Declarations – West

No Risky Business

“However, we do not think it’s good risk management to put a group of gentlemen with weapons out in the desert at night, becoming involved in human- and drug-smuggling enforcement efforts.”

—Bill Hardy, executive director of the Arizona Counties Insurance Pool, explaining why the insurance pool that covers sheriff’s volunteers in 11 of Arizona’s 15 counties is changing its policies to exclude an armed volunteer posse to be deployed to scan the desert for smugglers.

No Habra El Niño

“The previous El Niño watch has been discontinued as the chance of El Niño has decreased.”

—Said the Climate Prediction Center two weeks into November, when it issued its monthly report. The U.S. national weather forecaster called off its El Niño watch five months after raising the alert, as it is now less likely that the much-feared phenomenon that can wreak havoc on global weather will emerge.

No Quacking Duck

“Odds are against a five-year farm bill in the lame duck (session) unless it’s part of a budget agreement.”

—Pat Westhoff of the think tank Food and Agricultural Policy Research, based at the University of Missouri, said referring to the likelihood that lawmakers will be unable to break their deadlock over enacting a five-year, $500 billion farm bill covering a wide range of agricultural policies from food stamps to crop subsidies and soil conservation.

No Halt Fault

“It just became blatantly obvious that you could have one rupture that goes from the next fault to the next to the next.”

—Peter Haeussler, an Alaskan research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said some researchers had thought an earthquake would come to a halt at the intersection of fault lines. The 2002 Denali Fault earthquake clearly broke that rule, and a decade later research connected to Denali has affected the way seismologists look at earthquakes.