Letters: Nov. 14, 2019

City helped quiet faulty smoke alarm

Kudos to our neighbors in Casa del Sol neighborhood and especially to Rick and to a program that is associated with Pasco (city) government. While we were 2,600 miles away from home visiting grandkids in North Carolina, our home smoke alarms went berserk and on repeated occasions sent piercing alarm warnings into the house and were heard by neighbors walking by. We became aware of the problem and were not able to manage the situation long distance. A call by my wife to the Pasco fire battalion chief put us in touch with a community program, “Community Risk Reduction,” and Mr. Ben Shearer and helpers attended to our smoke detector issues and the problems were eliminated.

We would encourage all Pasco residents to enthusiastically support the Community Risk Reduction Program. Thanks again to all that helped eliminate our worries about faulty smoke detectors.

Trump is why term limits needed

If we have learned anything from Donald Trump becoming president, it’s that “all” elected and appointed officials (city, county, state and federal) should have term limits. Time after time, we see these professional politicians and appointees become corrupt. When they leave office, they are often wealthier than when they went in.

Remove fuels to better control fires

I remember reading somewhere that fire needs fuel, a source of ignition and oxygen. Hard to imagine that we can get rid of the Santa Anna winds in California, or lightning, but it seems more important to look at the immediate causes of the fire there than to hope that all the nations of the world, spending everything they own, will reduce carbon emissions to the point that California will not be dry anymore, and in 80 years, we can stop the devastation. Or let somebody with a herd of goats graze under the power lines. Allow loggers to clear the dead timber and manage the live timber.

It is raving lunacy to not manage forest and grasslands, and blame the immediate cause of fires on anything else other than letting a pile of trash accumulate.

We lost the whole town of Paradise last year, and many residents suffered horrible deaths. If this is the effect of climate change, so be it, but I am thinking that a little clear cutting is preferable to being roasted alive. You cannot stop fires with solutions that are vague and generations away. To blame it on Trump feels good to some folks, I guess.

Cleanup achieving plenty at Hanford

There is a new locally written book, “Something Extraordinary,” about Hanford. I believe it misses the mark on all the accomplishments of cleanup so far. Access Hanford.gov, search “Cleanup Progress 2019” and click the second link, open PDF, see all, especially page 30. Nine reactors: six cocooned, two to go, one preserved. 493 tons contamination removed from groundwater, 22 billion gallons of groundwater treated, 100 percent of spent fuel moved to dry storage, 18.5 million tons soil/debris to ERDF, 889 facilities demolished, 1,342 waste sites remediated, 12,417 cubic meters of plutonium-contaminated waste retrieved. More work to follow.

This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 12:01 AM with the headline "Letters: Nov. 14, 2019."