A plan to ship coal to Asia by way of the Columbia River in Oregon has sparked protests. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that “hundreds of people turned out in Portland and Hermiston, Ore., for simultaneously held hearings” on the proposal hosted by the state’s department of environmental quality on July 9.
The plan would have almost 9 million tons of coal shipped through the Pacific Northwest. The Morrow Pacific Project is one of three coal export terminals proposed for the region. A port commissioner called it “one of the most exciting projects to come to Morrow County in half a century,” according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Opponents warned that transporting coal along the river would threaten the health of salmon and water quality.
Coal would be moved by train from Wyoming and Montana to eastern Oregon, then barged down the Columbia River to the Port of St. Helens where it would be loaded onto ships and transported to Asia.
“Stinky seaweed leads to storm-surge solution” would be how we would have written the headline. Yahoo News reports that beach-goers in Galveston, Texas “have long tiptoed around massive piles of seaweed, often using their children’s plastic beach toys and a few well-chosen expletives to rake away the stinky, dark muck that arrives daily like an unrequested gift from the Sargassum Sea.”
After years of having workers clear the tons of seaweed from the beach at night, the Galveston Island Park Board of Trustees and Texas A&M University are “launching a pilot program aimed at using the sticky muck to build a buttress against severe weather. The pilot program will test a theory that sand dunes fortified by compressed seaweed will be more resilient to storm surges and high tides, protecting the fragile community that has been pounded by countless hurricanes.”
Rising seawater isn’t a hypothetical threat for Chesapeake Bay. It’s old news.
The Star-Democrat of Easton, Md. featured a story about the problem, describing an island whose last house disappeared two years ago. Holland Island was “once 5 miles long and home to a fishing community of 300 residents,” the newspaper’s website reports.
“Now, rising sea levels and sinking land, the same forces that doomed the island, threaten [the town of] Crisfield, its seafood industry and its 2,710 residents. And a newly discovered tidal pattern puts them in greater peril than previously known,” the paper wrote. Gov. Martin O’Malley warned in his state-of-the-state address that Maryland is one of the states most vulnerable to rising sea levels.
“Studies show he is right,” the paper asserts. “The Chesapeake Bay is rising at two to three times the rate of worldwide sea levels. It rose more than a foot over the past 100 years and is expected to rise 2 to 5 feet within this century.”
Town officials in Chatham, Mass. on Cape Cod are trying to help the busy fish pier stay vital. The website Wicked Local reports that selectmen voted to write letters to property owners adjacent to the public landing to solicit their interest in selling some land for parking.
The board “had a difficult time balancing the needs of local fishermen who were being denied access to the fish pier with the local fishermen who were already there and were hamstrung by increasing congestion,” the website reports. The problems “have been exacerbated in recent years as the town has lost, or virtually lost, about five landings because of erosion.”
Leland, Mich. is a touristy town on Lake Michigan where one vestige of the working waterfront remains, reports the Lansing State Journal. Carlson’s Fisheries, the last remaining commercial fish shanty in Leland’s history Fishtown, is hopping with in-coming fish and customers.
“The back door swings open, and two men drag in a wagon full of ice-packed lake trout and whitefish, so fresh some of them are still wiggling,” the paper reports.
The business is family owned and run, dating back five generations. Several other fish businesses disappeared over the last few decades.
How did Carlson’s buck the odds? Bill Carlson, a past owner, sold a block of buildings to the nonprofit Fishtown Preservation Society in 2007. The business and family are being honored with a Michigan Heritage Award by the Michigan State University Museum for protect state traditions.