Impact zone: how much of our communities will be affected by a new incineration plant?

This is a map of the schools within a five mile area of the wood-burning incineration plant proposed by Palmer Renewable Energy. The plant will be placed just off Page Blvd. on Cadwell Dr. in Springfield.

I need community input to help fill in the other "sensitive receptors" in that five mile area. Hospitals, health clinics, nursing homes, day care centers, senior centers, elder housing, public and private recreational facilities, reservoirs-- anything that might be affected by a decrease in air quality or by pollutants such as lead and mercury that will fall to the ground or on the water.

Our area is already out of compliance with EPA ozone rules; our asthma rates are significantly higher than the state average; the plant will add a ton of lead plus other contaminants to our environment. You can find out a LOT more by going to Say No to Construction and Demolition Debris Incineration. You can help us flesh out this map by leaving a comment here or sending an email to stoptoxic@gmail.com.

There will be an air permit hearing sometime within the next several months, where the public can tell the Department of Environmental Protection that we don't feel "protected" by their regulations! Stay tuned.

Simple action could save hawks and eagles

Most Western Mass. residents have had the eerie experience of driving the Massachusetts Turnpike at night while approaching the Springfield exit and seeing fire burning in the sky-- seems that way, anyway, because we can't see the burners at the Chicopee landfill which are responsible for burning off accumulating methane.

I've often wondered why there isn't a way to recapture that methane instead of burning it but I never thought that the burner itself might be a hazard for hawks, eagle and other raptors.

Apparently, raptors will perch on the burners while looking for prey, completely unaware that fire could flare up at any moment. Most birds caught in that fire will die.

There's a simple and inexpensive solution-- install spikes or other excluder devices. Long-term solution? Find a way to use the gas so that burners are unnecessary.

There's a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that you can sign, asking them to direct landfill owners to make the necessary changes to their burners. Go to the Care2 petition site to sign.

Photos from the Petition Site and Paul W's photostream at Flickr.

Immigrants jailed, hidden, shuffled around in Massachusetts

Many people think of correctional institutes-- when they think of them at all-- as sources of jobs and tax money for their economically depressed communities. But for the families of the undocumented, these facilities are black holes, sucking away their loved one.

As a resident of Western Mass. and a member of Arise for Social Justice, I fought long, hard and unsuccessfully with others to attempt to prevent the construction of a new jail for women in Chicopee. At the same time, a new jail was being constructed 40 miles north, in Greenfield. Last month, that jail became "home" to 34 immigrants transfered from the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I. Those inmates were transfered because of the death in Wyatt of an undocumented man last August.

According to the New York Times, the Wyatt facility "offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work."

The article goes on to talk about the chilling disappearance of the undocumented who lived in Central Falls. Their families would search for them, only to find they were incarcerated in the same community where they worked and lived.

Back in December Fred Contrada of the Springfield Republican wrote about the transfer of the unauthorized immigrants to the Franklin County House of Correction in Greenfield. He also mentioned that 26 of its own detainees were transfered out to other facilities in Rhode Island to make room for the new. Thus people are separated from their families as they are shuffled from one community to another.

Addendum: In the final hours of the Bush Administration, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has denied unauthorized immigrants one of the few appeals to deportation that had been open to them, the right to appeal their deportation because of mistakes made by their attorneys in their hearings. You can read more here.

Photo from ProgressIllinois.

Skybus: how much local job loss?

Skybus, which flew out of Westover in Chicopee, will cease operations on Sunday. The company had 450 employees total. Does anyone know how many people locally will be affected?

A world without trucks

My brother-in-law is a truck driver, and I don't think there's ever a truck accident anywhere that I don't think of him and wonder where he is.

A terrible tanker truck accident on Route 91 in Chicopee, MAon Friday morning claimed the life of New Hampshire driver Aaron Staelens. The accident wasn't his fault-- in fact, my sister thinks if he had swerved left instead of right, the truck might not have hit a guard rail and exploded. But swerving left would have brought him into the line of more traffic, where more people's lives would have been at risk. Most truck drivers have that instinct-- to avoid passenger cars even when it puts the driver in more danger.

Truck drivers have a difficult life and with the rising cost of diesel fuel, jobs are at risk, especially for independent truckers. There's discussion of a truckers' strike early in April, though what that might accomplish is unclear.

What is the future of trucking? Some European countries are re-examining the idea of transporting goods underground. If it can be done for water, sewage, gas and oil, why not for other products?

Low-Tech magazine describes how it would work. "The most viable techniques, however, adopt just the concept of automated underground transport: they make use of well-known electric propulsion instead of compressed air or electromagnetic forces, and they envision extreme low speeds of 7 to 35 kilometres per hour (4 to 22 mph). In fact, they mix the concept of pneumatic transport with that of an automated subway line or a conveyor belt."

Check it out to see how at least some of our transport problems could be solved in a cheaper, more environmentally sound way than overland delivery by truck.

Five years of broken hearts

OK-- so one thing I know now that I didn't know then: it's easier to stop a war before it starts than to stop a war once it's started, and it's damn near impossible to do that.

Today I've been remembering what I and so many others were doing-- not so much exactly on March 19-- but in the months leading up to the war in Iraq. Every minute of every day that we weren't asleep was spent organizing: setting up meetings, leafletting, demonstrating, planning for demonstrating, calling Reps. Neal and Olver, training for civil disobedience, phone calling, mass mobilizations, doing everything we knew how to do.

And it wasn't easy, and I don't think we ever kidded ourselves that we had much chance of success, but we had to try.

And it wasn't easy, because let me tell you, people were mean. Bush and his cohorts in crime had done such a good job tying September 11 to Iraq that in many people's minds that to be against the war was the same as supporting the terrorists. But we had to try. We took a lot of abuse but knew it was nothing compared to what our troops and the Iraqi people would suffer.

Then the war began, and then followed forty-eight hours of demonstrations and mass arrests. I've never been much of a one for what I thought of as getting arrested for the sake of getting arrested-- but knowing that the war had begun, there really was nothing left for us to do, for the moment, to witness and resist, and that's what hundreds of us did at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee and many other places.

Five years. One piece of this insanity that has never ceased to simply floor me is how Bush has been able to get away with it, even when the proof that he lied began to be uncovered almost right away: no weapons of mass destruction, no terrorist threat in Iraq, no ties to September 11. When I think how Nixon was brought down by Watergate, it almost seems like that happened in another world, that we could demand and receive accountability from our government-- not all the time, but when it really mattered.

Five years. In the end, activists have had to return to what we can accomplish, while never being quiet about what we know about the war. It seems like most of the U.S. has finally come around to opposing this misadventure, although I still see people's vulnerability to a good spin. But we are still so powerless to bring this war to an end. No wonder so many people have so much invested in the next presidential election. I myself am less convinced that electing a good Democrat will bring about a sea change.

Five years. I did not choose to go down to the Federal Building tonight to join the Move On demonstration in the rain-- long day organizing, I worked hard, and have to go to Boston early. But some friends of mine who are in the affinity group "8 at the Gate" were arrested at Westover today. And we will all be together again soon on another day.