Sunday September twenty two 2069.
Authorities in Cambridge have declared an emergency in the
City today as a plume of toxic smoke continues to drift south and east over the
old city. This has persisted for days as
a fire in the north of the city continues to rage. The origin of the plume is
the incinerator power plant owned by the University. It has been operating for over 20 years and
provides power from waste to the main Cambridge University central campus to
the North West of the City.
The emergency advice to residents and businesses is to
immediately seal all windows and power-down air conditioning units or reset them
to recycled air flow and check filters. Despite the recent heat wave continuing with
temperatures soaring to over 32o Celsius, everyone is advised to stay
indoors and take shelter. The failure of
the power plant also means that some facilities are without power.
A spokesperson for the University, Ashfa Cash, apologised at
a hastily held press conference in Huntingdon to where key staff had been
evacuated.
“We unconditionally
apologise for the accident that led to our energy from waste plant, that
provides power for the main university campus outside Cambridge, rapidly
overheating and starting a massive fire. We are looking into the causes urgently
as there is a large emission of smoke drifting slowly down wind of the accident”.
The underlying cause.
The cause of the fire has not been officially disclosed and there
has been a degree of mystery surrounding the nature of the waste being
converted to energy. Staff have in the past informed us anonymously of their
concerns about the nature of the operation.
Unofficially, we have learned that the bulk of the waste incinerated is
discarded books. Twenty years ago the
university made a decision to dispose of most of its paper library material.
Only rare books or valuable first editions were saved. This followed similar
action by other universities and libraries as they converted to digital access
and archiving. Up to that point, many
unwanted books were donated to libraries across the world. This had been particularly useful in supporting education in poorer economies. However, the
advent of universal digital access and the introduction of the Low Energy Data (LED) 'balloon' technology led to a mountain of unused books accumulating. The proliferation of unwanted books produced in
the early part of the century was in part to blame. Vast warehouses of
remaindered books were increasing in size. The decision by Cambridge University
to convert their own book stock to useful energy, and then offer to dispose of the stock of other libraries in the Former UK States (FUKS), was welcomed.
Importing books for
disposal.
Maintenance of the power plant would have been difficult
after the finite stocks of waste books were depleted in the FUKS. Workers at
the super-container port of Felixstowe 5 indicate that waste books have been
shipped in recently from many locations and transported by rail to the Cambridge
North depot. This practice has been increasing in the last three years and containers
are transported in secret overnight. We saw inventory ledgers that indicate
many tons of China’s Chairman Mao Zedong’s so called ‘Little red Book’ from the
mid -twentieth century had been imported from China for disposal over the
previous weeks. The vast scale of the shipment surprised those involved.
Dr Sam Montag,
of The Valleys University College in Pontypandy and an expert on waste
incineration, indicated that books should not be considered as equally safe: “some
books, particularly those printed and bound in former communist states in the
last century or those produced in Europe before WW2 can have potentially very
toxic contents if not handled with care”. Although disposal by incineration
was considered in Germany in the 1930s there was little consideration of the
toxic side effects. Dr Sam Montag carried out tests for our researchers
and has shown that early editions of ‘Mein Kampf’ from the 1920s and the ‘Little
Red Book’ from China in the 1960s have a particularly toxic content. He indicated that making assumptions about
toxicity from analysing the book covers alone can be a mistake. Often it is the
ink and how it is applied to the pages that presents the most hazard to humans.
Sources in
the Chinese Embassy indicated that there had been recent shipments of the book
made to the FUKS. A spokesperson said that ,“although it still holds that it is necessary to investigate both the
facts and the history of a problem in order to study and understand it, there
was no longer a need to distribute such advice to its citizens in book format”. However, huge stocks of the book were now rotting in storage and “it would be embarrassing for the government of the People's Democracy of China to be burning this particular
book on Chinese soil”
Lack of capacity caused the accident.
Another
source working at the plant indicated that the large Chinese shipment was too great for
the storage capacity and a third much older incinerator, that had been
mothballed in 2053, was pressed into service.
It was an American design manufactured one hundred years earlier in 1953. This was many years before the ‘incident' of 2019 and was calibrated in degrees Fahrenheit. It seems that operatives on the ground had misread the paper manual and had set the controls to 451 degrees Celsius in error. This excessive temperature
was well above what was needed and led to an explosion inside the main chamber and a
great fire then spread quickly.
Response
from the University.
When we put our findings this afternoon to the CEO of Cambridge
University, historian Professor Dame Mary Stubble, she noted that “In history,
many societies have cleansed themselves by burning documents and books. The incineration
of the contents of Library of Congress during the third term of President
Trump who swept to absolute power in the wake of the ‘incident’ in 2019 is a good example”. She stressed that Cambridge University has “put
excess books to good use” by converting them to energy. There are vast
numbers of remaindered books from earlier this century produced by former
government ministers that studied at Oxford such as Geffrey Archer, Michael Gove and David
Willets, “They would no doubt be pleased to see so many copies of their books
converted to useful energy in Cambridge. Indeed, Geffrey Archer’s books alone
powered our campus for 42 days this summer”. She did also add “but it
is ironic that a simple error in reading an old paper copy of a manual had caused
the accident. Lessons will be learned about the toxic content of some books and
there would be more care taken with them in future."
Ray Faber-Granger, Special investigator and archivist.
No comments:
Post a Comment