Thursday, Dec. 29, 2005 LET'S FINALLY HAVE a look at the chart after all these years. Ladies and gentlemen, without another decade's delay, please meet the New Paltz PCB disaster, in nine planets, four asteroids and Chiron: http://www.planetwaves.net/charts/new_paltz_pcb.html This is the chart for the moment in late 1991, 14 years ago today in fact, when a car skidded off the road two miles from the SUNY New Paltz campus, hitting an electrical pole, snapping the T-arm and causing two high voltage wires to touch (22,000 volts, if I recall correctly). This is the chart because it's the beginning of the chain reaction and a point of no return. Also, the time is documented. Any time you hear someone state the time of a news event out loud or type it into the article, consider that your personal invitation as an astrology freak to scribble it down, make the chart forthwith and learn some cool stuff. The wires touching created a condition called out-of-phase current, which I learned from a really smart dude who runs Jonathan Cainer's Psychic Museum late one night last year when we were hanging out in London, is the exact same thing as a power surge. He drew me some schematic diagrams on the back of an astrology chart, and finally that part of the story was comprehensible. Sometimes the cows take a while to come in from pasture. The out-of-phase power surge ran through the campus power system for about 45 minutes before anything happened outwardly. Behind the scenes, all the transformers on the campus were getting hot and many along one circuit were getting ready to blow. Then thick white smoke started pouring out of the exterior electrical room door of Gage Residence Hall, and flooding the building through the interior door. This was a place where 370 students lived but were all away on vacation. Janitors fussed and wondered what to do; there was an explosion in the transformer room, meanwhile; and finally at 7:25 a.m. on a Sunday morning, somebody dialed 9-1-1. The New Paltz dispatcher summoned the volunteer fire department to the scene of an electrical fire in the basement of Gage Hall. Gary, the dispatcher, warned repeatedly that the roads were extremely icy. There was a second alarm right away. Emergency personnel started to respond. Mind you: nobody knew what was really going on. The tape of the emergency radio dialog is so vivid I can still hear it -- particularly Gary's voice and the sound of about a dozen guys radioing in one at a time saying they're en route. This happened at a time in my life when I was listening to the emergency frequencies almost around the clock. That prior night, however, I went to sleep at my girlfriend Sabine's house, and left my scanner home. Fortunately. Very fortunately. It's good that I saved whatever dioxin hits I was going to take for later in the project. It was a foggy day and the smoke hung low and close over the campus for about 24 hours. Everybody who went got a real exposure. I have heard bits and pieces of the story from that morning from different witnesses and participants. People were not aware it was a PCB and dioxin situation. Firemen went in to Gage, looking for students, not knowing the building was empty. They did not understand that the marking "ML" on the transformer room door was the official public relations marking for PCBs (after all, you cannot have the transformer room door off of a hotel lobby screaming supertoxins). The chief, who could see the smoke streaming into the morning sky as he drove to the scene from a mile away, smelled the PCBs when he got there. They have a distinctive sickly sweet odor. He gave the order to back the trucks away and to stop fighting the fire; he knew the guys could get very sick, and the fire trucks -- even lightly contaminated -- could become scrap metal in a matter of minutes. Two other guys went in to get the first two out. One going into Gage to get his fellows was Pat Koch, who later became New Paltz fire chief, and who is a personal hero of mine. When I interviewed him shortly after the event about what inside Gage Hall was like, he said, "All you saw was smoke." (Hence, there was NO WAY the vents could be clean; NO WAY the heating conduits could be clean; and ditto for the electrical conduits, all of which start in the electrical transformer vault. State of New York solution: don't test them for toxins, and call it good.) Meanwhile, there were about a dozen students in Capen Hall that morning, which was the official winter break dorm for foreign students. They were evacuated through a similar toxic haze, described to me by Matthew Dunphy, the Capen resident advisor (RA) that week, who became a close friend of mine and a very helpful spokesman for the testing and cleanup cause. As 8 a.m. approached, the power surge was still in effect; at this point, nobody had connected anything to the minor car accident two miles away. While all the emergency response people were streaming onto the campus, weird things started to happen. Out behind Bliss Hall, there was an explosion was so powerful that it shook a large ambulance 150 feet from the transformer vault, blowing soot outside and inside through the entire structure. On and on. The rest of the story is told in my articles. As for that chart. It's a good one. Note that Sagittarius is rising. A local story turned out to be a worldwide story. Sagittarius is always about things bigger than you think. Notice the imminent solar eclipse in Capricorn. You can see it because the Sun is sitting on the North Node of the Moon. When you see the Sun on a lunar node, that means there's an eclipse in the neighborhood. The Moon is in last quarter phase; the eclipse is less than a week away and the whole world was charged with that "in the eclipse zone" feeling. I was not an astrologer at this point; I was not watching the charts. I would have had no way to know what an eclipse on my own 7th house might mean; in this case, a new relationship with the karma of this story. I responded in that Lunar Nodal way: it never once occurred to me not to pour myself into the mission, body and soul, for as long as was necessary. Notice also that Mars is rising. Textbook accident astrology. What says toxic electrical accident? I wonder. How about Uranus conjunct Neptune in Capricorn, which was about to define an entire era in history, besides? If you don't count Ceres (classical astrology does not), the Moon is void of course. The whole incident had and still has a massively void of course feeling, with colossal fuckups visiting the scene from the first days. If you do count Ceres, which is in the ascendant, you have the Moon making its next aspect to Ceres, suggesting a story of grief and sadness, particularly where parents and children are concerned, and some involvement with the underworld. It's as if the students who are going to be put back into those buildings in a few weeks without real testing or cleanup are being taken down to Hades. Note that Ceres is on the Galactic Core to a few arc minutes. Notice Jupiter (a lot of something) in Virgo (related to technical matters and service) in the 9th house (writing and publishing, and involving a university). Note the Saturn-Chiron opposition across the 2nd and 8th houses. Does that say $50 million cleanup? It certainly suggests a values crisis and a genuine emergency. The state construction fund seemed to take the whole thing in stride. There was never a money shortage for the cleanup. They hired ridiculously incompetent, corrupt and expensive contractors -- but the money flowed like manna from heaven, even to the tune of a quarter million dollars a week some weeks. Not bad for a little state college campus; of course, it was all coming from the future through the construction bond program. Note the Moon, ruler of the Cancer South Node and the intercepted ruler of the 7th (Cancer is floating in the 7th and has no house cusp), as the highest planet. That Moon is a representative of the secret past (South Node, past; intercepted, concealed secret; Cancer, about someone's home, dormitories). It is the representative of the 50-year history of the faulty PCB "safety" equipment that was installed into Bliss, Capen, Gage and Scudder halls, as well as Parker Theater and Coykendall Sciences Building, suddenly appearing where everyone could see it. Note Mercury sitting on the Great Attractor. That is probably me. I'm a writer and a pretty mercurial guy. Mercury rules the 6th, 7th  and  9th houses; I certainly took the role of the diligent and obsessed worker-healer (6th house); "the other" in relation to the college (7th house); and some kind of publisher-writer-missionary who brought the PCB story to the world (9th house enough for me). The placement of Mercury on the Great Attractor says: controversy. Some people really, really did not like that I became the "dog who would not let go of a bone," in the immortal words of Kevin Cahill, the local state assemblyman, who did his part to protect the college and poison students. But in that Great Attractor way, they could not do anything about my dog-and-boneness. I was arrested for reporting on their stuff and the charges were dismissed. They tried banning me from the campus; I sued in federal court and won. They tried lying. I'm a Pisces with a really nice Neptune. It didn't work. Was it all worth it? All those weeks and months and years and reams of Xerox copies and huge books of endless files still in storage in Seattle? One the one hand, the dorms are still open. That is frustrating. I try not to think about it too much. On the other hand, had I not hounded the bastards and kept the story in the newspapers every week and had copies of all their files, they might not have cleaned up much of anything, and they did do some cleaning and renovation, shoddy as it was. Also, at this point, you pretty much cannot search the college in Google and not find out about the PCBs there. It was also very, very worth it for the people I met and got to know, such as my editor at Woodstock Times, Parry Teasdale; my editor at Sierra, Paul Rauber; a guy who got badly contaminated at a GE plant in California, and then shut it down, named Steve Sandberg; a dioxin-herbicide freak out in Oregon named Carol van Strum; a PCB avenger named Ward B. Stone; two hot scientists, Brian Bush and David Carpenter; and a lot of very cool lawyers who helped me figure out what in holy hell had happened. The New Paltz chart has had some significant transits lately. Extremely significant, in fact. First of these is that Pluto has crossed the ascendant. In many ways, it's a whole new story once that happens. I have no evidence of this in the real life of this issue except for the fact that a reporter actually called me this week asking for comment (shocking), but I can tell you from looking at a lot of charts that Pluto on the ascendant does not mean nothing. This chart is now having a simultaneous Chiron opposition and Saturn opposition. Saturn has now gone 180 degrees from where it started, and Chiron has gone 180 degrees from where it started. They have switched places and are in aspect again, and are aspecting the natal positions in the event chart. This issue is not over. But we shall see what that means. Once again, here are some photos from the first days. http://www.planetwaves.net/NewPaltz.Tour00.html Once again, here is my final report -- the Sierra article, right after which I bailed and became an astrologer. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200103/conspiracy.asp Thanks for reading about this madness. Please spread the word. PCBs and dioxins are an important issue for everyone, and they get very little attention since back around the time of Monica Lewinsky; and I would feel much better about this planet if those four dormitories were torn town and hauled away in barrels. (Additional articles are posted below. Thanks Steve for going to the campus and taking that nice photo of Dioxin Palace, Capen Hall, and to Tony, the current New Paltz fire chief, for a bit of fact checking tonight.)