by Bobby Fontaine
June 16, 2008

How do I tell the rest of the story? What the heck, you won’t believe it anyway so I guess the best way is to just tell it. It’s not very complicated. I mean I figured it out and I only have a high school GED. I do have one year of college but what I mean is that it’s the smart ones with all the fancy paper framed and hanging on their walls who won’t believe it, the experts who wouldn’t believe it coming from me even if they knew I was right, which kind of puts a damper on you having any reason to take me seriously. But I might as well give it a shot. The truth will come out sooner or later.

Hurricane Katrina wreaks havoc

Every day I see science articles that take the fact finding evolution process one-step closer to outing my science leaving me behind with a story to tell that’s irrelevant because someone qualified to take credit for it stepped up and plucked it from my future.  What I’ve found isn’t even much of a leap of brilliance but an obvious fact that doesn’t take a genius to figure out. But science is very competitive where people like me aren’t even allowed to be in the line for who gets to cross the finish line first while easy answers to what makes the world turn don’t get big grants for research.  But who knows, maybe you’ll believe me and even act on what I tell you helping bring something very bad to an end before it gets any worse

So here it is.  I got sick from drinking well water with a chemical additive to gasoline called MTBE in 1998. It made me sensitive to exhaust fumes coming from cars burning gasoline with MTBE in it. My health was gone. My life was totally consumed by defending my body from MTBE exhaust fumes. Then I discovered that the weather patterns where I live reflected patterns in my health. I found that on cold days, the air where I lived was not so bad except near the ground where the MTBE fumes were condensed close to it. On mild days, the fumes expanded rising up to where I couldn’t escape it unless I wore a charcoal filter respirator, even in my home.

(For those of you who have read some of my other pieces where it sounds like I am being redundant, hang in there, you do not want to miss where this is going.)

On hot days, I still had trouble breathing but I could think much more clearly because the neurotoxins in the pollutants were rising up into the atmosphere before they effected me badly. And out the process that evolved from learning how to center my life around dodging pollution, I found correlations between my health and weather patterns that were so distinct that I was able to tell what the weather would be like where I live, in particular when we would get rain, based on my health symptoms. When I was sure there was something to what I was finding being correct, I went looking for science that reflected what I thought was causing this phenomenon. At a NASA website, I found articles published by professor Drew Shindell whose been successfully linking weather pattern changes to low level ozone causing pollutants, low level ozone, and methane, interacting with water vapor.

It had also become obvious I was right from another more easily observed perspective once I knew what I was looking for, that weather patterns followed a Monday to Friday schedule caused by rush hours during the workweek that we then change on the weekends. In fact there were news articles regularly published in the 90’s about how low level ozone smog builds up during the morning rush hour starting rising into the upper atmosphere. But as everyone gets to work, it starts to settle again. Then as people come home during the evening rush hour, a new cloud of ozone pollutants gets under the morning one giving it the lift it needs to get high enough into the atmosphere to not settle again. Then morning comes and the whole process starts over. But on the weekends, the pollution and the water vapor it mixes with during the workweek has a chance to settle until Monday when the whole process repeats itself.

So I had found something right under everyone’s nose that no one was putting together correctly but me. To me, it was a huge boost for my self-esteem because I’d been recently told I had no legal recourse for getting compensated for what had happened to my health because the oil industry is such a preferred customer in Washington DC that they never did the required testing on MTBE. So not only was there not treatment available for what it had done to me, I also couldn’t sue anyone because I needed the test results to prove what caused me to get sick.   

At the time when I was sure MTBE was causing weather pattern changes, there was a nationwide drought in the Northeast part of the country that I live in. It was particularly bad to the point it was being talked about greatly. In fact I had heard it reported in the news media that meteorologists had pinpointed the cause of the drought to a huge mass of air stalled over the US that was preventing big storm systems from forming. That was the icing on the cake I was looking for because it was exactly what my theory was saying was happening, that a huge bubble of pollution was forming in the upper atmosphere that was making all the normal levels of water vapor too gaseous to come back down as rain as long as MTBE fumes were keeping it afloat, like a huge hot air balloon that won’t come down as long as more hot gas is pumped into it.

So I called in a favor from a friend who put me in touch with a reporter from the Washington Times newspaper who took the time to let me explain everything that had lead to my conclusions about what was causing the drought. She even agreed with me that it sounded like all the dots in my theory connected but told me she couldn’t simply report the story coming from me without risking the paper getting sued by the oil industry. So she said she would write a story, which she did, about how I got sick from MTBE drinking polluted well water. Meanwhile she said she would dig around Capitol Hill for evidence that would allow her to report the whole story without fear  of a lawsuit. That was on July 21, 1999, on a Wednesday.

On July 25, 1999, a few days later on a Sunday, President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, the head of the EPA Carroll Browner, and the head of the agriculture department, Dan Glickman, dropped what they were doing, going to church, laying around the pool, mowing the grass, whatever they were doing and said MTBE use needed to be stopped immediately. In those days, MTBE wasn’t a topic anyone in Washington discussed easily. MTBE was a huge boondoggle waiting to blow up in the American people’s face that everyone in that city was responsible for making happen.

And of course my biggest questions for doubters of my story is what did the agriculture department have a concern about MTBE for when there was a drought affecting crops everywhere that everyone in the nation was concerned about in one way or another. Then a day or two after their announcement about MTBE, I watched him on C-SPAN where people called in live to ask him questions. Not only did he appear very nervous to the point of sweating it seemed profusely, he never brought up the issue of MTBE while all he talked about was the drought.

So to me, I had hit a sore nerve in Washington. And since they were the people responsible for my life’s down fall, I was pleased, ecstatic was really closer to how I felt. Within a few weeks, I felt like my health was returning to normal while the air where I lived was moving again like it wasn’t stale or stalled anymore. It had felt like there was pressure around my head since I had gotten sick. It was like I was suffocating in a balloon.

I’ll never forget this next part of the story. It was August 17, 1999. I had mowed the grass the day before without getting terribly sick. I went to the front porch early that morning, I guess to see if it was true, that I had really mowed the grass without a respirator while rush hour traffic sat idling next to my yard. I knew I had won, that it had all changed, that things were finally back to normal as I looked out at the cars backing up in front of my house as the morning rush hour was beginning. I remember thinking it was the end, that the atmosphere was back to the way it was before I got sick, that the environment and I had been cured of a similar disease getting a second chance at living life the way we were meant to before MTBE came along.

That night I was watching the news eating dinner. Actually I think I was drinking beer bothering my roommate while she was eating dinner. I was in such a good mood that I was going on and on about my political conquest and theory about weather patterns being effected by MTBE. That’s when it all changed, for them and for me, them being the enemy, the people who put MTBE in gasoline in the first place. I saw the story and knew what had caused it immediately. I don’t know how I knew really. I guess it was just that big things don’t happen twice on the same day. There had been a tremendously destructive earthquake in Istanbul Turkey. My buzz sunk to the bottom of my heart as the glee I felt for my health went out to the victims of that earthquake.

There had been an a tornado Salt Lake City, Utah a week or so before in what was thought to be the “least tornado-prone state in the USA” where a lot of destruction occurred with one loss of life. That was back when natural seeming disasters were so rare that when something happened, it was all that was being talked about, much like our political spectrum then was calm but now it’s so volatile we believe this in normal. But nowadays, so many bad things happen every day in both our natural and social environments, no one notices them as anything out of the ordinary.

There had been a lot of other above average harsh storms around that time that reflected what I thought was the greenhouse bubble of MTBE settling to the ground when they stopped using it. So when I saw the earthquake happen just as I felt the MTBE balloon had landed, to me it was a no brainer. I saw a mass of trillions of tons of atmosphere like a hot air balloon that wasn’t sitting above the earth’s surface come down to rest where it used to be moving a few plates around under the surface of the planet. It was simple and obvious, not that anyone would believe it. But I did and that was all that was necessary for me to stay interested enough to keep an eye out for any other MTBE/earthquake seeming related events in the future.
 
See what was happening was the atmosphere was coming back down to earth to rest where it belonged but all the water vapor that used to be on the ground before the drought was still in the clouds. But as it was coming back down to where it had come from, it was running into the jet stream which was carrying it east towards the Atlantic ocean, which this just so happened to be during hurricane season.  

So I watched as hurricane after hurricane came slamming its way towards the East Coast of the US with people along the southern state coastlines evacuating. And with each hurricane, my prediction was that they wouldn’t come inland because the air was still too dry to sustain the excessive moisture needed to drive a hurricane over land. But all the experts were sure they were going to do a lot of damage so there were massive evacuations going on. And each time, I was right. As the hurricane hit the coast, it would stop and then start moving north following large amounts of water vapor coming down out of the upper atmosphere hitting the easterly flowing jet stream dumping it over the Atlantic ocean where it was then heading back towards land riding the backs of these hurricanes that couldn’t make it inland because the land was still too dry from the drought.

As my swelled head road on a cloud of overconfidence from being right when the experts were wrong, my self esteem took a dive as both hurricanes came crashing inland when they hit the coast of North Carolina. I remember loosing sleep trying to figure it out. But there was no way around the fact that those hurricanes coming inland threw a wrench into my theory. But the second one, Floyd, came inland and north far enough to end the drought in one land drenching rain. So I forgot about my theory that MTBE was causing the hurricanes going back to looking at it causing earthquakes as new evidence showed earthquakes are also caused drought ending rain where groundwater levels that had receded when trillions of tons of water rose into the sky came back down all at once.

This second earthquake happened in Taipei Taiwan. It was pretty bad too, like the one in Istanbul. And it was hard to decide whether to pursue exploiting how they happened exposing my country being responsible for them. But then if I didn’t try, there could be more that would be on my head for not having tried to do something. And the East Coast US where I live rests on a not very active but potentially dangerous fault, as well as others throughout the country that could be effected by what was being done. So I wouldn’t have been protecting our national interests by keeping silent about what I was finding. In fact I’d long before reached the conclusion that putting MTBE in the world’s gasoline was not a US conspiracy, that it was linked more to the international banking community largely based in Europe.

So my trying to expose it was an effort to thwart the advances of foreign agents on my soil who had corrupted my all too eager to sell out our freedom political leadership. I assure those of you who have been reading my work, when I break this story, the people behind this scheme will be from all walks of life and nationalities. And you will not believe what their motive is, which I will share with you in future articles.

For some reason, an instinct maybe, my curiosity kept me awake for a few nights wondering about the distance between where the center of the drought was in Washington DC and Istanbul Turkey. Istanbul is on an equal longitudinal parallel with our nation’s capitol. I also wanted to know the distance between Istanbul and Taipei Taiwan. I had plotted their locations on a globe where I could see clearly that whatever strain the drought had caused the earthen plates was finally being realized when groundwater levels rose back to normal all at once with the stress was relieving itself in front of us as the world turns east where the earthquakes happened. I could also see  the pressure was heading towards the equator as Taipei is south east of Istanbul. So I checked the distances between Washington and Istanbul, and then Istanbul and Taipei, to find there was only a 17-mile difference, which is about what I thought it would be based on an instinct.

So I figured there was something to what I was looking at, that their were stress values related to how much water left the soil in the Northeast US slowly over a long period of time that weren’t realized until the atmosphere settled back to normal with the bone dry ground being primed like a mouse trap waiting to be set off. Then the same stress factors were realized again when groundwater levels came back up to normal.

At this point, a few people were taking notice of what I was saying. I had been right about too many things to not be on to something. So I was put on the spot to predict the next earthquake. My thinking was there was an imbalance working its way to the equator to cast the remaining stress factors not yet realized by the earth’s crust out into space like water coming off a bicycle tire being ridden in the rain where water shoots off the center of the tire into the riders face. Only on this planetary tire, the earth is spinning the other way where the pressure is being thrown off in front of where the stress is so it’s more like a train derailing so all the cars behind where the derailment happened get lurched to a halt where some buckle and come off the tracks.

The earth spins to the east but the earthen plates are moving west. I see the earth like a tire with a bubble on it, the bubble being land that’s clunking along because it’s out of balance with the rest of the rotating tire. At one time, all the continents were connected where the rest of the earth was nothing but ocean. But over millions of years, like a potter shapes a bowl or vase with his hands on the inside and outside of the clay as it spins on a potter’s wheel, the internal molten lava along with the oceans water have been slowly moving the continents around so weight is evenly distributed around the globe. So when there are changes in water weight on the surface of the land, it effects this process just like if a potter changes the pressure beaten his hands or their position related to his other hand.

So I looked at my globe with my stickers pasted where the earthquakes happened spinning it and forecast that the next earthquake would likely be in the middle of the Pacific ocean where I would never know that it happened. But I also said one could strike in Mexico. I further stated that surely there could be an earthquake or volcano in South America on the equator as the stress relieving process ended.

A couple weeks later, which was the amount of time I said it would take to happen, I got a call from one of the people I related my prediction to who was excited because there had been an earthquake in Oaxaca Mexico.  Again I got a call a few weeks after that when a volcano erupted on the equator in Ecuador, which happened in Quito on a latitudinal parallel with Washington DC like the one in Turkey had been but longitudinally.

So what I was looking at was like a crack in the earth’s crust starting where the earth’s surface had been pounded like a hammer had struck it that ran full circle from Washington DC around the globe ending on the equator in Quito Ecuador. And when I started using this new information in my campaigns to stop MTBE, my campaigns became for more effective leading me to believe I was right about my claims, otherwise why would the government and oil industry flinch so quickly when confronted with it.

Once Bush got elected, the new MTBE battleground became getting a liability waiver for MTBE producers so they couldn’t be sued for any damages MTBE had caused while putting that responsibility on US taxpayers. They were saying it was about polluted groundwater but there were already lawsuits that weren’t being won and a lot of clean up already in progress. Based on the oil industry own projections, cleaning up MTBE nationwide would only cost a few billion dollars. But I found that every time I got sick after that, it was because they were trying to sneak this liability waiver into an energy bill so no one would notice it but they didn’t want to debate an additive to gasoline that was supposed to be in gasoline but was actually not being used.

So they would put it back in making me sick signaling it was time to start broadcasting what and why they were really trying to get this liability waiver - to get out of being sued by foreign countries for causing those earthquakes while making the American tax payer responsible for what they had done. And whenever I started broadcasting my crazy sounding story around the country, they would stop what they were doing with the energy bill and MTBE would be taken out of gasoline, which would always cause a lot of violent weather patterns as the new cloud of gas and water vapor settled back to earth. 

Eventually they arrested me but it didn’t work. Even from behind bars in a federal detention center in Houston Texas, I was still able to stop them from getting their amendment in energy bill passed without the news media having to report about what they were doing. But they did get to use MTBE for a number of months while I was in there before I was able to regroup and figure out how to be effective against them while locked up. Once I got my bearings dialed in, they pulled it back out of gasoline like they always had. Weather patterns returned to normal. Then flooding rains from hurricanes came to drought ridden regions, which of course was followed by more catastrophic earthquakes.

See when they took it out of gasoline, weather patterns would return to normal. Since they were pretending it was still in use, it made it hard for me to explain that MTBE was causing weather pattern changes when there weren’t any. So really the only times I was able to be effective in getting my story out was when it was being used so people could relate to what I was claiming about workweek weather patterns first hand. But when the threshold for believing my story was for the reader to have to listen to a long winded conspiracy theory about how the government and oil industry were pretending to be using MTBE but not actually using to made it impossible for me to get the truth out. I mean who would take something sounding that crazy seriously? Certainly I wouldn’t if the shoe was on the another foot. But when they put it back in so it was effecting weather patterns the way I was saying it was, it made my job a whole lot easier.
 
After they were finally forced to release me from the federal prison system, they tried again to pass their liability waiver only having to debate it before a public that was well aware of what they were doing. This took the winds out of my sailing too hard against them since they weren’t hiding anything. But the measure failed anyway under it own merits without my help in taking it down. But they did put MTBE back in gasoline while they tried, taking it out when they were finished because weather patterns were coming in weekly cycles making it easy for me to show MTBE was the cause.

That’s when hurricanes Katrina and Rita followed the water vapor cloud that was settling back into the lower atmosphere back to New Orleans and Houston where refineries were dumping emissions into the atmosphere that usually would be used to produce MTBE. That was because without the liability waiver, they couldn’t ship it overseas pretending it was in use because no one would buy it anymore. Then at the exact time another Northeast drought ended when the hurricanes left over rains filled our nation’s capitol’s groundwater back to normal capacity, there was another tragic earthquake, this time in Pakistan.

Of course there is a lot more to this story than I am telling you here. There are much more provoking aspects to it while I have a great deal of documented evidence to support my claims. And I know I tend to write long articles you put a lot of time into reading while I don’t give you all my supporting evidence or tell you the whole story. But to tell it all and support it with evidence would be a book, which I have already written. And to keep it the shortest I possibly could would mean to tell my story without the details that make it personal. Making it personal is the only way I have a chance at your thinking I might know what I‘m talking about. By trying to give you a way to see yourself in my shoes, it may create questions about the veracity of my claims along with a demand for more information and further debate on this issue. I figure all I need is for one aspect of this overall story to break out in the open where it validates I’m right about at least one thing. Then I will have credibility that can be challenged by whatever part of the story is left out by the vetting process that brought my story to the surface in the first place.  

So a year after the energy bill passed in 2005, MTBE use ended, this time without it being pretended that it was still in use. And the thing was, for the most part, it hadn’t been in use at the time. There were sporadic periods when it was used as old stores of it were being burned up to make way for the new MTBE, ethanol. And it was some stinky rotten left over MTBE  too. It made me as sick as I had ever been from it in the past even when it would only be around for a few days, or even if I just happened to get behind someone who was bringing it through town from another region or state where the exhaust fumes invaded the cab on my car. But when it was finally gone, I was relieved.

I didn’t know what new problems ethanol would bring. But knowing the people who did all this to the world, they would have used the worst gasoline additive they could first saving the lesser of two evils if something happened to the first one. Ethanol is just moonshine. Its polluting byproducts are acetaldehyde instead of the formaldehyde that comes from MTBE. Acetaldehyde is what causes hangovers. So in my mind there was hope because the new additive is already part of the human diet where MTBE is just straight up poison. Sure enough, ethanol didn’t bother me as bad as MTBE. It also didn’t seem to effect weather patterns, accept that it rained every week on the same days, which was actually good because with MTBE, it didn’t rain at all and then there would be devastating flooding.

As the winter of 2006 set in, I began to see weather patterns developing that were disturbing with a lot of warming when it should have been cold all coming in the usual MTBE style workweek patterns. In the spring of 2007, a drought began in the south eastern states. By the time fall rolled around, it was worse than it had even been before even as other droughts had taken years to form. So I was on the lookout for a drought ending rain causing another cataclysmic earthquake dragging my war onto a new battlefield with my new enemy being corn farmers and ethanol refiners instead of the oil industry, which has made ethanol hard to attack because farming and corn seem to most people to be so clean and apple pie American compared to the oil companies who get their fossil fuels from other countries whose governments are anything but models for how we run this country, or how we’re supposed to be running it.

So I made a video posting it on YouTube telling the basics of my story forecasting a apocalyptic earthquake when the drought in the south ended. Then I sat and waited. But as winter set in, the South started to get rain, not drought ending rain. They didn’t use ethanol down there during the summer. It’s too hot where it can cause a whole range of problem because anhydrous ethanol is so gaseous. I had long before figured out that this was probably the reason for the drought because rain was moved across the country in weekly patterns all summer long but bypassed the states where ethanol wasn’t being used. Then they would crawl up through northern states that use ethanol and head out to sea. But as soon as the Southern states started their winter ethanol programs, the rains started coming back.

I had never followed a drought ending slowly over a long period of time. But I expected I could lose a really good chance to show how drought ending rains cause earthquakes if groundwater in the South didn’t rise back to normal all at once. So I got thinking that if big drought ending rains cause apocalyptic earthquakes, perhaps rains that don’t end a drought causes smaller ones. I started tracking rainstorms through the South comparing when they happened to when earthquakes were happening around the planet. I found indeed it does occur, that when there was a great deal of rain in the Southeast, earthquake activity rose significantly while always following the same kinds of patterns heading east and towards the equator. I also discovered a new phenomenon I hadn’t seen before where earthquakes and volcanic activity also increase in latitudinal direction from Maine down to the Antarctic.

Although a lot of what I was finding was thought provoking to me, it wasn’t enough to convince the average person I was right unless they were interested enough to patiently take a course in what I was working on. For most people, they want it laid out like the news, short and sweet with a big boom somewhere in the picture to wake them up to the reality of it. Without that, it simply was not going to catch their interest.

So around New Year’s with workweek driving habits having changed dramatically for the holiday season, there were a great deal of storms and flooding in California and Nevada. It flooded a lot of desert that’s usually,,,, well, dry, it’s a desert. And much of it was coming in the form of ten feet of snow, which in the desert, rain usually floods its way through the terrain quickly leaving the ground dry almost as fast is it had come and gone. When that happened, there were earthquakes everywhere.

I had been building maps charting daily earthquakes around the globe putting them in videos showing national rain patterns for a particular day and then the resulting earthquakes when this happened. But the video really seemed to drag making it difficult to grab the audiences attention explaining why what I was showing them was so important. You have to understand, earthquakes caused by changes in the earth’s surface weight as it relates to water is nothing new. And it’s not revolutionary to think shifts in weight in one part of the planet can cause earthquakes in another. So it is not a leap of science to believe earthquakes are caused by droughts ending. But for whatever reason, scientists refuse to go there, which is good for me in a way because if I can prove this to be true, it puts me in a position to expose everything about why I am interested in this topic in the first place.

So I had daily earthquakes and the rain that caused them charted in a boring sequence of thought provoking events when it flooded in the California Nevada desert. Man, it was perfect. What happened made it very hard to refute what I had been trying to explain in the video. So I finished producing it posting it on Googles video service, which you can view it below. For me, that was it, I had enough. I had a small following of witnesses who followed my work through the winter watching me document what I was finding. But the drought wasn’t over and there was still the question of what would happen when the drought ended, what happened at the moment groundwater levels reached normal? - Would the stress slowly relieved by small earthquakes when groundwater tables refilled to normal levels slowly over the winter be the end  of earthquake caused by the drought or would there be a catastrophic quake like there always had been before?

On May 11- 12, 2008, rains were drenching the southern states to the extent that it near ending the drought. This was the same day of the Sichuan earthquake in China. I mean it was the storm I had been crossing my fingers over hoping everything would be OK, that there wouldn’t be a major earthquake or that it wouldn’t do a lot damage to human beings or their property if there was. But this did not turn out to be the case.

My concern now, which still resides partially with the drought in the South that’s still not fully ended with it prone to getting worse again because summer is back. But now California has been declared to be in a drought. I have believed for years that the droughts in California caused by MTBE were caused by their regional water vapor being carried too high in the atmosphere to come back down there as rain where it gets carried away by the jet stream being dumped in the Midwest, which has also been chronically being flooded by California rain since ethanol use started.

In 1993 and 1994, they suffered that last server droughts as also did the Midwest suffer the worst flooding in recent history. In 1995, MYBE started being added to gasoline at 15% year round instead of 10 percent during the winter months. That a nationwide drought pattern began that ended in 1999 when I alerted the news media to what was causing it, which began the pretense of MTBE being used when it wasn’t. I am not sure why using MTBE at 15% relieved California of its drought problems. But surely drought has returned there since ethanol use began being added to gasoline at 10 percent. My concern now stems from the fact that all the major earthquakes in California have happened when droughts end there, except for the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. That one happened as record breaking snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains melted rapidly during spring flooding rains.  

This is by no means the end of the story. In fact I’ve left out the worst of it. All my articles are like that. I first tell what’s believable to get you to read the next story which you wouldn’t have believed if you hadn’t read what I wrote before. It’s hard for me to report on my own story. It’s the kind of story that needs to be told by someone else so the reader assumes the writer has vetted the subject matter enough to feel confident it’s worth putting their credibility on the line to writer about. When telling one’s own story, there’s no cause for the reader to think the writer is being objective enough to make it worth them taking the time to read a story. But in a world where the people trusted to tell stories like mine are the same people causing the problems, the truth telling process becomes muddled where I’m forced to put myself out here on a limb not knowing if anyone will ever take me seriously. But there’s always hope. Sooner or later the truth has to come out even if it doesn’t come from me, which will likely prevent it coming from me if it happens that way. But at least this way I have a public record of my having told it first, if that happens matter, which it better otherwise I will still be climbing these branches looking for a way to get credit for what is mine and punish the people who have prevented me from doing so already.

But if you made it this far down the page, thanks for sharing these words with me where I hope you found the way I told my story personal and compelling enough so you’ll remember it if you read about what I am talking about in the future but there is no mention of how I published the truth about it before anyone else.  

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