With astounding callousness NStar, the so-called public utility, has announced its intention, after a voluntary moratorium, to go ahead and spray herbicide on the foliage in the powerlines right of way.
All Cape towns have passed resolutions against spraying. Thousands of residents, visitors, and businesses have signed GreenCAPE petitions against spraying. Physicians, public health academics, and members of the Cape legislative delegation have spoken against spraying. More than 150 Cape businesses have put anti-spraying signs in their windows.
Given this outpouring, company’s announcement feels profoundly–shamefully– unresponsive to the people they purport to serve.
According to Sue Phelan of GreenCAPE, on the company’s hit list for as soon as late September are Barnstable, Bourne, Brewster, Chatham, Falmouth, Harwich, Orleans, Sandwich and three towns on the islands. The Outer Cape may get our chemical cocktail next year.
After decades of simply cutting back foliage to keep the powerlines clear, four years ago NStar came up with the plan to spray herbicides. There was an immediate outcry. Hey, that’s our drinking water aquifer you’re messing with. It’s only a few feet below the surface. The company was all bland reassurance. Trust us, this combo of fosamine ammonium, glyphosate, imazapyur and metsulfuron methyl we’re going to put into your soil is perfectly safe. But the fact is, 50 years down the road from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a road littered with many cautionary tales of corporate assurances that proved hollow, citizens’ passionate skepticism seemed entirely reasonable.
In the four year history of this struggle, two things stand out: one, the company simply isn’t interested in what we their customers think or feel about this issue. In an early hearing in Eastham in August of 2009 the company came right out and said to the assembled crowd: we’re not here to discuss this, only to explain what we intend to do. At the start of the moratorium the company said, now don’t get too excited, we have no intention of changing our minds about this. They might just as well have come out and said: fact is, we’re hoping by the end of the year you’ll have forgotten all about your drinking water concerns.
Second: the company for whatever reason will not explain, other than saying the obvious that they think it will be better, why it persists in this unpopular idea opposed by so many health experts. agents, commonsense. It has seemed to those of us living near the power lines that the periodic “mowing” was all those decades getting it done quite satisfactorily.
Will the spraying translate to such big savings on our utility bills that we will be forever grateful and forget all about the quality of our water? I don’t recall the company ever actually saying anything about savings to consumers .
It seems clear that it is not in the perceived interest of the company, despite its desire to be viewed as a public servant and good corporate citizen, to come clean about its motives– which probably, no big surprise, have everything to do with putting its bottomline and the interests of its stockholders before the interests of its customers.
So as annoying as it is for we the people to have to take time out of our lives to do battle with this arrogant and irresponsible company with its hired legal guns and paid obfuscators, it looks like it’s back to the mattresses. Towns need to renew their pushback against the company, citizens to take it to the power lines to demonstrate our determination not to be bullied.
GreenCAPE is sponsoring a “goatscaping” event this coming Friday, September 20, from 12:00-4:00 PM in Hyannis, 1336 Phinney’s Lane (street in front of Cape Cod Beer) Under the powerlines in ROW #343. The idea apparently is to let goats, voracious consumers of foliage, show NStar a better way. .(In case of inclement weather, or for more info, go to www.GreenCAPE.org; or call 508 362.5927).
Sounds like a win-win to me. Keep the power lines clear and fatten up a goat.
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