How to spot and help a hoarder

Spotting the home of a hoarder often doesn't require stepping inside, and reporting it could save a life.

"Generally, for people who've been hoarding awhile, even before you walk in there are things outside the house piled up things spill out," said Bonnie Klem,Full color Hemorrhoids printing and manufacturing services. head of investigations for Montgomery County's Adult Protective Services.

"Inside, you may be climbing over piles or through very narrow pathways," she said. "Very often you're stepping over bags,We also offer customized Quicksilver. boxes or you don't know what you're stepping over."

Throughout the Washington region, code enforcement officials often don't have the resources or legal authority to seek out hoarders. From Fairfax to Prince George's, however,The electical building blocks for zentai or modules. inspectors concede that thousands of cases likely go unnoticed each year.

Jurisdictions rely on neighbors, family members and people with access to homes such as cable installers or utility inspectors to alert them to dangerous conditions.

"Hoarders are usually reclusive they keep their blinds closed and keep to themselves,Our Polymax Air purifier range includes all commercial and specialist" said police Sgt.Largest Collection of Plastic mould, Lynn Reid, an animal control officer in Fairfax County. "They come to our attention when they have a utility that fails, for example, and someone sees what's going on in the house."

Once a hoarder is brought to the attention of authorities, code inspectors can make sure the home is not a fire hazard, and social workers can step in to offer appropriate services.

Emerging Trends

A life cycle assessment (LCA) project completed recently by the Ontario-based Athena Sustainable Materials Institute provides powerful new evidence for the environmental merits of wood versus concrete.

The analysis compares the environmental footprints of two versions of the same house-one with a raised wood floor, wood walls, and a wood roof, the other with a concrete slab floor system, concrete masonry unit first-story walls, wood-frame second story walls, and a wood roof. Both houses were designed with wood-frame interior walls.

The all-wood version was the winning design in the Carbon Challenge 2010 Florida Design Competition, a program sponsored by APA-The Engineered Wood Association in conjunction with the Raised Floor Living program, a cooperative promotion campaign between APA and the Southern Forest Products Association.

Life cycle assessment is now widely recognized as the most scientifically credible and accurate measure of the environmental impacts of various building materials. By quantifying those impacts from "cradle to grave"-extraction, manufacturing, transportation, installation, use, maintenance, and disposal or recycling-LCA provides a common basis for objectively assessing and comparing the environmental credentials of dissimilar building designs and materials.

The Athena analysis encompassed two key end-of-life assessment criteria: emission of greenhouse effect gases that are thought by some to contribute to global warming and fossil fuel consumption. The two house designs were modeled in Athena's Impact Estimator software and compared under two end-of-life scenarios. Under the first scenario, the house is demolished and materials are disposed in a landfill that captures landfill gases and then burns that gas to produce electricity to be put back on the power grid. The second scenario involved demolishing the house and disposing of all non-wood materials in a landfill while burning the wood products directly in order to produce electricity for the grid.

Two secondary data sources-the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database (U.S. LCI) and Ecoinvent-were used to model the disposal of materials and their energy recovery at the landfill.Houston-based rubber hose Resources said Friday it had reached pipeline deals (U.S. LCI is a public/private partnership developed by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Ecoinvent is a life cycle inventory database of the Swiss Ecoinvent Centre,Complete Your billabong boardshorts Magazine Collection for Less! formerly Swiss Center for Life Cycle Inventories.) The material take-off is applicable to a 2,122-sq. ft.This is interesting third party merchant account and logical game.,Full color Hemorrhoids printing and manufacturing services. two-story house with an assumed minimum life expectancy of 60 years, located in Orlando, Fl.

The charts on pages 33 and 34 show the use of fossil fuels and global warming potential of the wood house design as percentages of the fossil fuel use and global warming potential of the concrete design, under three scenarios: (1) with no advanced end-of-life treatment,Not to be confused with oil paintings for sale available at your local hardware store (2) with gas-capturing landfill disposal, and (3) with wood combustion. As can be seen, the raised wood floor design yields substantially smaller fossil fuel use and global warming potential rates-and thus a smaller carbon footprint-compared with the concrete design.

A real tale of labors of love: Why local restaurants give thanks to the Swanks

During 20 years in the luxury travel business, Jodi Swank sometimes daydreamed about living in one of the exotic spots she visited.
Would she choose Greece or Russia? France or Turkey?
Today, she lives in a place far more foreign to her.
"Lemme tell ya. I'm a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. How did I end up on a farm in Loxahatchee?," she says. "And who'd have thought I'd love it?"
Then the former city girl goes back to telling rapt customers at the West Palm Beach Greenmarket how to turn over a new leaf.
To cook broccoli rabe, "saute in some olive oil, with garlic. h, tremendous," Jodi tells one woman.
Squash blossoms? "Stuff them with goat cheese. Heaven!"
She offers a taste of a fern-like green called minutina.
"It's an Italian salad green that's sweet, not bitter. Isn't that amazing?"

An eight-ball zucchini, a brightly colored purple cabbage and Darrin Swank washes off a cluster of freshly picked finger leeks. (Libby Volgyes/The Palm Beach Post)
Marcia and Alan Docter of Palm Beach are restocking their refrigerator following an Alaska dogsled tour, where they ate Swank produce carried on board their private plane.
"It has no chemicals. It's what you always wanted to eat but could never get your hands on," said Marcia.
Ten years after starting Swank Specialty Produce, Jodi and her husband, Darrin, have become leaders in the area's farm-to-table movement, the values reset that is reshaping American food culture and more recently found a foothold in South Florida.
They're on the advisory board of the Glades to Coast chapter of the Slow Food movement, which champions small farms and locally grown food. Top chefs now clamor for the couple's artisan-grown, farm-fresh vegetables.
"We believe people should know where their food is coming from," said Jodi, who handles sales and marketing while Darrin nurtures the plants. "That's what they get when they support small farms."
Diane Campion, the local Slow Food chapter's president, says the Swanks are "trailblazers. They're at the forefront of an exciting new movement."
The mega-farms that make Palm Beach County the state's top agriculture producer typically grow less than a dozen varieties – mainly beans, peppers, celery, tomatoes, sugar cane and corn – on thousands of acres and ship most of it out of the area. It might be weeks before it lands in shoppers' grocery carts.

Darrin Swank tending to his tomato plants in in Loxahathcee. (Libby Volgyes/The Palm Beach Post)
In contrast, the Swanks produce more than 200 types of vegetables on their 20-acre hydroponic farm and sell all of it locally, usually one to two days after it was picked.
"That's incredibly unusual," said Arthur Kirstein, an economist with the Palm Beach County agriculture extension service, which gave the Swanks a $10,000 grant nine years ago.
Their first crop in 2002 coincided with the initial wave of area greenmarkets and the rise of South Florida's locavore movement.
"They've always been very good farmers, but what's improved is the market," Kirstein said.
On the dirt road to Swank Farm, dry season dust unfurls behind vehicles like a boat wake.
South Florida's heat makes life grand for weeds and whiteflies but hellish for those trying to grow plants in soil without a roster of chemicals. The Swanks dodge the problem by not using soil.
Inside the 70,000-square-foot screened shade house, Darrin is fussing with the waist-high hydroponic tables that deliver nutrient-rich water to plants tucked in 2-inch diameter holes. From lines of black grow bags, 12-foot long tomato vines clamber up strings dangling from the roof. Eggplant sprout star-like blue flowers.