As many residents learned this week, Garrett County has a new comprehensive plan that will serve as policy for decisions made by county government. The county commissioners approved the final plan, but only after removal of any protections afforded ridge tops as sensitive areas.
I find this action outrageous. In addition to their ecological importance, these mountain ridges define who we are in western Maryland. It is part of our heritage — Backbone, Big Savage, Four-Mile Ridge, Elbow, Meadow, and Negro mountains. Places like High Rock, Sampson Rock, and Saint John Rock on Big Savage Mountain, and Roth Rock, Eagle Rock, and Table Rock on Backbone Mountain are part of our history. Each has a story to tell.
For example, have you wondered how Big Savage Mountain got its name? The mountain is named for John Savage, who in the winter of 1736 is said to have offered his life, if needed, to save the others in his survey party from starvation. There are many such stories and legends surrounding our county’s ridge tops; each is an important part of our cultural history.
Many even consider our ridges to be sacred places, deserving as much protection as any cathedral or monument found on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Instead, what do we do? Declare them open to exploitation!
This action is wrong-headed and an insult to those pioneers and past generations who risked their lives to explore these mountains and revered them as places of significance.
It is obvious what has contributed to the removal of this protection — it would hinder wind developers from exploiting our county for their own enrichment! These features that past generations knew and visited, making pilgrimages to them with their children and grandchildren, will be altered forever. Our awareness of mountain ridges will be distorted by miles of gleaming white wind turbines, each over 400 feet tall, rotating in the breeze.
This ill-conceived decision by our elected county commissioners is especially significant today, as we celebrate the changing colors of the autumn leaves. How will residents and visitors reconcile the beauty of hardwood forests in autumn with the ugliness of industrial-scale wind plants?
We are Mountain Maryland, not the OPEC of wind! If our mountain landscape and heritage can be offered up on the altar of greed and corporatism, then what’s next?
J. Edward Gates
Frostburg
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I am once again dismayed by the action — or lack thereof — of our county commissioners. They have chosen to ignore the advice of their planning commission, and are sacrificing our citizens and our natural resources for a buck.
The Planning Commission recommended that the new countywide comprehensive plan designate ridgelines as sensitive areas, due to their role in preserving our natural resources.
The county commissioners dismissed the researched and educated advice of the Planning Commission, saying they could not safeguard our ridgelines without zoning.
The county commissioners know that many citizens in Garrett County — voters to be sure — would choose to protect the county from zoning over protecting their neighbors — or even their own families, it seems — from the permanent damage building on our mountain tops could do. Wind turbines are seen by the commissioners as easy income for the county, income that I would question, based on wind’s unpredictable nature and based on the fact that the PJM grid will not make much room for wind-pow-ered energy, surely cutting into the promised profits.
Then to add injury to insult, blasting during the construction of wind turbines on those ridges could easily damage fragile and vulnerable aquifers, ruining water supplies forever.
The county commissioners like to claim that their hands are tied because we have no zoning. But I am pretty sure that if they saw a need not tied to greed, they would say, “We have a right to protect our citizens; that is what they elect us for.”
If it is only about money, why not look for the economic gain in preserving our heritage and protecting our citizens? It is out there.
Natalie Atherton
Oakland
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This year’s Autumn Glory Festival will likely be the last celebration of Garrett County’s spectacular mountain beauty before the wind developers begin their methodical, relentless destruction of our ridges, neighborhoods, and way of life.
Our county commissioners are going to stand by and let this happen, even though they could easily have prevented it. They claim that they cannot prohibit ridge-top wind turbine development without comprehensive zoning, but this is simply not true, and they know it. They know it because they have in their hands the written opinion of Maryland’s leading zoning attorney that they can stop this insanity by enacting a simple performance zoning ordinance.
Historians will note this colossal mistake as a textbook example of irresponsible leadership. Our commissioners have failed spectacularly to uphold the public trust. It will be a turning point in the life of all Garrett Countians, and one that we will regret forever. Such a shame.
Vincent A. Collins
Swanton
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We are concerned for your forested mountain crests and have worked to help protect them. We trust that preservation of your natural heritage for future generations will turn out to be the right investment at the right time to ensure that ecotourism such as leaf-peeping brings renewable and sustainable economic sense.
Geoff Patton,
Ph.D., President
Maryland Alliance for Greenway Improvement and Conservation
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At this time of the year when Garrett County showcases its golden ridge-top splendor and we welcome the world to our beautiful region, the Garrett County commissioners once again sell their soul for a few pieces of gold. Their absolute refusal to heed their own Planning Commission’s recommendations to protect our scenic moun-tain-top beauty is but one more example, along with refusing to protect our state parks, of selling out the county’s heritage.
Future generations will never forget their historical destruction of our very way of life.
John N. Bambacus
Friendsville
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Those who tout industrial wind projects for western Maryland as “part of the energy solutions for our country,” able to guard against the rolling brownouts projected because of our “overextended grid,” are whistling in the wind.
Physicists define energy as the ability to do work. Power is the rate at which work is done. Huge turbines can convert wind energy into electrical power. But they do so with the same capacity standards that powered sailing craft and water pumps in the early nineteenth century.
For centuries, industry has deployed far more effective ways to produce power. Contrast the ability of sleek clipper ships to deliver small, specialized cargo across the Atlantic in three or four weeks with today’s freighters that can make the same trip in days, usually on schedule, while carrying thousands of tons of diverse cargo: The power (the rate work is accomplished) of the latter is many times greater, allowing exponentially more productivity. Although we may applaud the skill of the sailor, we rely for our well-being on the performance of highly responsive power.
The ability to convert prescribed amounts of energy at high rates of power at specified, convenient, times is a cornerstone of modern society. Imagine the long lines at filling stations if wind power pumped the gas: Your tank might get filled eventually, but the wait would be infuriating, costly to your time and others’.
Like its power source, wind energy is unpredictably intermittent and highly variable. It produces only a statistical fraction of its installed capacity in desultory fashion. Since wind energy is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, small changes in wind velocity affect output enormously; a doubling of wind velocity from 11 mph to 22 mph increases power from 6% to 73% of rated capacity — a 12-fold increase.
Supplying the annually increasing demand for electricity is much like continuously replenishing a large, leaking tub of water. Whimsical wind power can add only a few sporadic drops, which cannot keep pace with the water loss (demand increases). The real work is accomplished by high-powered, precision-tuned machines that reliably pump in just the right amount of water at critical times to keep the tub from overflowing or from eventually emptying out. Wind volatility destabilizes the grid, making it work harder, becoming more “extended….”
Although wind technology does provide energy, it is inconsistent, even incompatible, with modern machine power performance.
Jon Boone
Intervener in Maryland PSC Wind Hearings
Oakland
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The Republican [1]
9 October 2008
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[1] The Republican: http://therepublicannews.com/article.asp?type=letters
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