Just a few cracks a couple of years ago turned into a 90 foot wide
and 60 foot deep sinkhole Thursday.
At least six houses affected in north Florida,
above the same Floridan Aquifer that produces sinkholes here in south Georgia.
Here in Lowndes County Michael McCormick has more than a few cracks:
he has a sinkhole in his garage.
Will Lowndes County do something before we wake up to news of
man’s house fell into a sinkhole overnight?
The day after the VDT ran
Lowndes County’s admission that the sewer line break was theirs, not Valdosta’s,
did the VDT start a series of financial investigation
like they did about Valdosta’s water issues?
Nope, they ran a piece about how much weather costs the county,
with no recognition of watershed-wide issues,
nor of any need for the county to participate in proactively
dealing with them, to reduce costs, for better quality of life,
to attract the kinds of businesses we claim we want.
Nope, none of that.
In the Deep South, near a river plain where floodwaters rise and ebb
from season to season and wetlands that distinguish the region from
anywhere else in the nation, flooding makes a significant portion of
the concern for Lowndes County emergency management.
OK, that’s close to getting at some of the basic issues.
We’re all in the same watershed, and we need to act like it
instead of every developer and every local government
clearcutting and paving as if water didn’t run downhill.
Does the story talk about that?
After all, the county chairman attended the
11 April 2013 watershed-wide flooding meeting
that led to the
city of Valdosta’s likely participation in flodoplain planning.
Nope; according to the VDT,
everybody around here seems to be hapless victims of weather:
After
Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked
about some licensee documents related to last week’s
NRC hearing in faraway Maryland on restarting California’s
San Onofre nuclear reactor,
NRC’s
David Beaulieu expanded on NRC’s refusal to divulge the documents.
Video by Myla Reson at NRC, Maryland, 18 December 2012.
You can hear him say it’s “never been a practice” to let the public
see licensee documents. But if they’re being used in making a license
decision, why doesn’t that make them public documents accessible by the
public? Oh, right “it’s very complex” but “it’s a yes or no question”
and “I will assess”, he says. It’s good to be king!
I wonder if the public had some assurance of
transparency maybe the NRC wouldn’t get
so many FOIA requests?
Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth asked the NRC some simple questions
that stumped the Commissioners and staff.
She wondered when the public could expect to see a
a 50-59 analysis California Edison had done about
restarting San Onofre.
Dave Beaulieu, NRC Generic Communications Branch,
said it was a “licensee document, licensee documents are not made public.”
He did say NRC would release its own inspection results.
She asked again, and Rick Daniel, NRC meeting facilitator
suggested she submit written questions.
Beauleiu summarized:
“At the end of the day, licensee documents are not made public;
that’s the answer.”
So what would be the point of her submitting questions when
she was just told they won’t make the answers public?
Ulrich continued by asking why NRC was considering going ahead
on the basis of experimental data that has never been used before
and that has not been made public.
Remember this is about a nuclear reactor that was shut down because
it was leaking.
That question sure caused some passing of the buck and pretending
not to understand the question by everybody in the room
who should have been able to answer the question.
Private companies can build prisons faster and operate them for
slightly less than the state, said Michael Nail, deputy director of the
department’s corrections division.
Slightly cheaper.
Which we already learned is by having
fewer guards per prisoner.
Risking public safety for small dollar savings:
does that sound like a good idea to you?.
Biomass plants don’t have to report their CO2 emissions,
so if all the proposed biomass plants get built
we’re talking about as much as 800 million tons of CO2 from
biomass plants by 2020, 12 to 14% of total CO2
emissions for the U.S. (not just power emissions: total national emissions).
Trees don’t grow fast enough to suck all that back out of the air in ten years.
Continue reading →
Just a few cracks a couple of years ago turned into a 90 foot wide
and 60 foot deep sinkhole Thursday.
At least six houses affected in north Florida,
above the same Floridan Aquifer that produces sinkholes here in south Georgia.
Here in Lowndes County Michael McCormick has more than a few cracks:
he has a sinkhole in his garage.
Will Lowndes County do something before we wake up to news of
man’s house fell into a sinkhole overnight?
A growing sinkhole in Florida has swallowed Continue reading
