There will be a Vog Seminar held Thursday, Sept. 25 at the Convention Center, 1PM to 4PM.

On Oahu.

Not the Big island of Hawaii.

Sponsored by the State of Hawaii, in conjunction with the Hawai’i SOS Safety, Opportunity, Sustainability conference, the Hawaii State Department of Labor and Industrial Relations is offering a FREE! seminar. They will talk about the “potential health effects of VOG (emphasis theirs) and what employers can do to mitigate the effects in the workplace.”

This was announced by a full-color ad in West Hawaii Today, which charges an extra $405.00 per day for color, and it has been running for several days. You are probably used to all color ads in your newspaper, so this does not seem unusual to you. But being in a sort of backwater here, the smaller ads in our newspaper are mostly not in color. In this case, the color cost much more than the ad itself.

But not to worry! Lucky us on the Big Island, and lucky you wherever you may be, whether you are somewhere in Hawaii Nei or elsewhere on this planet, we all get to listen along during the LIVE WEBCAST of the seminar, to be presented at:

www.hawaii.gov/labor

I’m thinking that address may not exactly right for the actual webcast, but a person should be able to find it from there. In any event, that’s the only address given in the ad. And please do not blame the messenger if, when it comes time to join in, the site is unavailable. Hopefully things will work out fine, but I just would not count on it too heavily.

Anyway, I’m just imagining what the seminar will suggest. “… so you must tell your employees there is no problem, they simply have to hold their breath a while. Say, until December. We’ll give you an update then.”

Frankly, I thought the CDC report went something like, ‘we don’t have any idea what you should do, but we need more money so we can come back and study things some more. We didn’t have enough money this time to do a good job.’ But maybe the State of Hawaii, which CDC castigated for not doing enough about the vog previously, now has some good answers. Perhaps this conference is a response to that criticism. And the full color ad is to show everyone the State really cares about them.

Okay, there are sensible things one might say. Stay inside and turn on the air conditioning (like people aren’t doing that anyway). Don’t run a triathlon… woops, there is the Ironman Triathlon being run here on the Big Island on the 11th of October. Well, maybe the volcano will be done by then. Or perhaps those wacky guys who so enjoy challenging themselves to excel will enjoy the unusual treat of sucking in lithium and fluorine and sulfur dioxide/sulfuric acid with every breath. On a heavy vog day, that would certainly be an exhilarating challenge. Some years the ambulances are busy without the vog.

Back on track… whatever that may be today… I’m just glad that our State resources are being used wisely to give us tools to, well, do something about the vog. We can stay inside and listen to the webcast while sipping a cup of Kona coffee and reading West Hawaii Today, and not go out and run a triathlon. That sounds like a real plan.