$hrill vs. Brazile.

Hope y'all are revving up for a safe and fun weekend. Rec'd!!

EPA finished with hazardous waste cleanup at one-third of destroyed Sonoma County homes

More than 8,300 containers of hazardous waste have been picked up by EPA teams working on nearly 7,000 residential, commercial and public properties in Sonoma and Napa counties since the work started last week as the first phase of the government-funded post-fire cleanup.
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The hazardous waste cleanup of 6,153 burned properties in Sonoma County was about one-third complete, with 2,121 sites cleared, according to an EPA website. Dozens of truckloads of waste leave the collection depot every day, Dunkelman said.
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EPA has done fire cleanup work before, but “nothing of this magnitude,” Dunkelman said.

The fires, which destroyed 5,300 homes in Sonoma County by Cal Fire’s count, are considered the costliest in U.S. history.
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The progress of the cleanup in Sonoma and Napa counties can be tracked on a map updated daily at www.epa.gov/norcalfireresponse.

tax dollars at work

Four dams in the West are coming down — a victory wrapped in a defeat for smart water policy

When a top Interior Department official acknowledged recently that the Trump administration wouldn’t try to block removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, he signaled a monumental victory for local Native American tribes, salmon fishermen and the national dam removal movement.

Yet this development is less momentous than it would have been in 2015, when dam removal was just one component of a broad plan for the Klamath Basin, which straddles the California-Oregon border. That plan included salmon habitat restoration, the return of tribal land and water-sharing among farmers, ranchers and tribes. It was the product of a decade of trust-building and honest negotiation among representatives of the basin’s constituencies, whose efforts turned one of the nation’s most contentious water basins into a model of collaboration. It helped that big money didn’t skew the process: Most of the basin’s residents are far from wealthy, and the only corporation involved is PacifiCorp, the utility that owns the dams.

But congressional Republicans declined to support the deal (it required legislative authorization and funding) on the grounds that taking down four obsolete, inefficient and soon-to-be money-losing dams could set a precedent that would eventually threaten, say, Hoover Dam. By espousing an outdated tenet of conservative ideology — all dams are engines of economic development — they sabotaged the interests of their own supporters.
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Two years later, the dams are going to come down, but no water-sharing plan will accompany their removal. As a result, the ranchers and farmers in the Upper Klamath Basin, where Republican voters predominate, will not have a reliable source of irrigation water. Upper Klamath farm country is already studded with “for sale” signs. Becky Hyde, an Oregon rancher who courageously fought for a comprehensive basin agreement for many years, says the 2015 plan’s collapse “feels like a betrayal.” She diplomatically declines to say who she thinks the betrayers are.

Cascadia awaits those who can live without irrigation. Speaking of Utopia ...
"todds shirt disappears, and then he plays a three minute guitar solo. Great stuff from 1978."
Todd Rundgrens Utopia - Just One Victory

Мир

here, complicating fall chores, but onwards!