OPINION: Clean, Green Reddy Kilowatt Meets The General

An Original Digest of Global Affairs
By Kathryn Albrecht
By now, most of you have probably heard that a very large electrical transmission line may be headed straight for San Antonio, N.M. Imagine emerald San Antonio – historic and pre-historic village, annual destination of hundreds of thousands of migrating waterfowl, and hamburger heaven, too! – dissected by two parallel 500-kilovolt lines atop massive towers (the sort you see marching across the deserts of Arizona, California and Nevada).
If you haven’t “commented” yet on the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project, you may just want to listen up. The public’s “scoping” comments – key to the writing of an Environmental Impact Statement (which studies issues raised by the public and all interested agencies, per the National Environmental Policy Act) – are due to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management by Aug. 28.
So what’s with this power line? It’s an initial segment of a new national grid planned for distributing the increased solar, wind and geothermal electricity being developed across the West. Economic stimulus funding drives the project, and it could be completed by 2013. Cities west of New Mexico will initially gulp up the juice. Sigh … I suppose that running Phoenix’s air conditioners with renewable energy – rather than coal, nuclear and oil – is the wiser way to go.
But dual, zing-ing high-voltage cables on huge towers, flung across the migratory flyway above an alfalfa field near you? Is this our only alternative? The answer is “NO.” And you, dear readers, have the power to drive the outcome – if you exercise your right to “comment” both now and when the draft EIS is published. Let’s take a look at an alternate route for the giant industrial line – the route initially proposed by the project’s planners.
Crossing the Rio Grande below Perchas/Caballo reservoir at the top of Mesilla Valley, the corridor was originally planned to run north either just west of White Sands Missile Range or further west, closer to Engle and the rail line. This is all BLM and state land, miles east of the river’s greenbelt. As this kinder corridor nears Bosque del Apache, it passes miles to the east of the visitors center, then veers out to Highway 380, entirely missing historic old San Pedro.
Bossy, Bossy
But as it now stands, the line slashes right across Milligan Gulch ranches, descends through San Antonio (and Laborcita, south of Luis Lopez) and clobbers Bosquecito right between the eyes. The problematic route plows across three Areas of Critical Environmental Concern and proposed wilderness on its way to Bingham. So who in their right mind would favor this currently proposed siting? Guess.
The commanding general at White Sands, employed by the Pentagon, that’s who. Ooo, they just don’t want anyone doing anything near their touchy-touchy boundaries – even though they long ago absconded with the heartland of our state, not offering New Mexicans one red cent for it! And their nearest terrorizing test-beds are dozens of miles in from the range’s western borders. But the general assumed his post last October, and the powerline’s proposed route maps were abruptly altered by November. The general said, “Move away!” although he has no jurisdiction beyond his fence.
SunZia’s project manager believes his line could cross WSMR diagonally and not interfere with the general’s precious little pulsed-laser, mock-nuclear, electromagnetic and “mid-infrared advanced chemical laser” (MIRACL for short) weapons testing. And the SunZia guy ought to know. A 35-year veteran of western powerline siting and construction, when this fellow started in the business, the commanding general was still in junior high school.
So what to do? Send your sought-after comments to the BLM by the 28th. Handy forms are at the front desk on California Street in Socorro. You may e-mail comments to NMSunZiaProject@blm.gov. Or snail-mail them to BLM/SunZia Transmission Proj-ect, PO Box 27115, Santa Fe 87502. Remember, at issue are wildlife health, tourism’s wealth, visual pollution, Indian pueblo ruins, early Spanish “contact” sites, wilderness values, rural homes, small farms and quietly grazed ranches – all threatened by the selfish, senseless militarism infesting a beautiful desert crawling with defense contractors throwing our money around. What are the issues for you?
Another Cheery Note:
A passel of bio-terrorism laboratories have been constructed across the country by the dubiously-titled Department of Homeland Security. But disturbingly, the federal government cannot say how many. The “estimated number ranges from” 386 to 630. Whew! That’s a lot of wiggle room when you’re permitting research on anthrax, hoof and mouth, tularemia and Marburg hemorrhagic fever.
One number is known: at 15, we now have three times the hardened “high containment” labs in the United States than we did a decade ago. These “little shops of horror” experiment with the surest killers, incurable and untreatable, such as Ebola. All of this pushing-the-envelope and our luck in a stated “defense against bio-terrorism,” when no foreign terrorist has ever attacked America with a biological agent.
More hi-con laboratories are under construction – one in Tornado Alley (right where a big one touched down last year), another in a densely populated Boston neighborhood. Brilliantly, one of our “most deadly” labs opened in autumn on Galveston Island, that dicey Texas sand pile entirely washed over (and considerably demolished) by hurricanes three times in the past 109 years.
source: The Los Angeles Times

Kathryn Albrecht, a Missile Range neighbor, plans to lighten up (with luck), jar her racial memory, and file reports from a distant continent for a couple of months. Her opinions do not necessarily represent the Mountain Mail.

OPINION: Clean, Green Reddy Kilowatt Meets The General