Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 11:55:54 -0500 (EST)
From: Maryphylils
Subject: WVa vs ChathamPark re regulations
Perhaps most have you have seen/heard the recent news of a coal plant in WVa suffering a spill of severely toxic chemicals into its town’s drinking, cooking, and cleaning water? The coal company had built their plant UP stream from the “fresh” water intake for the whole town. That’s all residents, restaurants, medical facilities, stores, other businesses, theaters, schools…..no one could go anywhere in the town without encountering the same toxic water that not even boiling it would clear it of the toxins! Thank heavens we don’t have that here; even when the water is turned off for repairs, I can still go to a restaurant, coffee house or the Coop for those few hours. But not those WVa people; they were suffering through all of that for at least a week!!!!!
My next reactions to the news were: How stupid and callous was that?! Why did the plant site its project UPstream?! Why didn’t the town, county and state’s regulatory systems prevent that siting?! Furthermore, why haven’t their governments made over-sight inspections since the 1990s?! Every human makes mistakes; companies are run by humans so of course companies too will make mistakes. And – what’s it going to take for those citizens up there to rise up and demand that the government regulate the coal industry to be more caring and humane towards the very people who work for them and support them?!
Well, it’s not my place to take action for them, up there. They will have to some day wake up and take action on their own behalf.
It is wonderful that here in Chatham County and Pittsboro that there are a lot of people who DO care about our individual human health. This is reflected specifically in the town of Pittsboro’s Mayors Voller and Terry, the Town Commissioners and the Town Professionals. Thank you to all of them for listening to us citizens….not with just their ears but also with their hearts and priorities! Thank you too for PittsboroMatters, who alerted us to what Chatham Park was about to do to our town. We know that our air and water supplies are the two most crucial components for life on this planet. They are crucial, ahead of food and climate-control, to sustain health. Without good – or reasonable – health, nothing else matters.
Governmental regulations of industry and large-group matters (traffic, crime, etc.) are here to help us in ways that we each as individuals can not do. One or two individuals would have had no impact on the proceedings of Chatham Park because the 1 or 2 could have seemed like fear-mongerers. It took the organization of PittsboroMatters, a flood of emails to the board and mayor, several hours of individual speeches at several meetings, and a standing-room-only (SRO) meeting at the old courthouse to assure our town government that we mean business regarding going slower with Chatham Park plans. We are taking reasonable and necessary steps to assure that OUR drinking water won’t be contaminated by close proximity of a business upstream to us; and that OUR air will be healthy, free of smog; and that OUR natural wilderness won’t be gutted like WVa mountains have been since at least the 1980s.
If we citizens don’t demand of our governments that they put into effect proper, reasonable regulations of industry, then it won’t happen. Let’s look at what’s been happening to WVa over the past 30+ years and say “there but for OUR priorities AND actions, go we.”
Maryphylils