Saturday, December 16, 2006

Say it, Believe it, Become it!

Last week a nice woman wrote into the nice local paper and thanked the nice new corporation that wants to put a nice new liquified natural gas holding tank on our river for being such nice environmentally friendly people and contributing many millions of dollars to the local environment. This nice lady noted that "no other" corporation has contributed to the environment like this corporation wants to, if given the chance to put their terminal in at Bradwood.

WHAT?

Lets take this one spin at a time. For this post let's just address that according to Northern Star they are going to have a salmon program, similar to the one provided by good ole Bonneville Power Administration.

According to documents that Northern Star submitted to the state of Oregon, Northern Star Natural Gas has proposed the Bradwood Landing LNG receiving terminal to be built on about 55 acres of a 420-acre site at Bradwood, located between Astoria and Clatskanie at about River Mile 38 on the Columbia River. The facility would be designed to have a peak sendout capacity of 1.3 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas and would be capable of continuous operation. The project also would include a 34-mile long pipeline that would run from the site to Port Westward and then under the Columbia River into Washington.

One point three billion cubic feet of natural gas per day! Even if running at half peek, say 65 million cubic feet per day calculate that at the price of natural gas. Northern Star is proposing approximately 50 jobs for Clatsop, Columbia and Wahkiakum Counties to share. It is donating "up to 59 million" to environmental causes, less than the amount it will make in one day of operation.

This great environmental organization has optained permits to use 4400 gallons PER MINUTE from the Columbia River and 150 gallons per minute from a well for the purpose of hydrostatic pressure testing of storage tanks and associated pipelines. [Where does this water go, how often is this done, is there a pond that returns this water to its natural temperature before it is dumped back into the river?]

Northern Star has obtained permits to use 133.7 cubic feet per second from the Columbia River for the purpose of suction dredging of Columbia River sediments for construction of ship berth and turning basin. [Bye, bye salmon! Spawning grounds? Oh yeah, were going to make fake ones for them to use. Maybe some test tubes. LNG & BPA bring this salmon to you ... or maybe we can raise them for 4-H.]

Northern Star has obtained an additional permit to use 4.456 cubic feet per second from the Columbia River for the purpose of hydrostatic pressure testing of a transmission pipeline. [So this is shot down the pipeline after it is connected at the plant and the Columbia River water ends up where? Because we have so much of it being wasted by BPA so now it can be used to clean out pipes and be used to test them, instead of as spawning waters for our fish?]

THIS is what kills salmon! Taking COLOSSAL amounts of water out of the river and returning it in an altered state! Dredging our river bottom! These are extremely bad ideas! Read more about them and then protest by writing to your congress person.

There are sincere people in some salmon programs that believe they have the answer for the diminishing salmon population, however, these hypothesis have not been proven out. In most cases the salmon recovery projects have been proven to be dismal failures, as all of Bonneville Power Administrative's environmental salmon projects have shown.

Similar to the sacrifices Thugs brought to their multi-armed god, Kali, local thugs will sacrifice what is left of our salmon and sturgeon to the multi-facilities of the "environmentally friendly," power hungry, energy companies the Bonneville Power and Northern Star, unless we speak up and out, often and loud.

4 comments:

The Guy Who Writes This said...

Nice work, Sid. Please attend the PTOP LNG meeting, Tuesday, Dec 19 at 6:30pm at #10 Basin St. Astoria at the Union Fish Meeting Room at the Cannery Pier Hotel.

Elleda said...

I have been disgusted by the recent barrage of Northern Star literature cluttering my mailbox. They are so "dedicated" they can't even spell Clatsop (Clatsip).
What's really alarming is that some people are actually taking these thugs seriously, and believe Northern Star is here to "help" us. I can only imagine those people probably believe in the tooth fairy, and Santa Claus, too.

Patrick McGee said...

It's really tough to convey to the minds eye the magnitude of what we are dealing with in this issue
isn't it?

The other thing that amazes me are the number of people in this community that don't have a "Hoot in Hells'" idea of what LNG even is much less that we are under attack by these "Energy Carpetbaggers".

And then these same people, Northern Star Natural Gas, boast of 260 letters of support?

Well if one would call signatures from a standardized letter signed by members of trades union and such likley to profit from the construction phase of the project, support, well I guess you could call it that while others might call it names extorted from the membership.

Undercover Mother said...

Alls I know is that if they were so environmentally friendly, they wouldn't have sent me a whole tree's worth of junk mail in one week.