WIWIHJHIII'IIHIIWIIIIH NATURAL
DISASTER
HURRICANE HAVOC Storms affected Florida's environment, industry, and some science facilities
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DEBRIS About 800 16-by 4-foot panels were torn off the south side of Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building as Frances made landfall.
S HURRICANE IVAN—THE
third hurricane in about as many weeks—appeared to be heading toward Florida last week, rescue and cleanup crews already had their hands full dealing with the aftermath of Hurricanes Charley and Frances. At least three lives have been lost. Frances alone is expected to result in an estimated $2 billion to $20 billion worth of insurance claims in Florida. Other damage included ahuge acidic wastewater spill from a phosphate fertilizer plant nearTampa and serious damage to buildings at NASAs Kennedy Space Center. President George W Bush has formally asked Congress to pass emergency supplemental funding of $2 billion to be used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for emergency cleanup, emergency protective measures, and assistance to individuals and to support disaster response efforts of the Small Business Administration. To ease cleanup and recovery
efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency for aperiod waived some Clean Air Act requirements on gasoline in order to quickly get supplies into affected areas. The agency allowed sale of high-sulfur diesel fuel—normally used for offroad vehicles—for use in all vehicles, for example. Property loss included some science facilities. An estimated $700,000 worth of damage was wreaked by Hurricane Charley at NASAs Kennedy Space Center. With Frances, NASA reported more storm damage, including "severe" damage to its huge 40story Vehicle Assembly Building and the building where space shuttle thermal protection system tiles are manufactured. Florida is home to many research institutions and quite a few universities. An informal poll by C&EN yielded one report of minor damage to the University of Florida, Gainesville. Damage that may have occurred at other research institutions could not be ascertained as ofC&EN press time.
Business was spared Frances' wrath in some places but not others. Many of Florida's organic chemistry-based companies, for example, are at the western end of the state's panhandle, an area not significandy affected by the storm. However, several of Florida's phosphate fertilizer producers, scattered about the state's midriff, were in the path of Frances. On Sunday, Sept. 5, a dike broke at Cargill Crop Nutrition's Riverview complex nearTampa, dumping more than 40 million gal of acidic wastewater into a creek that feeds Hillsborough Bay State officials had warned Cargill in August that a stretch of the dike was not as thick as it should be. At a Sept. 6 press conference, Cargill Vice President Gray Gordon apologized for the incident. ""We're very upset about this, very concerned," he said. According to the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, the outlook for the 2004 hurricane season calls for 12 to 15 tropical storms to be generated; six to eight will become hurricanes, and two to four will become major hurricanes. The increased hurricane activity has been linked to warmer than normal sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. — WILLIAM SCHULZ
PHARMACEUTICALS
Drug Industry Trade Group Unveils Clinical Trials Database he leading U.S. pharmaceutical trade association announced last week that it will launch a public database to communicate the results of clinical studies for drugs on the market. The move by the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) comes amid mounting pressure on drug companies to provide access to clinical trial results, both positive and negative (see page 19). Companies including Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck have already announced individual initiatives in the wake of a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer claiming that Glaxo withheld negative information from trials of its antidepressant Paxil (paroxetine hydrochloride) in children. PhRMA says it developed the registry as part of à three-year clinical trial reporting project. Critics say the database, which will be available on Oct. 1 at http://www.clinicalstudyresults.org,
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is inadequate in that it is voluntary and focused only on latestage trial results—primarily, Phase III and postclinical studies for drugs already on the market. Meanwhile, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors issued a statement last week saying it will require clinical studies to be registered in a public directory as a condition for publication. ICMJE says trials must be registered at or before the onset of patient enrollment, and that this policy applies to any trial that starts enrollment after July 1, 2005. ICMJE says registries must be free, open to all prospective registrants, electronically searchable, and managed by a notfor-profit organization. The group claims that http://www. clinicaltrials.gov, a registry operated by the National Library of Medicine, is the only one that currently meets all its criteria.— RICKMULLIN
HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
