Update 2018-12-12: And the winner is….!
Thanks to Bret Wagenhorst for the raffle kayak, which he donated at the Berrien County Harvest Festival.
You can get your raffle tickets here:
We’ll be picking the raffle winner on Saturday, December 8, 2018, in the Okefenokee Swamp. Continue reading
Except for being a very unseasonable 102 degrees in the shade, it was a very fine day at Berrien County Harvest Festival in Nashville, Georgia, Saturday, 29 September 2018, next to the Withlacoochee River and in a county bordered on the east by the Alapaha and Willacoochee Rivers.
He likes wwals.net so much he wanted to be on it, and now he and she are, shown here with Gretchen Quarterman.
Here are some pictures from the last year, and we’ll be back today at the Berrien County Harvest Festival.
If California can do it, so can Florida. The petition deadline for FDEP’s Basin Management Action Plans (BMAPs) got pushed back to January 2019, so we shall see.
Sara Rubin, Monterey County Weekly, 20 September 2018, Victory for Monterey Coastkeeper as court rules regulations for ag runoff fall short,
Even California’s water quality law, the Porter-Cologne Act, recognizes the challenge. A 2004 addendum about nonpoint source pollution put it this way: “Current land use management practices that have resulted in nonpoint source pollution have a long and complicated physical, economic and political history… Therefore, it is expected that it will take a significant amount of time for the [regional water boards] to approve or endorse nonpoint source control implementation programs.”
Photo: Nic Coury, “Otter Project Director Steve Shimek stands near the Monterey County Water Resources Agency’s Blanco Drain, which conveys ag runoff exceeding state water quality standards to the Salinas River,” in Court slams Central Coast farm runoff rules as too weak, orders water quality improvements, by Sara Rubin, Monterey County Weekly, 14 August 2015.That time, according to the Court of Appeal for California’s Third District, has come. A Sept. 18 decision Continue reading
Join WWALS back again at the eighth annual Berrien County Harvest Festival in downtown Nashville, Georgia. Music, art show, craft and food venders, featuring The Puppies of Penzance.
When: 9AM – 3PM, Saturday, September 29, 2018
Where: Downtown Courthouse Square, Nashville, GA 31639
Free: No entrance fee.
Event: facebook
Flyer:
Berrien County Chamber of Commerce.
Berrien County PR, unknown date, 2018 Berrien County Harvest Festival,
Harvest Festival activities will also include Continue reading
We are fortunate in the Suwannee River Basin in not having this bad a problem, but are similarities. Greg Allen, NPR, 7 September 2018, Toxic Algae Seeps Into Florida Congressional Races,
For months now, mats of algae from Lake Okeechobee have been flowing down the river, bringing toxins that can affect people and animals. In beach communities east of the lake, the algae have had a big impact on tourism and businesses.
With more toxic algae blooms on Florida’s west coast and a red tide algae bloom causing massive fish kills in the Gulf of Mexico, water quality is increasingly having a big impact on key midterm races in Florida. While Democrats tend to be more outspoken on environmental issues, Republican candidates are also speaking up because they’re feeling the heat.
Seems to me all the candidates are dancing around the real issue, which is Continue reading
Here are Gretchen Quarterman and Dave Hetzel at Heather Brasell’s annual A Day in the Woods at the Gaskins Forest Education Center near Alapaha, Berrien County, Georgia.
How can there be soil mixing yet zero noncompliance incidents?
Randy Dowdy asked directly to FERC, following up his
call in AgWeb for an independent investigation of Sabal Trail’s
destruction of his
world-record-holding soybean fields in Brooks County, Georgia.
Dowdy doesn’t trust Sabal Trail or anybody it sends to investigate that soil mixing. He’s hardly the first to say Sabal Trail’s inspectors don’t; see for example FERC’s Moultrie Scoping Meeting 2015-09-29 where James Bell said pipeline inspectors stood around until they noticed him watching, Sandra Jones said the surveyors were not qualified, and Attorney Daniel Dunn said Sabal Trail operates under darkness of misinformation. Dowdy may be late to the opposition, but he is determined.
Sabal Trail is still a stagecoach line in an electric car world, except stagecoaches didn’t destroy farmers’ fields.
Bad news doubled for the little pipeline that cried wolf: FERC did not file any certificates today for Sabal Trail, and Brooks County farmer Randy Dowdy is vindicated with a letter from FERC demanding a plan from Sabal Trail “within 20 days” (emphasis in the original) for “for investigating the actual extent of the topsoil and subsoil mixing on the Dowdy and Robinson properties and the reported mixing on the Jones property.”
Map:
Google, of Sabal Trail pipeline through Randy Dowdy’s soybean fields, next to Little Creek, which runs into Okapilco Creek, into the Withlacoochee River, into the Suwannee, to the Gulf.
That letter refers to an inspection report of November 14, 2017, also filed by FERC today, that documents that “topsoil and subsoil mixing has occurred in agricultural areas during construction of Sabal Trail Transmission, LLC’s (Sabal Trail) Sabal Trail Pipeline Project.”
FERC has thus validated Continue reading
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
