Another important step toward cleaning up the Quanta Resources Superfund site in Edgewater, N.J., was announced today by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Department of Justice, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality announced today a comprehensive Clean Water Act settlement with the city of Jackson, Miss.

John Tuma, 55, of Centerville, Texas, was sentenced today following his March 21, 2012, trial conviction by a federal jury for discharging untreated wastewater directly into the Red River without a permit, discharging untreated wastewater into the city of Shreveport sewer system in violation of its permit and obstructing an EPA inspection.

Transocean Deepwater Inc. has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Clean Water Act (CWA) and to pay a total of $1.4 billion in civil and criminal fines and penalties, for its conduct in relation to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Department of Justice announced today

BP Exploration and Production Inc. pleaded guilty today to 14 criminal counts for its illegal conduct leading to and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, and was sentenced to pay $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties, the largest criminal resolution in U.S. history.

Transocean Deepwater Inc. pleaded guilty today to a violation of the Clean Water Act (CWA) for its illegal conduct leading to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, and was sentenced to pay $400 million in criminal fines and penalties.

Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. has agreed to pay a $2.25 million civil penalty to settle alleged violations of the federal Clean Air Act (CAA), Clean Water Act (CWA), and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), as well as the Missouri Air Conservation Law, Clean Water Law and Hazardous Waste Management Law at its facility in Mexico, Mo.

The Unified Government of Wyandotte Co. and Kansas City, Kan., has agreed to a settlement to address unauthorized overflows of untreated raw sewage and to reduce pollution levels in urban stormwater.

The owner and sole operator of an environmental laboratory was found guilty yesterday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi of all counts of a federal indictment charging falsification of records and obstructing a federal criminal investigation.

The Justice Department announced that it has reached an agreement with the Yuba County Water Agency.

The Justice Department announced that it has reached an agreement with the Linda County Water District, a special district in California, that, if approved by the court, will allow for the district to bail out from its status as a “covered jurisdiction” under the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has agreed to make significant upgrades to reduce overflows from its sewer system and pay a $2.6 million civil penalty to resolve Clean Water Act (CWA) violations stemming from illegal discharges of raw sewage. The state of Texas is a co-plaintiff in this case and will receive half of the civil penalty.

Halliburton Energy Services Inc. has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Department of Justice announced today. A criminal information charging Halliburton with one count of destruction of evidence was filed today in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Two individuals, Donald Torriero and Julius DeSimone, were sentenced in federal court in Utica, N.Y., for illegally dumping thousands of tons of asbestos-contaminated construction debris on a 28-acre piece of property on the Mohawk River in upstate New York, the Justice Department announced.

An Athol, Mass., man has been charged in a criminal information with engaging in a practice known as “swatting,” which involves making hoax emergency telephone calls in order to elicit an armed police response (from a SWAT team) for the purpose of harassing someone believed to be at a specific location.

Tennie White, the owner and operator of an environmental laboratory located in Jackson, Miss., was sentenced in federal court late yesterday to 40 months in prison in connection with her conviction for faking laboratory testing results and lying to federal investigators, announced Gregory K. Davis, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, and Robert G. Dreher, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.

Jonathan Deck, 59, of Norwood, N.J., was sentenced today in federal court in Utica, N.Y., to 15 months in prison for conspiring to commit wire fraud in connection with the illegal dumping of thousands of tons of asbestos-contaminated construction debris on a 28-acre piece of property on the Mohawk River in upstate New York, the Justice Department announced.

Halliburton Energy Services Inc. (Halliburton) pleaded guilty today to destroying evidence pertaining to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and was sentenced to the statutory maximum fine, the Justice Department announced.

The city of Shreveport, La., has agreed to make significant upgrades to reduce overflows from its sanitary sewer system and pay a $650,000 civil penalty to resolve Clean Water Act (CWA) violations stemming from illegal discharges of raw sewage, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today. The state of Louisiana, a co-plaintiff in this case, will receive half of the civil penalty.

A former engineer for BP plc, was convicted today of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal criminal authorities investigating the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that Chesapeake Appalachia LLC, a subsidiary of Chesapeake Energy,will spend an EPA-estimated $6.5 million to restore 27 sites damaged by unauthorized discharges of fill material

The Justice Department announced today that it has reached an agreement with the city of Waterloo, Iowa, resolving allegations that the city violated the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Alpha Natural Resources, Inc. (Alpha), one of the nation’s largest coal companies, Alpha Appalachian Holdings (formerly Massey Energy), and 66 subsidiaries have agreed to spend an estimated $200 million to install and operate wastewater treatment systems and to implement comprehensive, system-wide upgrades to reduce discharges of pollution from coal mines in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

At the time of Judge Waring’s landmark dissent in Briggs v. Elliott, I was less than six months old, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was nearly three years away. Yet because of Judge Waring’s powerful words – and the legal foundation they helped to provide – my generation would be the very first to come of age in a post-Brown America. And we were the first that would never know a world in which “separate but equal” was the law of the land.

Under an agreement announced today by the U.S Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice, the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (VIWAPA) will come into compliance with air pollution control requirements in the federal Clean Air Act at its Estate Richmond Generating Facility located on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Houston-based CCS (USA) Inc. and several of its operating subsidiaries will pay a $2.5 million civil penalty relating to operations at its Shreveport, Louisiana, industrial wastewater treatment plant, the Department of Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state of Louisiana announced today. The settlement will resolve violations of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the hazardous waste law known as RCRA

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced a Clean Water Act settlement requiring the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) and seven East Bay communities to conduct extensive system repairs aimed at eliminating millions of gallons of sewage discharges into San Francisco Bay. Under today’s agreement, EBMUD and the communities will assess and upgrade their 1,500 mile-long sewer system infrastructure over a 21-year period

A Colombian man extradited to the Eastern District of Virginia pleaded guilty today for his involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Agent James Terry Watson in Bogotá, Colombia, on June 20, 2013.

Today's Daily Dose brings you news about Cassava Sciences' research grant from the National Institutes of Health for developing Alzheimer's disease drug; Edwards Lifesciences' Q1 financial results; Enzo Biochem's launch of the next-generation COVID-19 test kits and Johnson & Johnson's deal with Emergent BioSolutions related to COVID-19 Vaccine candidate.

Today's Daily Dose brings you news about aTyr Pharma joining the COVID-19 battle; Cara's pivotal KALM-2 trial; LabCorp's at-home collection kit for COVID-19 testing securing Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, and Myovant's much-awaited clinical trial catalyst.

By Laurie Meehan

SOP revision. It falls somewhere between income tax prep and colonoscopy prep on the likability scale.  So why would you want to read about it?  Maybe you’re hoping someone’s figured out a way to make the process more efficient and less painful.  Maybe we have.

The SWAT Technique

Last month, we worked with a company to revise a set of SOPs using a technique we call SWAT.  (Any edgy appeal that name might have otherwise had will be immediately dulled by its acronym expansion: “SOP Working Analysis Team.”  It’s the best we could do.  Don’t judge.)

The goal of the SWAT technique is to revise the most documents in the least time, while preserving friendships, sobriety, and original hair color.  The heart of SWAT is an immersive, multi-day working session in which participants discuss SOP revisions and incorporate them in real time.  Careful planning, thorough preparation, and commitment from management and participants are keys to keeping the SWAT session productive.

It’s Not For Everyone

Up front, we need to say that SWAT won’t work for every organization.  While the size of the company may not be important, the size of the working team needs to be fairly small.  Also SWAT won’t work for every set of SOPs.  The documents need to be part of a natural grouping – a set of similar procedures – and not a random collection.

But in the right situations, SWAT works very well.  Last month, we conducted a 2-day SWAT session with a client’s QA department to revise a set of 10 auditing SOPs.  We’ve also successfully used the technique with ClinOps teams, for example, to revise sets of monitoring SOPs.

SWAT Planning and Preparation

The SWAT process begins with central planning.  A coordination team selects a logical grouping of SOPs to revise, and assembles a list of specific revisions to be made.  Where it’s not possible to provide specific revisions, instructions and guidelines are developed, such as “remove audit report distribution details” or “update to reflect new file safeguarding practices.”

Each SWAT participant is assigned an SOP from the revision set.  The participant doesn’t need to be the author of record, but must be knowledgeable enough to “represent” the SOP – to learn the document well and understand how it’s similar to the other SOPs in the revision set and in what ways it’s unique.  Based on this understanding, prior to the SWAT session, participants make applicable revisions to their individual documents using the information received from the coordination team.  Participants should also note questions and any open issues appropriate for SWAT discussion using inline comments. 

SWAT Session

The result of the SWAT session is a set of approval-ready SOPs.  The precise structure of the SWAT session to get you there depends on a variety of factors, such as how similar or dissimilar the SOPs are, the extent and complexity of the revisions, and whether subject matter expertise is concentrated or distributed among the group.  But all successful SWAT sessions we’ve conducted share these attributes:

• Duration of 2 to 3 days.  Just long enough to accomplish the aggressive goal, just short enough to keep everyone from diving out the window.
• Real-time revision.  The “SOP of the hour” is projected on a screen while participants sit in front of PCs and update their assigned SOPs accordingly.
• Rigorous facilitation. It’s natural for discussions about company procedures to morph into other topics, such as business strategy or staffing requirements.  Discussion *will* get off topic.  When it does, the facilitator must act quickly to table it.  You can maintain a list of tangent topics on a flip chart, schedule a meeting to discuss the most pressing items, ring a cowbell, blow an air horn, or drop a quarter in the “Diversion Jar” and move on, but keep those conversations out of your SWAT session.  Save the war stories for dinner.
• Commitment to the process.  Scheduling the session is one thing, but remaining dedicated to the session is an act of will. It’s so ridiculously easy for outside work to creep in.  Management and participants must be committed to carving out the time and keeping the barbarians at the gate.
• Of course: Plenty of caffeine and yummy treats.

If you’ve ever worked on SOPs, you know there’s a big difference between done and almost done.  To help ensure you emerge from the SWAT session with the former, time must be allotted for participants to format, polish, and conduct a quality review.  If it’s possible to scare up some on-site administrative support, that could help expedite the process.

SWAT Benefits

When you look on your team’s Outlook calendar and see 3 entire days blocked out, it can seem like an awful lot of time devoted to SOP revision.  But SWAT really doesn’t take any longer than the usual process, it’s just more obvious.  Does SWAT take significantly *less* time?  Mmmm, not sure, but SWAT brings with it other benefits.

SWAT produces a more consistent set of SOPs.  Since every document is compared to every other, it’s easy to notice and correct incidental differences.

SWAT is a cross-training opportunity.  Participants enter SWAT knowing their own SOP very well.  They leave knowing the whole SOP revision set very well.

SWAT gets it done.  Auditors, how many times have you cited facilities for failure to revise their SOPs within the specified window?  It’s not because there’s a willful disregard for SOP procedures.  It’s because, in the real world of work, revising SOPs is seldom prioritized highly enough to get on anyone’s schedule until the end of the revision window encroaches or – oops – has passed.  But schedule a SWAT and they will come. (And because the effort is so visible and so obviously resource-intensive, no one wants to be the one to drop the ball.  Participants come prepared and the resulting documents are the better for it.)

SWAT is a lot more fun.  Revising SOPs on your own is really boring.  Revising them in immersive sessions with colleagues is significantly more enjoyable.  Gallows humor reigns supreme.  Copious amounts of chocolate are consumed.  Air horns are blown in celebration.  Friendships, sobriety, and hair color remain intact.  Participants live to write another day.



_______________________________________________________________________
Photo Credit:  Tenaciousme CoffeeArt, under Creative Commons License

Film critic Justin Chang hosted a live discussion of 'The Avengers,' the first film Times readers chose in the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown series.

It was one of last year's hot tickets: Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta, on the same stage at the same time. How to see it for free.

Robert De Niro told Stephen Colbert he wants to play New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a pandemic movie. And Cuomo approves.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6841) announced today that its subsidiary, Yokogawa Engineering Asia, has been awarded a contract from PUB, Singapore's National Water Agency, to develop a plant simulation system for the Lower Seletar Waterworks, a 60 million gallons per day (mgd) water treatment facility in Singapore. This is part of PUB's continual investments in innovation and R&D to ensure a safe and sustainable water supply for Singapore.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6841) announces that it has made it onto CDP's Water Security A List and Supplier Engagement Leader Board. The A listing is for the company's sustainable water management practices and disclosure of information on these activities, and the selection to the leader board is for the company's leadership in engaging with its suppliers around the world to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming.

Illicit nuclear detonations are anything but secret

The coral is composed of many small polyps and forms large colonies approximately 2 metres across. The polyp skeleton is a dusky pink colour.

As of December 2017, fewer than 50 individuals are thought to be remaining in three subpopulations that are scattered over 140,000 square km in Iran’s central plateau. The cats have been nearly wiped out by excessive hunting, habitat degradation and scarcity of prey species.

These wild mushrooms usually fetch between 50 and 70 Euros per kilogram. This encourages people to collect and sell the mushrooms, often before they are mature. It is estimated that only 250 White Ferulas make it to maturity each year.

Since the 1940s, this species has attracted considerable attention because of its plasticity; in the 1950s, tests were carried out to introduce the species into various open stretches of water (Baltic Sea) or closed areas (lakes). The farming of this species

Georgia aster is currently found in five US counties in Alabama, 15 in Georgia, nine in North Carolina and 14 in South Carolina. It was once known from Florida, but is no longer found there. Across its range, 146 total populations have been known, of these, 28 have likely disappeared.

Unlike other members of this family, the eyes of the Ganges shark are tilted dorsally, instead of laterally or ventrally, indicating that it may swim along the river bed scanning the waters above for prey. Its sharp and slender teeth suggest that it is primarily a fi sh-eater. It is often confused with the bull shark, which is known to attack humans

The plant has been listed as a threatened species in the United States since 1989, and in 2008 it was listed as an endangered species by the IUCN.

Between 2012 and 2018, the Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis) population across Africa has grown at a modest annual rate of 2.5% from an estimated 4,845 to 5,630 animals in the wild, respectively. Population models predict a further slow increase over the next five years, according to IUCN’s March 2020 update.

Illegal hunting, habitat loss and changes through expanding agriculture and mining, increasing humanwildlife conflict, and civil unrest are all pushing the species towards extinction.

In 1945, the tree, also known as ‘Kaikomako Manawa Tawhi’, was visited by professor Geoff Baylis, who brought a cutting back to Auckland and nurtured it to maturity at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR).

This incredibly metallic blue tarantula is found within a 39-square mile reserve forest in Andhra Pradesh. Its behaviour parallels that of many arboreal spiders. In the wild, it lives in holes of tall trees where it makes asymmetric funnel webs. Spiders of this genus may live communally when territory, i.e. the number of holes per tree, is limited.