caves. I was with Group 4: English-speaking and headed for Bédeilhac and Niaux.

The grand entrance to Bédeilhac, one-time warplane repair shop.

Photo by Andrew Howley

Bédeilhac was first, an enormous cavern used during World War II as a plane repair shop, and in the 1970s for a film where a small plane was actually flown into and out of the grand entryway. Walking 300 meters inside, you begin to reach the untouched prehistoric area, and are treated to a stately black bison silhouette, hard-to-reach engravings, and a replica of the even-harder-to-reach molded clay bison, one of only a few such sculpted images from the region.

It doesn't take too long before modern usage of the cave seems a thing of the past, and you're gazing directly into the the Paleolithic era.

Photo by Andrew Howley

After a quick lunch of leftovers and a box of the local vintage, we headed up to Niaux, the grandest of the decorated caves in Ariège.

While some caves have been found in modern times, like Lascaux (discovered 70 years ago this coming Sunday), and many are still waiting to be found, Niaux, with its relatively easy entry way and wide caverns, has been known throughout history. This fact is illustrated, quite literally, by rock art of another kind.

Names of visitors and dates of visits cover several sections of the caverns (though they've been removed from where they were close to the prehistoric images). Some date from as recently as 2008. Others are verifiably from the 1600s. Still others claim to date from 1304 (no chance, based on the handwriting style) or to have been written by a first-century Jewish man by the name of Jesus. Perhaps you've heard of him?

The entry to Niaux commands a view of the valley below and of the Pyrenees rising to every side and ascending to rocky peaks in the distance.

Photo by Andrew Howley

So if people have been visiting the caves for at least the past 400 years, you may be wondering if they made any mention of seeing the prehistoric art. The answer is yes. And no. These early modern visitors did record their experiences and described the caves as having images of "horses and cows," but they seem to have had no awareness of the deep antiquity of the images' creation. It's a testament to the timelessness of these works from such a distinct time.

Cathedral in the mountain

After walking for a while longer, we reached the greatest section of paintings in Niaux, the Salon Noir. As we entered the great "cathedral in the mountain," we turned off our flashlights and our way was lit only by the lights controlled by our guide.

This increase in darkness (while exciting and atmospheric) is done as a precaution against changing the natural temperature and lighting conditions of the cave system too much. For decades, Niaux's tour programs have been strictly guided by scientists' recommendations for the number of people, duration of each visit, and number of visits per day, and it has helped keep the paintings in a very good state of preservation.

Lascaux famously suffered greatly from changes in humidity and temperature from years of unrestricted visits and elaborate but ultimately detrimental attempts at air conditioning. That cave is itself closed to all but a few now, while workers fight off a pervasive image-covering fungus. Visitors are welcomed at a full-scale replica cave called Lascaux II.

Copy of a painting of bison in the "Salon Noire" of the Cave of Niaux.

Photo from Wikimedia

In the gloom of a single light, we followed our guide to the first panel, where she pointed out the outlines of two bison. One (bearing a striking resemblance to an animal-cracker bison) is in fact the oldest painting in the cave, carbon dated to 13,850 years ago. To put that in perspective, if one day at noon you started thinking through 16 years every minute, you'd hit Jamestown in about 15 minutes and ancient Rome around 2pm. Stonehenge would go up around 5pm, and you wouldn't see this bison being painted until almost 2am the next day.

The lights went out and came back on as the first major panel was revealed. Here there were bison and horses, big and small, overlapping, facing each other, some complete, others partial, and all of it eye-openingly fresh and clear.

"After years of seeing images like this in books ... seeing them bright and bold and on their original cool, hard, wildly undulating surface was exhilarating."

After years of seeing images like this in books and two full days of seeing them projected on sun-blanched outdoor screens, seeing them bright and bold and on their original cool, hard, wildly undulating surface was exhilarating.

In the Internet era, we see images constantly. Big and small, hi-resolution, 3-D modeled, and so on. But the blessing is also a curse. Images now can be seen anywhere, but they don't actually exist anywhere.

In Niaux, these bison, horses, and ibex are most definitely existing. This is where they were made, this is where they've been for 13,000 years, and this is where they will be tomorrow and 13,000 years from now.

We processed around the large semi-circular Salon Noir, alternating between moments of quiet observation and reflection, excited pointing and questioning, and even in the depths of the cave, scholarly debate. My two favorite points of contention today: Can you say that some of the paintings are "better" than others? and can you tell whether any two were made by the same person?

After that, we made our way back out into daylight and the bright orange bus that would take us back to our home base.

What were they thinking?

Among all the various ideas that bounced around today, there was still the recurring theme that we'll never really know exactly what the makers of prehistoric rock art were thinking, but we can be pretty sure that there is no one simple explanation or answer. These images, and the experiences of making or seeing them can have many meanings at different levels at the same time.

My favorite illustration of this came shortly after we entered Niaux, and our guide pointed out the much smaller entry tunnel that the Paleolithic people had used.

Picturing a group of people in handmade leather garments softly stepping along a sandy floor across the gallery from where we were processing with our flashlights and hiking boots, I said to my neighbor: "I was just thinking how here we are now, and this is where the people of the past really were, and it's almost like it's all happening at once, and while they're the people of the past to us, we're the people of the future to them..."

"While you're having those thoughts," he replied, "I'm singing "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.""

I whistled along and we continued deeper into the cave.

Earlier blog posts in this series:

Mysteries of Prehistoric Rock Art Probed

Finding pictures and meaning in rock art 

Andrew Howley is a senior producer for National Geographic Digital Media, responsible for editing theNational Geographic website home page and the front page of National Geographic Daily News. He also manages the National Geographic Facebook page, which has more than 1,700,000 followers. Prior to joining National Geographic, Andrew was a programming manager at America Online, which included writing promotions for the Welcome Screen. He received a BA in Anthropology (focus on Archaeology) from the College of William & Mary, Virginia. His personal interests are history reading, painting, running, and developing educational projects.

All blog posts by Andrew Howley.

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