Some Things to Worry About

• A Tornado Hitting a Hazardous Waste Site - Amy Lee Wyatt, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma, traces the patterns of tornado debris. Accoring to The Boston Sunday Globe, "the record is held by a sack of Kansas flour, moved 110 miles in 1915. But pieces of paper have been carried more than 200 miles..." Ms. Wyatt explains that "'Part of the reason behind the research was that we may be able to come up with the fallout pattern in cases of hazardous waste. ... We're working on articles right now that would be of use to forecasters if a tornado were to hit a hazardous waste site,' scattering toxic chemicals, radioactive material and medical waste..." November 26, 1995, p. 10  More...
• Falling Airliner Debris - "Like cars losing hub caps and mufflers on the freeways, airplanes periodically shed objects such as aluminum skins, access panels, fuselage doors, hot turbine blades, frozen sewage, cowlings, engine cones and even whole engines. Hurtling towards earth at hundreds of miles per hour, such fallout has punched gaping holes in roofs, crushed cars, plunged into crowded swimming pools, smashed school desks, showered people with human waste and set houses on fire." The Boston Sunday Globe, November 26, 1995, p. 24.
• Strange Matter - "If you have trouble sleeping, you don't want to know about the physicist's worst nightmare: an atom smasher produces a new form of matter even more stable than everyday protons and neutrons, thereby triggering a cataclysmic, self-sustaining reaction that consumes the earth." There is believed to be no risk of this from any existing accelerator, however, because conditions more extreme than the ones they create already arise from cosmic ray collisions. Scientific American, August 1993, p. 17.  More...
• Killer Bees - "Africanized bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) are descendants of a group of queens that were brought to Brazil in 1956 from South Africa... Moving north at a rate of many tens of miles a year, they have totally displaced European bees in their path. They have already reached Texas, and it is believed that they will reach a northern limit in mid-California in the West and North Carolina in the East, by about 1997." Unlike European bees, "an Africanized colony will explode into hundreds or thousands of enraged bees at the slightest provocation. Such attacks killed 100 people in Venezuela in 1978. In one incident in Costa Rica in 1986, a hiker evidently disturbed a colony, then caught his foot in a crack in a rock while trying to run away. His body was found later - with 8,000 stings." The Boston Globe, March 12, 1992. The first person killed by Africanized bees in the U.S. was an 82-year-old rancher named Lino Lopez, according to a Globe story on July 20, 1993, p. 3. More...
• Radioacticity from Burning Coal - "In 1982 ... U.S. coal-burning power plants .. released 801 tons of uranium and 1,971 tons of thorium into the environment... Roughly 11,371 pounds of the uranium was U-235. Ironically, in 1982, 111 U.S. nuclear power plants used 540 tons of nuclear fuel to generate electricity. Thus, 'the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels.'" So concluded researcher W. Alex Gabbard, in work reported in Science News, October 1, 1994, p. 223.
• The "Moth Effect" - "In 1988 in the state of Illinois, more than 54,000 drivers collided with cars parked legally on the side of the road. Such roadside collisions occurred, on average, once every 7-1/2 minutes - and most happened during good weather on straight, dry roads, with drivers not impaired by alcohol or medication." The reason was the so-called "moth effect" - "the tendency of drivers to focus on an object outside their intended path of travel and steer involuntarily into it." AAA World, April, 1992, p. 6.
• Terrorism Using Stolen Russian Nuclear Material - "Roughly 800 to 1,200 tons of highly enriched uranium and another 200 tons of plutonium," enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons, "are held in a vast nuclear 'archipelago' of several hundred sites, including storage depots, navy bases, and abandoned civilian research labs--most of which have less security than any major U.S. airport." So say Graham Allison, Owen Cote, Richard Falkenrath and Stephen Miller in Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material (MIT Press 1996). The book contends that stolen nuclear material will sooner or later become the terrorist weapon of choice, unless the United States buys the material (for $30 billion) before it is stolen.
• Fake ATMs - In 1993 a group of computer-literate thieves set up a bogus automatic teller machine in a shopping mall in Manchester Connecticut. The machine dispensed money for a time, but then ran out. "While customers were using the machine, the ATM recorded their account numbers and personal identification codes... The thieves then made counterfeit bank cards encoded with account information and used them to withdraw money" from other ATMs. The Boston Globe, May 12, 1993.
• Rogue Weather Balloons - "Rogue balloon nearing Norway.  Oslo - A balloon as tall as a 25-story building moved toward Norwegian airspace last night, after jet fighters from three countries were unable to bring it down.  The balloon, which if deflated would cover an area equal to five football fields, broke out of control after being launched last Monday from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, to measure ozone levels.  Commercial air traffic over the North Atlantic had to be rerouted to avoid the helium-filled balloon.  Two Canadian CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 cannon rounds at it off the coast of Newfoundland on Thursday.  Two Nimrod aircraft from Britain's Royal Air Force shadowed the balloon on Saturday before a US Orion plane took up the chase.  (Reuters)"  The Boston Globe, August 31, 1998, p. A8.
• More: Bucket drownings, Sinkholes.