Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Lt Governor Please Help

Lt. Governor John Garamendi
State Capital Room 1114
Sacramento CA 95814

Dear Sir,

I just dropped my daughter off at Hollywood Beach Elementary School. As I drove up Harbor Blvd, I was reminded of what is going on less than a mile from my beach area home. There is land clearing going on at a toxic oil dump at 5th and Wooley Rd. There, PCBs, arsenic, lead and waste oil products are being stripped from the land. The smell of oil permeates the air. The street is brown from the trucks going in and out. A street sweeper follows a circuit back and forth helping to spread the contaminants further. There are plans to build 350 homes there. Across the street from this development, California Edison plans to build a gas fired peaker plant. Our city has known about this project since September, only now do the citizens find out about it. In addition there is construction started on a natural gas sweetening plant in the same location. The debris of over 100 years of oil industry abuse pock the beaches and fields just down the road from me.

On top of all this, the Governor has greased the way for a foreign owned multinational corporation to build a Rube Goldberg style floating factory off our coast. It was probably designed on a cocktail napkin. BHP Billiton will do anything to get in on the LNG gold rush. As this contraption is designed, it cannot use the best available technology to reduce pollution so the company has lobbied Washington to have the EPA reverse itself and allow Billiton to become Ventura Counties largest air polluter. All this so the fossil fuel industry can find a new way to keep us addicted to their products. Loretta Lynch, former chair of the California Public Utilities Commission has evidence that there is no gas supply shortage in our state. The shortage is based on a bogus study done by Sempra Energy. Sempra fired Cal State Riverside when they found there was a problem with hot gas. They didn’t want them to pursue that line of research.

This contraption will produce sound pressure levels of 192db. That is far beyond the threshold of permanent ear damage. This noise will be underwater where it will endanger the whales and other sea life that travel through the Santa Barbara Channel. Whale stranding has been attributed to high intensity noise. We will have huge LNG supertankers, marauding through our shipping lanes with cargos of 2.5 Billion cubic feet of gas aboard, floating bombs with a power many more times what was dropped on Hiroshima. Then there’s the dubious security issue. There will be automatic gattling guns and who knows what else guarding it creating an armed death island just off our coast. Aren’t we at war? Most of the world hates our guts. Why, because we have become arrogant. What we do in the third world has come home to fester in Oxnard. How can our governor put the lives of the people in such jeopardy? He can if he doesn’t value the lives of the people living here. I guess the people of Oxnard are too “hot blooded”.

Two weeks ago, the Ventura freeway was closed down by a natural gas pipeline damaged by a construction crew. My three year olds day care center was right there. Over 100 children and their caretakers cowered in their building with the smell of gas permeating the air. Fortunately, it didn’t explode. It was only a 4 inch low pressure pipeline; no big deal said the gas company. Billitons 36 inch high pressure line will cross the street right in the same area. I suppose if a construction crew punctures that one, it would be no big deal too.

Last summer SB 426 was killed in a back room deal thanks to Fabian Nunez and his pandering to the labor unions down in Oxnard. They wanted to get jobs building the plant proposed in LA Harbor. SB 426 would have put the evaluation of these projects in the hands of the people not lobbyists and cronies of the governor. Long Beach has opted to kill their project. Now, without SB 426, there is no balance to be found in Sacramento. Communities along our coastline are forced to compete with the fossil fuel industries unlimited deep pockets .They pay off our local organizations, spend millions subverting our politicians and will tell any lie to achieve their goals. This is all in line with the intentional lack of oversight coming from Washington.

Your experience dealing with the insurance industry equips you with the tools needed to evaluate the dangers inherent in this project. I have some tools for you to use also. I have enclosed a documentary video entitled Sand Sun Oil Gas. It is a history of the oil and gas Industry in the Santa Barbara channel since the turn of the century. I have established a channel on You Tube.com http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=6790BD162AA51143 that has short videos covering the route of the pipeline, Loretta Lynches lecture called “The Case Against LNG” and several other videos from as far away as Wales.

My Italian grandfather used to say about Mussolini’s Italy, “The trains run on time, but Democracy doesn’t.” I hope you can put Democracy back on track for the people of California.

No comments: