Cell phones and cars crashes

A few of our County Council members are determined to help out the enormous US wireless industry by drafting a new ordinance that makes it easier to locate cell towers in tiny SJC. Bad idea, County Council! Improving cell phone service is essentially a form of manslaughter.

New data and studies show that texting and talking on cell phones are turning our roads into a bloodbath. The National Safety Council calculated that at least 1.6 million crashes are caused each year by texting and talking on cell phones, that’s 28 percent of all traffic accidents, over 10,400 killed.

From 2001 to 2007 cell phones caused 16,000 deaths on US roads alone. This may be only the tip of the iceberg — until cell phone records are routinely subpoenaed in accident investigations, we will not know the full extent of the carnage. Worse yet, the new laws prohibiting phone use while driving are having no effect. They may even be causing drivers to deny and hide their phone use, again obscuring the full extent of the problem.

The saddest part of this story is that most of the people killed and permanently disabled by cell phone caused accidents are young – mostly under 30 and predominately teens. That’s not to say that older law-abiding drivers can relax, you or someone you love could be the target of one of these speeding bolides with a texting teen at the wheel.

The wireless industry spends billions on advertising and so it’s not surprising that people now don’t feel “safe” without cell phone service. The human mind is no match for a well-crafted propaganda campaign. But as long as we are compelled to drive motor vehicles, cell phone service will shorten far more lives than it prolongs. To put it another way, cell phones do save lives, but not nearly as many as they ruin.

The best thing any community can do for its young people is to strictly regulate cell tower and antenna placement. Federal law gives us this right, and we should use it!

Steve Ludwig,

Lopez

Give citizens

certainty with CAO

In the early 1940s I lived across the street from Charles Countryman, the owner-operator of the mail and freight vessel, the “Osage”, which departed from Quackenbush dock in Bellingham at 7 a.m. daily.

He often invited my family to make the journey through the San Juans. Sometimes we would dis-embark and fish for trout in Cascade Lake on Orcas, and catch the Osage on her return trip. Even as a child I knew that the San Juans provided a beauty, adventure and inexpressable enchantment unrepeatable anywhere.

I have lived all over the U.S. and traveled across the globe, but the San Juans have always called to me as the most rapturous, precious, fragile and fecund place on earth. Confirmation of my feelings came from 11 years as a commercial salmon fisherman in the San Juans in the 1950s and 1960s.

I have been a property owner on Lopez since 1969. I live here because of the natural environment and want to preserve clean water, woods, streams, and shoreline spawning areas. Preserving these qualities are of special value in themselves, but also because they maintain property values and strengthen our local economy.

It is essential that we care for our critical areas, including those on my property. “Best Available Science” ensures adequate buffers exist between my buildings and the beach, that fresh water run-off from the woods on the hill has adequate natural filters, and that the natural, life-giving tides are not frustrated by human constructs, thus inhibiting seemingly invisible spawning and the growth of herring and salmon in our eel grass and kelp.

For 60 years I have observed a steady decline in salmon, bottomfish and herring in our waters. As an addicted recreational fisherman I am alarmed where we are going if we do not recognize the role of guidance and sensible regulation.

Excellent work on the CAO has been completed by the county council, staff, and the Citizens CAO Committee. The CAO is five years overdue. Give citizens certainty, complete the CAO and stop postponing the process with the distracting proposed four year vesting provision of the mini-initiative now circulating in the county.

George Lawson,

Lopez