Published in the American Journal
A tanker truck carrying 8,000 gallons of fuel flipped over early Monday morning, spilling jet fuel into the street and into storm drains leading to the Fore River and Casco Bay.
The truck overturned right outside the South Portland Central Fire Station at the corner of Broadway and Route 77, and closed the Casco Bay Bridge for hours, delaying traffic heading from Portland to South Portland.
Jon Woodard of the state Department of Environmental Protection said the truck was carrying 8,000 gallons. “All of it was released from the truck,” he said. Some was contained on the street and some went into storm drains leading to the water.
“We have collected a lot of it,” Woodard said. The DEP and Clean Harbors, a South Portland-based environmental company handling the cleanup, are using booms to contain the jet fuel that flowed into the water.
Woodard said the state Department of Marine Resources is sampling the water in the Fore River and Portland harbor to make sure no fuel escaped. He said there have been a few small sheens reported in both of those areas, but does not believe any significant amount escaped containment.
A spokesman for Clean Harbors said the amount of the spill was “sizeable.” The company said it would not have a good handle on how long the cleanup will take before the American Journal’s deadline.
It will take at least until Wednesday afternoon, according to the South Portland Police Department. A cruiser has been assigned to block the right-turn lane coming off the bridge onto Broadway through Wednesday afternoon. That will allow cleanup workers to use the road as they collect contaminated dirt from the area around the spill.
Woodard said the level of environmental damage remained to be seen. He said the plants “are not really out yet,” and may not suffer much damage, while marine animals and shellfish have different levels of sensitivity to contaminants.
Wednesday, April 9, 2003
PWD not interested in lease plan
Published in the Current and the American Journal
A legislative bill that caused a big stir in Standish now appears unlikely to have any real impact on the town’s tax rolls.
Rep. Janet McLaughlin, D-Cape Elizabeth, proposed a bill that would allow water and sewer districts, including the Portland Water District, to raise ready cash under a lease-and-lease-back arrangement. Under the proposal,
district-owned buildings and equipment would be leased to a private entity, which could then take depreciation of the assets off their taxes.
Standish residents and officials were excited that the town might be a beneficiary of private control of the district’s assets, worth as much as $50 million, because they would no longer be tax exempt as they are now under PWD ownership.
Not only is the bill now tabled pending the input of the Legislature’s finance committee, but it could be revamped to excise any portions that would result in the transfer of ownership of any PWD equipment or buildings, leaving Standish’s hands empty of any new taxes.
Rep. Larry Bliss, D-South Portland, who heads the Legislature’s utilities committee, said last week that state law would require the state to pay half of the tax liability for any private property it exempts from tax. Under the proposal, the state would have granted that exemption.
A letter circulated to Standish town councilors suggested that PWD property is now worth $50 million. At Standish’s $20.48 per thousand tax rate, half of its potential property tax is $512,000, which the state would have to reimburse under the proposal.
That would be unlikely to pass in this tight budget season, Bliss said.
And the district is not interested anyway. PWD trustee chairman Howard Littlefield of Cape Elizabeth said there was nothing in the proposal the district would be likely to use.
The lease-and-lease-back arrangement was designed to provide ready cash to districts, paid by investors, who would take depreciation tax deductions on the district’s assets over time.
The tax-exempt district does not now receive any credit for depreciation. The bill would not allow the lease or sale of water rights, and transactions would be unlikely to include much real estate, because land does not depreciate.
A legislative bill that caused a big stir in Standish now appears unlikely to have any real impact on the town’s tax rolls.
Rep. Janet McLaughlin, D-Cape Elizabeth, proposed a bill that would allow water and sewer districts, including the Portland Water District, to raise ready cash under a lease-and-lease-back arrangement. Under the proposal,
district-owned buildings and equipment would be leased to a private entity, which could then take depreciation of the assets off their taxes.
Standish residents and officials were excited that the town might be a beneficiary of private control of the district’s assets, worth as much as $50 million, because they would no longer be tax exempt as they are now under PWD ownership.
Not only is the bill now tabled pending the input of the Legislature’s finance committee, but it could be revamped to excise any portions that would result in the transfer of ownership of any PWD equipment or buildings, leaving Standish’s hands empty of any new taxes.
Rep. Larry Bliss, D-South Portland, who heads the Legislature’s utilities committee, said last week that state law would require the state to pay half of the tax liability for any private property it exempts from tax. Under the proposal, the state would have granted that exemption.
A letter circulated to Standish town councilors suggested that PWD property is now worth $50 million. At Standish’s $20.48 per thousand tax rate, half of its potential property tax is $512,000, which the state would have to reimburse under the proposal.
That would be unlikely to pass in this tight budget season, Bliss said.
And the district is not interested anyway. PWD trustee chairman Howard Littlefield of Cape Elizabeth said there was nothing in the proposal the district would be likely to use.
The lease-and-lease-back arrangement was designed to provide ready cash to districts, paid by investors, who would take depreciation tax deductions on the district’s assets over time.
The tax-exempt district does not now receive any credit for depreciation. The bill would not allow the lease or sale of water rights, and transactions would be unlikely to include much real estate, because land does not depreciate.
Biode puts high-tech twist on measuring thickness
Published in the Current and the American Journal
What Biode Inc. has to sell is only slightly larger than a postage stamp, and the company hopes to reach as diverse a range of buyers. Their solid-state digital viscometer, built to measure the thickness of liquids from motor oil to shampoo, is in the testing phase and has generated interest from prospective buyers including the U.S. Navy and Procter and Gamble.
Biode’s office hides in the back of a building on Larrabee Road in Westbrook. Chief Technology Officer Kerem Durdag of Scarborough said the company was founded in 1986 to do research and development on ways to detect contaminants in liquids.
In the mid-1990s, the company chose to focus on commercializing one of the products it had developed, the viscometer. Most viscometers are mechanical instruments requiring very precise environmental conditions for proper measurements, Durdag said.
“The viscometry market is very mature,” he said. The successful companies in the sector have been around for 60 years or more, making the same type of equipment now as then.
They have a broad market base, though, one that is attractive to Biode.
“Anything that is gooey, (someone) will measure viscosity on it,” Durdag said. The usual method in industry today involves taking a sample of a fluid, like shampoo, somewhere in the manufacturing process, taking it to a lab for testing, and reading the results some time later to make adjustments in the process.
Real-time viscosity measurements are not possible most of the time because of the equipment required to take the measurements, Durdag said. Biode’s digital viscometer has no moving parts, which prevents it from “gumming up,” he said.
Biode’s device can fit in a pipe to give real-time data feeds, or can be used on a tabletop to handle samples from vials or test tubes. Connected to a standard PC laptop using a commercially available data-acquisition card and software, the viscometer can start reading data immediately and requires no power source.
Instead, it is what is called a “surface acoustic wave device,” which operates by vibrating on an atomic level, Durdag said. When the measuring surface is exposed to a fluid, the vibration changes as a result of “viscous damping,” allowing the device to measure how easy it is to shake the fluid around.
Biode has approached companies that are traditionally early adopters of technology, as well as large operations that might want in-stream process measurements.
Among the interested clients are Procter and Gamble’s shampoo manufacturing, beer companies that want to know how their malt syrup is doing, and the U.S. Navy.
“They like to do oil sampling on their ships at very frequent intervals,” Durdag said. Mechanical devices can’t work on ships because they require a level surface to base their readings on. So the Navy, at great expense, flies helicopters between ships and land-based laboratories carrying jars of oil to be tested.
The Navy is now testing Biode’s device, which would allow real-time readings even aboard ship, and may phase it in over time, Durdag said.
The company has taken advantage of a number of state business-assistance programs in the four years since it started work to bring the viscometer to market.
One of the most important services was the patent program at the UMaine School of Law in Portland, Durdag said. It allows companies to get access to patent attorneys at reasonable charges to protect their intellectual property rights.
“Maine tends to be fairly risk-averse to tech, when it comes to startups,” Durdag said. That makes it hard to get money, but the Maine Technology Institute has grants for this type of activity, and the Maine Seed Capital Tax Program is also useful, giving investors in qualifying companies 40 percent of their money back in tax credits. Maine Investment Exchange and the Small Enterprise Growth Fund also have played large roles in helping Biode raise the money it needed to continue development.
Part of the problem in the private sector was that Maine investors are used to short business cycles, more in line with agricultural or marine businesses, in which increased investment leads to higher yield almost immediately. Technology is slower, which can make it harder to find money, Durdag said.
Durdag was, however, able to turn to other state companies as component suppliers. The circuit boards are from Enercon Technologies in Gray and Knox Semiconductor in Rockland. “We’re leveraging a good amount of Maine stuff here,” Durdag said.
Maine companies may also be good buyers for it, he said. When the device goes on the market in the summer, the company plans to approach paper companies to see if they want to use it in their manufacturing process. Durdag is already working on a test at the UMaine paper mill test center in Orono.
“We’re crazy enough to think wecan do it,” Durdag said.
What Biode Inc. has to sell is only slightly larger than a postage stamp, and the company hopes to reach as diverse a range of buyers. Their solid-state digital viscometer, built to measure the thickness of liquids from motor oil to shampoo, is in the testing phase and has generated interest from prospective buyers including the U.S. Navy and Procter and Gamble.
Biode’s office hides in the back of a building on Larrabee Road in Westbrook. Chief Technology Officer Kerem Durdag of Scarborough said the company was founded in 1986 to do research and development on ways to detect contaminants in liquids.
In the mid-1990s, the company chose to focus on commercializing one of the products it had developed, the viscometer. Most viscometers are mechanical instruments requiring very precise environmental conditions for proper measurements, Durdag said.
“The viscometry market is very mature,” he said. The successful companies in the sector have been around for 60 years or more, making the same type of equipment now as then.
They have a broad market base, though, one that is attractive to Biode.
“Anything that is gooey, (someone) will measure viscosity on it,” Durdag said. The usual method in industry today involves taking a sample of a fluid, like shampoo, somewhere in the manufacturing process, taking it to a lab for testing, and reading the results some time later to make adjustments in the process.
Real-time viscosity measurements are not possible most of the time because of the equipment required to take the measurements, Durdag said. Biode’s digital viscometer has no moving parts, which prevents it from “gumming up,” he said.
Biode’s device can fit in a pipe to give real-time data feeds, or can be used on a tabletop to handle samples from vials or test tubes. Connected to a standard PC laptop using a commercially available data-acquisition card and software, the viscometer can start reading data immediately and requires no power source.
Instead, it is what is called a “surface acoustic wave device,” which operates by vibrating on an atomic level, Durdag said. When the measuring surface is exposed to a fluid, the vibration changes as a result of “viscous damping,” allowing the device to measure how easy it is to shake the fluid around.
Biode has approached companies that are traditionally early adopters of technology, as well as large operations that might want in-stream process measurements.
Among the interested clients are Procter and Gamble’s shampoo manufacturing, beer companies that want to know how their malt syrup is doing, and the U.S. Navy.
“They like to do oil sampling on their ships at very frequent intervals,” Durdag said. Mechanical devices can’t work on ships because they require a level surface to base their readings on. So the Navy, at great expense, flies helicopters between ships and land-based laboratories carrying jars of oil to be tested.
The Navy is now testing Biode’s device, which would allow real-time readings even aboard ship, and may phase it in over time, Durdag said.
The company has taken advantage of a number of state business-assistance programs in the four years since it started work to bring the viscometer to market.
One of the most important services was the patent program at the UMaine School of Law in Portland, Durdag said. It allows companies to get access to patent attorneys at reasonable charges to protect their intellectual property rights.
“Maine tends to be fairly risk-averse to tech, when it comes to startups,” Durdag said. That makes it hard to get money, but the Maine Technology Institute has grants for this type of activity, and the Maine Seed Capital Tax Program is also useful, giving investors in qualifying companies 40 percent of their money back in tax credits. Maine Investment Exchange and the Small Enterprise Growth Fund also have played large roles in helping Biode raise the money it needed to continue development.
Part of the problem in the private sector was that Maine investors are used to short business cycles, more in line with agricultural or marine businesses, in which increased investment leads to higher yield almost immediately. Technology is slower, which can make it harder to find money, Durdag said.
Durdag was, however, able to turn to other state companies as component suppliers. The circuit boards are from Enercon Technologies in Gray and Knox Semiconductor in Rockland. “We’re leveraging a good amount of Maine stuff here,” Durdag said.
Maine companies may also be good buyers for it, he said. When the device goes on the market in the summer, the company plans to approach paper companies to see if they want to use it in their manufacturing process. Durdag is already working on a test at the UMaine paper mill test center in Orono.
“We’re crazy enough to think wecan do it,” Durdag said.
Thursday, April 3, 2003
Join the hunt: Chase away lions, wherever they be
Published in the Portland Phoenix
Written by John Urquhart. Directed by Pamela DiPasquale. With Mohamed Abdirahman, Jared Mongeau, Catherine Wallace, and Hue Edwards. At the Children’s Theatre of Maine, through April 6. Call (207) 878-2774.
The future of Maine theater is here. The people in Lewiston still haven’t put their Somali neighbors’ experiences on stage, but the Children’s Theatre of Maine has. Lion Hunting on Munjoy Hill is the most important, relevant play on Maine stages this season, a brilliant show that all Mainers should see, the better to understand ourselves and our neighbors, both new and old.
Within the confines of a simple set combining a market, Congress Street, and the Portland Observatory, Portland playwright John Urquhart crystallizes the immigrant experience in Maine, sharply portraying harassment by local teens, police insensitivity and recalcitrance, proud and strong immigrants, overbearing social-service workers, lost dreams, and identity crisis. It is a world white Maine too rarely sees, and often prefers to ignore.
Urquhart based the script on interviews conducted with Portland’s immigrants and lays out their lives in strong, vibrant characters. The actors bring their own experiences to the roles, making them uniquely authentic and powerful, even beyond their clear talents. And the simplicities required by children’s theater do not preclude deep, layered meanings that are great for parent-child conversation.
There are warning bells clanging loudly here. In this play, Portland’s cops are shown as do-nothing buffoons, complete with red clown-noses, who have no desire or ability to help the most vulnerable Portlanders. Social service workers are exposed as dithering do-gooders who want to mold kids into a sad American " ideal. "
Immigrants’ own contradictions are also put on display, from the frustration of Long (Hue Edwards) with her mother’s refusal to label products in English to attract tourist buyers, to the false, but lucrative, American patriotism of Ivan, the Russian street vendor (Eli Doucette).
Small vignettes illuminate other aspects of immigrant life, showing the hardships of interracial puppy love and the sacrifices immigrants must make, leaving respected professions to become housecleaners. These are real: Ask the woman who runs the Vientiane Market what she used to do for work in Bangkok.
This play should open lines of dialogue throughout the city, and open eyes in every neighborhood in Maine. Even a benign lack of knowledge of other cultures can be painful for newcomers to bear. An innocent child’s question, " Where are you from? " turns into a geography lesson, complete with world map. And " What is that ‘S’ on your shirt? " becomes a confession of immigrant vulnerability, because, as the response instructs, " Everyone knows who Superman is. "
Not Asad, the Somali boy who arrived two weeks ago and is played powerfully by 11-year-old Somali-born Mohamed Abdirahman, cast just three weeks before the show opened. CTM Managing Director Stacy Begin said the challenge of finding actors who met the show’s ethnic requirements was not small.
It took weeks to find Mohamed’s family, and, even then, the two weeks of explaining and negotiating had to go through an interpreter. Cultural mores prevented his sister from performing by his side.
The whole casting process took a hurried three months for this play, as contrasted with the usual seasonal auditions casting three or four shows in one weekend. Even so, CMT couldn’t find a Cambodian girl, so they changed two characters to be Vietnamese. And they couldn’t find a Russian teenager, picking instead an Anglo teen, Doucette, with an excellent Russian accent. " I hope it will encourage other kids to (audition), " Begin said.
It should — a recent show’s audience included a smattering of ethnic backgrounds, though, as the play points out, even native-born Americans call themselves something else. Danny (Jared Mongeau) is Irish, but it is the immigrants who worry most about identity, and have dreams far removed from those of their US-born friends.
When violence strikes, the immigrants bond together to make it right, though still cowed by their newness in town. It takes Asad, who wants to help but knows he can’t take on bully white teens alone, to come up with the idea. " Superman only helps white people. We need another superhero on Munjoy Hill, " Asad says. He remembers a time, before Somalia was torn apart by war, when villagers would have to protect themselves against lions by repeatedly scaring them away.
He teaches the kids, who come into their jubilant and powerful own with this task, how to hunt lions. They dress up in hilariously cute costumes and race about the theater empowered, yelling " hunt! hunt! hunt! " until their unity and strength drive away the bullies. But even after success, Asad is wary: " Lions always come back. "
Written by John Urquhart. Directed by Pamela DiPasquale. With Mohamed Abdirahman, Jared Mongeau, Catherine Wallace, and Hue Edwards. At the Children’s Theatre of Maine, through April 6. Call (207) 878-2774.
BACKSTAGE
• The free workshop showing of Tim Rubel’s Eggs Over Eric just wound up. A longish one-act with strong interaction and dialogue and excellent emotional moments, it has been entered in PSC’s Clauder competition.
• Michael Tobin, formerly at MainePlay Productions, has started Cocheco Stage Company in Dover, New Hampshire, in what was the Edwin Booth Theater. Shows are already under way, and a full summer season is planned. Watch this space for more.
• Theater in crisis: You can help prevent the next casualty in Maine’s tough theater business from being the Oddfellow Theater in Buckfield. Visit www.oddfellow.com to keep this lively operation going, and get John Baldacci to help, too.
From the stagefront lines: Maine theater folk react to war
Published in the Portland Phoenix
As life for nations on the world stage gets more complicated, and as we get more scenes from the Iraqi theater of military operations, it has become clear how much thespian language ties in to everyday life, how tightly linked life and theater are.
At Cocheco Stage Company, in Dover, New Hampshire, Michael Tobin reports that he got some calls to cancel reservations and others to confirm the show was still on, after war broke out. " One woman challenged me with, ‘How can you perform a show when we have men and women fighting a war, risking their lives to save ours?’ " Tobin says. His reply? " It’s a matter of emotional survival " in the face of non-stop war coverage and in-our-faces violence. Attendance was " near capacity " even when the war was just beginning, which he attributed to the audience’s need to " escape. "
Tobin and Michael Miclon, at the Oddfellow Theater in Buckfield, agree that they want to provide lighter shows just now. Tobin said he would have changed his scheduled show if it had been a heavy one, and Miclon said the theater’s philosophy is to bring people together for laughter and joy, even in hard times.
Actors, too, need their escape. " It’s nice to have something to do to stop sitting in front of the TV, " says Craig Bowden, who is rehearsing for the upcoming Mad Horse show Suburban Motel. He sees hope in this time of turmoil. " There’s going to be a big change in the way the world is because of these events, " he says. " Maybe people will get motivated to take advantage of the freedoms that we have. "
The freedoms to speak, to act, and to assemble are all crucial to a lively theater scene, and are constitutional guarantees that will only continue to exist if defended.
Bowden warns that the role of theater in that changed world may change, too. He took heart that the actors at the Academy Awards ceremony " were sort of humbled, brought back down to reality. " That perspective is important for actors, who both create and reflect reality while onstage. " There’s nothing more real than war, " Bowden says.
Two other Maine groups are going the other way, bringing the reality of war to the stage. Two Lights Theatre Ensemble has submitted La Promise to the New York International Fringe Festival. It was performed at the St. Lawrence in September, 2002, as a thematic anniversary piece for September 11. The question posed by French playwright Xavier Durringer is, " What is just, in times of war? "
It is the story of simple villagers who have their village destroyed by war, and their women raped and people killed. The war changes fighters, too. Zeck was a loving fiancé before he went off to the front. When he returns, he is faced with his bride’s pregnancy, the child conceived by an enemy rapist. The play looks at the role of non-violence in war time and shows the complexities of victim and tormentor within one heart.
Without taking sides, La Promise explores what war means for humans, rather than the video game now on television, where we can see a missile-eye-view of a bunker containing, we are told " 200 Iraqi paramilitaries " moments before its destruction in a much-heralded US " successful strike. " Those 200 people inside, paramilitaries or not, have mothers and fathers, too.
It is to his forefathers that Frank Wicks has turned to create Soldier, Come Home!, a " readers’ theater " piece based on the letters between his great-grandfather, a Union soldier in the Civil War serving in Grant’s VI Army Corps, and his wife back home in Pennsylvania. Preserved in a shoebox, the letters open to a world of war closely paralleling today’s events.
Soldiers far from home sent letters regularly, supplying loved ones with fresh evidence that their father, brother, son or husband had survived another day. And yet the telegraph allowed instant communications of news, letting Wicks’s great-grandfather cheer for the success of the siege of Vicksburg just a day later, despite a distance of hundreds of miles.
Wicks had worked on Soldier off-and-on for 15 years, but was moved to finish it by the events of September 11. Now he wants to perform the play, which has had one-time productions at several locations and continues to tour as interest arises.
" I wish we could be doing this play immediately, " Wicks says. He wants the play to have a full run somewhere, but isn’t sure where or when that might happen.
Now could be the time. The letters have been distilled into the " nugget " of truth and meaning in each, making them more like the dense-but-brief emails now flashing from military bases in the Middle East to homes in Maine and throughout the nation.
Wicks said the letters offer a glimpse at the difficult answers to questions nobody should have to ask: " What do you write when you’re separated? What do you write when you start to worry? "
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