I find our *so called* conservative led Legislatures efforts to control all of our assets from food stamps, public lands and our waters ironic at best because while they pay so little attention to conditions and needs of the people they supposedly represent, our conservatives are eager to waste everything from time to our health by way of nonsensical grandstanding to gain public approval for attacking the poors to threatening to blow fifty-five million dollars on a lawsuit over the Water Compact.(Keith Regier)
It is doubtful that any of them are aware that there were 295 oil well blowouts and spills in Montana between 2009-2013 including 83 in 2012.
The Indy reported that fracking had polluted the water near Poplar eleven months before a second pipeline burst on the Yellowstone River last Saturday, but safe drinking water does not begin arriving until Tuesday Morning.
One resident affected by both Yellowstone River spills,Dena Hoff, posed the questions "For the people in Lower Yellowstone Irrigation District, what's going to happen to their irrigation water?" she asks. "What's going to happen to the paddlefish at the intake diversion, where the paddlefish come up every May?"
That reminds me of something...
Weeks away from the spring herring season in 1989, the oil spill occurred." Bombers full of oil dispersants started flying over Prince William Sound and they didn't know a school of herring from an oil slick and they bombed those schools of herring with chemical dispersants... son of a gun, the doggone herring died off. They're just-pretty much gone."
RJ Kopchak did the math for the damages to his own small family fishing operation at over half a million dollars and said that his settlement checks would amount to less than ten per cent of his losses.
"The lesson from these big oil spills is: A) the oil companies won't make you whole and; B) the damage is still going on twenty years later and there is no way fishing dependent or natural resource dependent communities will ever recover from major oil spills, at least during the lifetime of the people who were there when the spill happened."
-RJ Kopchak, fisherman, Cordova, Alaska
This is an unfortunately long story, and I have other points to get to so I will mention that Baker Hughes plans 7,000 layoffs in the oil field business and break from it for the time being.
All news is not bad for Montana, a low income community decided to purchase their trailer court so they can upgrade their sewer and water problems rather than stay at the mercy of an indifferent owner, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will be speaking at the Fieldhouse in March!
Photo from California Sugar Queen.
