34
Thursday, August 30, 1984/The Battalion/Page 5B
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Telecommuting: some choose
work at home rather than office
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United Press International
WEST LEBANON, N.H. —Lloyd
Kvam moved from New York to get
| out of the city. Later he left his office
[job to work behind a computer at
[home — and make more money.
Kvam, a data processing consul
tant, works in an office below the
I kitchen in his split-level home. He
|does most of his work there with an
.Apple computer for clients as far
I away as California.
Kvam is among a growing num
ber people known as telecommuters,
who have been able to leave tradi-
itional office settings by virtue of the
[powers of the microcomputer.
“Being on my own was by and
-large a matter of location,” said
Kvam, whose wife and two young
j daughters are often around when he
1 works.
Dave Rochat, another transient
[from greater New York, works at
home in nearby Chelsea, Vt., ma-
Jnaging a Washington-based money
market fund.
Rochat had spent about three
hours a day commuting from his
New Jersey home to a New York
brokerage firm before he moved to
his 75-acre farm four years ago.
“I’ve got four kids and a wife and
wanted a change in lifestyle. We
kind of knew what we wanted,” said
Rochat, who keeps an office over a
nearby funeral home.
A number of large companies, in
cluding Digital Equipment Corp.
and Southern New England Tele
phone, recently paid Electronic
Services Unlimited in New York to
study the effects and future of tele
commuting. The survey looked at
various programs and the jobs of
about 1,000 telecommuters.
The companies with successful
telecommuting programs spent time
developing a solid plan and made
sure a good manager was supervis
ing the right people, said Marcia M.
Kelly, president of Electronic Serv
ices.
“Obviously there are barriers and
disadvantages that have to be
thought out carefully,” she said.
“The thing people are most con
cerned with are the personnel is
sues.”
Those issues can become compli
cated with telecommuters, determin
ing what is a sick day or a day off
when someone goes to the computer
for an hour one morning.
Mike Lawson, a management in
formation systems specialist at Bos
ton University, wonders about legal
issues. For example, is an employee
covered by workers compensation if
he’s injured at home during the day?
Aetna Life and Casualty Co. in
Hartford, Conn., has allowed 16
programmers to do part of their
work at home for about two years,
but doesn’t have a defined policy to
deal with the personnel issues.
David Leclair, one of the pro
grammers, said no problems have
come up at Aetna — where the tele
commuting plan started as a conve
nience to everyone involved.
“The work we did required major
hunks of computer processing and it
made it easier to do it at night (when
the system isn’t being heavily used).
It saved us a lot of time,” he said.
Leclair will work at home about 12
hours in a typical week, and says he
wouldn’t want to be away from an
office environment all the time.
“It would be very, very difficult to
work at home all the time. I can’t see
doing it five days a week,” he said.
Kelly agrees the mix of work at
home and in the office is best for
most people. “We suggest people not
work at home 100 percent of the
time,” she said.
Leclair initially had doubts tele
commuting was for him at all. He
was worried that domestic distrac
tions would be a problem.
“At first it was, until finally I sat
down with the family and said this is
the story: When I log on to the sys
tem, I belong to Aetna just like I’m
30 miles away at work,”’ he said.
Everyone agrees telecommuting
isn’t for all people, but technical im
provements continue to make it eas
ier for those who want to give it a try.
ERA’S dumping process questioned
iw tube that J
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he person sieI
ing, he or il
) an emerge'^
ople, espeoi'l
m massive expsl
erial,” she said [
United Press International
HARLINGEN — A congressman
land an ecologist claim the Environ-
Imental Protection Agency botched
jthe recent emergency dumping of a
Ipesticide in the Gulf of Mexico.
But an EPA official called the
dumping “the safest way to handle a
[very bad situation.”
Rep. Kika De la Garza, D-Texas,
[said he is not convinced the 7,000
Icanisters of Brazilian-manufactured
aluminum phosphide pellets would
hiot damage the offshore environ-
nent.
And Sue Ann Fruge of the Gulf
dioast Coalition for Public Health
varned that some of the canisters
light float ashore and endanger
fexans.
The EPA contends the chemical,
ised to kill insects in stored grains,
pimply evaporated and is no longer
dangerous.
EPA spokesman Roger Meacham
said the situation became an emer
gency after an explosion killed a
Hbrklift operator unloading alumi
num phosphide from a Brazilian
ship on July 27 at the Port of Hous
ton.
The Coast Guard later discovered
that the batch of pesticide, which was
stored in a nitrogen-cooled van, had
begun heating up and destabilizing,
causing a risk of explosion, Mea
cham said.
He said the only alternative was to
risk transporting the substance over
land. The chemical becomes poison
ous phosphine gas when it contacts-
air or water.
De la Garza said the emer
gency disposal operation
“began to resemble a car
nival show in its clumsi
ness. ”
De la Garza, however, said the
emergency disposal operation “be
gan to resemble a carnival show in its
clumsiness” because initially the can
isters. containing the pellets simply
were unplugged and tossed into the
Gulf.
“After sinking several hundred
feet, the chemical began exploding
on contact with the sea water, but the
gas trapped in each bottle forced
them back to the surface where the
canister bobbed up and down on the
waves. The Coast Guard issued rifles
to sharpshooters to blast each canis
ter before it drifted dangerously
away,” he said.
After discovering the canisters
were not sinking, the Coast Guard
“switched disposal methods,” De la
Garza said.
“They began emptying each canis
ter upside down into the water as
they should have done in the first
place. The remaining canisters of
pellets, representing about 10 tons
of aluminumm phosphide, were dis
posed in this manner. ... Nothing
like good old ‘trial and error’ meth
odology for a chemical thought too
dangerous to keep on land.”
Meacham emphatically denied
Monday that the Coast Guard used
rifles to sink the canisters, saying
each receptable found still floating
was collected and chopped with a
fire ax to sink it. But the EPA
spokesman telephoned UPI today to
say he subsequently found out some
of the canisters were shot. “Kika De
la Garza was right,” Meacham said.
Meacham said his agency was so
sure that the potentially dangerous
pesticide was disposed of safely that
it plans no follow-up studies to de
termine after-effects, if any, of the
dumping 110 miles south of Galves
ton on Aug. 7-8.
Meacham said the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis
tration’s “worst case scenario,” de
vised by “some pretty good scientific
minds” prior to the (lumping, con
cluded “there could be some short
lived destruction of marine life, but
it appears that didn’t happen.”
The EPA spokesman also dis
counted Fruge’s fear that some of
the 3-pound canisters may have es
caped the Coast Guard and could
wash ashore.
“The chance of any of the canis
ters reaching shore are almost nil,
but if any of them do, the material
would be totally dispersed and dissi
pated,” Meacham said.
De la Garza said scientists have
told him there has been very little re-~
search on offshore dumping.
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