Category Archives: History

Canoeing from the Little to the Chee by Burt Kornegay 2018-03-24

Received April 6, 2018, posted with permission. -jsq

When I called the Canoe Outpost on the Suwannee River in Florida to ask if they would give me a shuttle up to the Little River at Reed Bingham State Park, in Georgia, the woman on the other end said, “You want to start up there?” I told her my plan was to canoe the Little River from where it left Reed Bingham down to its confluence with the Withlacoochee, then follow the Withlacoochee to the Suwannee. “I’ve worked here 27 years,” she exclaimed, “and this might be the first!”

Photo: Kathy Hubbard of Burt Kornegay arriving at Troupville Boat Ramp, March 24, 2018.

It turns out that, although many paddlers ply the Withlacoochee and the Suwannee with their blades, the adjective “little” in the name Little River means, in part, little paddled.

I’d had this trip in mind for years, and one reason lies in that Continue reading →

Troupville Cleanup, Little River, 2018-04-21

By permission of the landowners, WWALS will be cleaning up the site of Troupville, the previous county seat of Lowndes County, Georgia. Its nineteenth-century residents picked up everything and moved it when Valdosta was founded, so there’s not much to see but beautiful riverfront, in Between the Rivers LLC, down to the confluence of the Little River with the Withlacoochee River. Unfortunately, there is trash, which we will clean up. We hope to have some history experts explaining what used to be there.

This cleanup is in conjunction with Keep Lowndes Valdosta Beautiful (KLVB) The Great American Cleanup, and is part of Waterkeeper® Alliance Cleanup Week.

When: 8:30 AM – Noon, Saturday, April 21, 2018

Gather at: Troupville Boat Ramp, 19664 Valdosta Hwy, Valdosta, GA 31602: on GA 133 off I-75 exit 18.
Park here to walk to the cleanup site.
No boat required, but if you want to bring a boat, you can put in here and paddle back.

GPS: 30.85131, -83.34743

Bring: Cleanup materials will be provided, but if you’ve got a trash picker, bring it along.

Free: This outing is free to everyone. We recommend you support the work of WWALS by becoming a WWALS member today!

Event: facebook, meetup

Site of Troupville at the confluence of the Little and Withlacoochee Rivers, Lowndes County parcel 0057 003, Between the Rivers LLC

Continue reading →

Ockolocoochee, Little River 1889-01-29

Update 2023-12-28: Revised version..

Who knows the Ockolocoochee River? No, not the Ochlockonee River; that’s a bit to the west. You do know the Ockolocoochee River as the Little River, of the Withlacoochee, of the Suwannee. Here is news from 1889 that also includes the boat that didn’t survive from Troupville to Ellaville, which was apparently not a paddlewheel steamer.

Irwin County, 1885a, GeorgiaInfo, Rand McNally Map of Georgia, 1885

Atlanta Constitution, January 29, 1889, Pg 12., quoted in Ray City History Blog, 18 October 2010, More About Troupville, GA and the Withlacoochee River,

THE WITHLACOOCHEE RIVER.

VALDOSTA, Ga., January 19. -[Special.]- Away up near the northern limit of the great wiregrass section there is a big cypress swamp. They call them bays there. From this bay emerges Continue reading →

Sabal Trail is shut down while DC Circuit Court delays again 2018-03-08

Sabal Trail is already shut down, while the DC Circuit Court delays its mandate to shut it down.

This month 2018-03-01 – 2018-03-09: Graphs by WWALS from Sabal Trail’s own FERC-required Informational postings.

Here’s the problem:

Courts rarely block pipelines, even if regulators are found to have fallen short of the National Environmental Policy Act, and they have never halted a pipeline for inadequate climate review.

It’s long past time to get the clammy grip of fossil fuels off not only Congress and the agencies, but also off the courts.

Ellen M. Gilmer, E&E News, 8 March 2018, Shutdown averted for Sabal Trail pipeline, Continue reading →

Pipeline opposition rebuts wild-eyed Congressional distractions 2018-03-08

The headline would read better in this order: “Congressional Committee trolls energy policy.”

Suwannee Riverkeeper John Quarterman… said the science committee’s chairman, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, was making “wild-eyed attempts to divert from the misdeeds of his patron, the fossil fuel industry.”

Steve Patterson, Jacksonville.com, 8 March 2018, Congress: Russians trolled Florida pipeline debate,

Efforts by Russian internet trolls to destabilize the U.S. energy industry reached all the way to Florida and the controversy over construction of the Sabal Trail gas pipeline, according to a Congressional report.

For my previous takedown of that report, see Fossil fuels are a far bigger threat than the Russians.

And if the Russians were behind me spotting from the air this frac-out of Sabal Trail drilling mud up into the Withlacoochee River in Georgia, they’re way behind in their payments.

View from the south bank of Sabal Trail turbidity curtains and pipe from the north bank of the Withlacoochee River, about 2000 feet upstream from the US 84 bridge.
Photo: John S. Quarterman, October 22nd 2016.

Maybe I should send that Committee a bill Continue reading →

Fossil fuels are a far bigger threat than the Russians

Leaks of hazardous materials, explosions, land takings, sinkholes, frac-outs: these are far bigger threats than Texas Rep. Lamar Smith’s Committee report “that states Russian agents were attempting to disrupt U.S. energy markets and using social media to purportedly stir up protests against pipelines such as Sabal Trail,” as a reporter asked me about recently. Smith’s report doesn’t mention that solar and wind power are growing far faster than his favorite, fracked methane gas.

Business Council for Sustainable Energy by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, February 2018, 2018 Sustainable Energy in America.

Elsewhere I already looked behind Lamar Smith’s fossil fuel smoke and mirrors, and found I post more on social media than the tiny Russian numbers that horrify him.

His actual examples are seriously rolling-on-the-floor laughable, such as this: Continue reading →

Green Amendment book talk in Gainesville, FL, Delaware Riverkeeper 2018-03-26

Join veteran environmentalist Maya van Rossum at the Working Food Community Center in Gainesville as she discusses her new book, The Green Amendment: Securing our Right to a Healthy Environment, followed by Q&A and signing. Come out and meet Maya, pick up a copy of the book, and learn about the future of environmental advocacy.

When: 6-8 PM, Monday, March 26, 2018 (doors open 5:30 PM)

Where: Working Food Community Center
219 NW 10th Avenue
Gainesville, FL 32601

Event: facebook Continue reading →

FERC inadvertently clears path for renewable energy via storage 2018-02-15

FERC just let slip the wolves of sun and wind by enabling the storage that those sunny twenty-first-century “aggregated distributed energy resources” (DER) will use to blow down the straw houses of traditional twentieth-century so-called baseload capacity coal, oil, and nuclear power plants.

FERC Commissioner Robert F. Powelson called out the “participation model” Thursday’s twin orders enable, bypassing many traditional charges by accounting for physical characteristics that do not change over time, recognizing that batteries, sun, and wind power are basically different from old-style dinosaur power plants. Commissioner Neil Chatterjee named Senators Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse as proponents of these new rules, which is very interesting since both have long been proponents of renewable energy, and Sen. Whitehouse called out FERC for failing to implement the DC Circuit Court’s Order on greenhouse gases. Commissioner Cheryl A. LaFleur said “Electric storage is like a ‘Swiss army knife’”. Maybe more like the South Australian storage utility player that has already out-responded natural gas during coal plant outages. Commissioner Richard Glick says sun and wind power “no less than energy storage, have the potential to play a leading role in the electric grid of the future”. None of the Commissioners could bring themselves to say what they all know: sun, wind, water power with storage will be the electric grid of the future. Former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff and I were right in 2013: solar power will provide more U.S. electricity than any other source by 2023, on the way to complete conversion of everything to sun, wind, water, and storage by 2050.

Giles Parkinson, Reneweconomy, 23 January 2018, Tesla big battery moves from show-boating to money-making.

Gavin Bade, UtilityDive, Feb. 15, 2018, FERC issues storage, reliability orders, calls conference on aggregated DERs, Continue reading →

Emergency! Cries Sabal Trail 2018-02-02

Desperately seeking loopholes, at 4:58 PM today on a Friday, Sabal Trail claimed “Applicants would face irreparable financial harm,” which is pretty rich for the company that stuck the Bell Brothers with $47,000 in Sabal Trail legal fees for fighting eminent domain from that same FERC certificate the DC Circuit Court is likely to void next week.

It wants to “avoid the irreparable impacts of a system shutdown,” says the company that destroyed world-record-holding soybean farmer Randy Dowdy’s soybean fields. As Randy Dowdy said last May, and Sabal Trail’s own reports then say they have done nothing to correct:

“We’ve got loss of production for the future that will take not my lifetime, Continue reading →

Same Excuse: FERC rubberstamps PennEast like Sabal Trail 2018-01-19

Precedent agreements for 90+% of the pipeline’s capacity was FERC’s excuse for PennEast yesterday, the same as for Sabal Trail two years ago. Yet Sabal Trail apparently already lost 4/7 of its supposedly solid customer base and is not even shipping any gas. Even a dissenting FERC Commissioner spelled out that such shaky “need” does not justify environmental damage nor invasion of property rights through federal eminent domain. Sure, Commissioner LaFleur, we should trust PennEast with the Delaware River like FERC told us to trust Sabal “Sinkhole” Trail about the Suwannee River?

On New Year’s Day Sabal Trail removed Duke Energy Florida (DEF) from its customer index. On November 14, 2017, Sabal Trail’s gas flow dropped to zero, and Sabal Trail increased its Uncommitted Capacity by 300,000 Dekatherms per day, exactly the same as DEF formerly contracted for, and thirty days after DEF’s initial contract expired. That leaves FPL as Sabal Trail’s only customer, with its 400,000 DTH/day. Four sevenths of of 93% is only about 53%, which is not even the 75% Commissioner Richard Glick also mentioned in in his Friday dissent from the 4:1 FERC rubberstamp of the PennEast pipeline, which also happens to be a feeder for Sabal Trail through Transco. Meanwhile, during freezing weather in Florida, Sabal Trail shipped zero gas for much of November and January (and hardly any in December): how is that need?

Lost Duke Energy Florida, Sabal Trail?

No Balance

Commissioner Glick’s opening paragraph also sums up the recent WWALS motion to FERC to reject, shut off, and revoke Sabal Trail: Continue reading →

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