Eyesore near Ocotillo
The San Diego Union-Tribune | www.utsandiego.com 19 June 2012
I’ve been out of state for a week, but on the day I left I read the U-T on the plane, the issue in which Morgan Lee’s essay on wind turbines which will surround Ocotillo on three sides was the front page story (“Bracing for winds of change,” June 12). It tried to be fair, but the quote in huge letters on the front page was this:
“The political decision is whether you inconvenience 100 or 150 people in order to provide clean, renewable power for decades to 50,000 or 60,000 homes,” explained Jim Waring, president of CleanTECH San Diego.
Neither Waring nor Lee’s story mentioned a fundamental fact about the project. Tens of thousands of people from the greater San Diego area go out through Ocotillo every weekend, fall and winter and spring, to dune-buggy, drive ATVs, camp, fish, go birding, do botany, study fauna, stargaze – even hunt, or just sit and enjoy the view and the silence. Those turbines will look like a suppurating sore on one’s forehead to every one of those tens of thousands. And so much for the flora and fauna and view and silence destroyed thereby.
It is hard to believe that the U-T and Lee and Waring are so insensitive, even dumb, as not to acknowledge this fundamental fact. What? Are you in Sempra’s and SDG&E’s pocket, just like the California Public Utilities Commission? And Lee is your “green business & energy” reporter? Is not that an oxymoron? For shame!
You folks better wake up or you won’t have any place to go to avoid such obscene projects! By the way, I have lived in San Diego for 39 years and have had a trailer just north of Ocotillo for 27 years.
– John Mood, San Diego
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/06/20/eyesore-near-ocotillo/