Permission to Use Images in San Juan Hills High School Disaster Picture Book

[Christine Chan]

Dear Mr Reardon,

I am a part time student who is currently studying the Pipeline Engineering MSc at Newcastle University in the UK. I am trying to complete my dissertation and came across your blog during my research. I am especially interested in your picture book version of the San Juan Hills High School disaster.

My dissertation is related to the safety of UK gas pipelines and the tentative title (that may change) is "An Integrity Validation of Safety Design in Gas Pipelines by Investigating the Individual Risk Levels in PD BS 8010". A large part of the project involves carrying out generic quantiative risk assessments to calculate the individual risk for pipelines of varying diameter and pressure. To illustrate the consequences of a gas pipeline disaster, I would like to use your 2 images of the San Juan Hills High School disaster in my dissertation.

On condition that I fully reference each photograph, may I have your permission to paste these photographs into my report? I would also include "With kind permission of Jim Reardon, webpage, date etc...", (only, of course, if this is satisfactory with you).

I would be grateful if you would let me know whether or not it would be acceptable for me to include these photographs in my dissertation as soon as possible.

Thank you very much for your help. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours faithfully

Christine

[Jim Reardon]

Christine,

Thanks for your note.

You are welcome to use anything contained on my websites.  While I can take credit for all the photographs and the annotated aerial views, the perspective drawing of the SJHHS site was taken from our local newspaper, the OC Register (www.ocregister.com).  I think this is noted on the image itself.

All the documents contained on the website were public records.

Since you have obviously found the Google Groups collection of documents, you might also want to look at the related blog:  http://nzj1hn215k.blogspot.com/ .  The blog does a better job of tying the various issues together, I think.  In particular, you may find it interesting to see how easily a couple of professionally prepared risk analysis studies could be effectively criticized by a non-professional.

Finally, to be clear, there has never been a disaster at SJHHS.  Instead, there is a potential for disaster.  The actual disaster photos are mostly from Walnut Creek in California, Bellingham in Washington state, and British Columbia, in Canada (these are also not my images, but rather were collected from around the web.  Most of my work involved comparing the conditions at the SJHHS site to these locations where pipeline releases actually occurred.

Good luck with your study!

Jim Reardon