Titanic Post

A letter to the editor of the Alamogordo News

It is difficult for me to get my mind around the present debate on our White Sands National Monument’s being submitted as a World Heritage Site. Being listed as a World Heritage Site appears to me as a win-win situation.

With a World Heritage Site listing, I envision world travelers becoming more aware of our White Sands being a unique piece of geology, traveling to Alamogordo to visit the monument, leaving a good deal of their money here, then moving on. All at no cost to the taxpayer. Yet I hear horror stories of our government losing its sovereignty, the military no longer being allowed to fly over the area, and all sorts of dire events, if we allow WSNM to be listed. A drop in attendance at Carlsbad Caverns (a World Heritage Site) was cited as a reason against listing, ignoring fuel cost as a possible cause for a decline in travel. The loss of a gold mine outside of Yellowstone National Park was another example of what could happen here. (more…)

I have written several letters to the editors of our local newspaper about various topics and usually in response to letters from the knee-jerks population. To the best of my memory, these letters were all published (on slow news days) by our pretty good newspaper.

This letter is in reply to responses to a series of accidents on a local mountain road in which severa people were injured, including a good friend of mine.

Letters to the Editor
Alamogordo Daily News
518 24th Street
Alamogordo, NM 88310

March 6, 2002

Dear Sir:

Let’s see if I’ve got this right: due to the high number of accidents, injuries, and deaths on Hwy 82, one party wants to widen and straighten the highway while the other wants to ban trucks and bicycles. Bicycles? Bicycles cause accidents on Hwy 82?

I don’t have the statistics at hand, but anecdotal evidence of causes of accidents points primarily to someone driving beyond his or her abilities, which I take to mean, drunk driving, driving too fast for road conditions, and just plain mindless driving.

Some thoughts about roads, vehicles, and drivers:

• The wider the road, the more traffic it attracts.
• The later you leave home, the faster you drive.
• The more you drink, the drunker you get.
• Snow and ice are slick.
• You can’t see around a blind curve.
• Trucks are even bigger than your SUV.

No, it’s not the bicycles killing us, it’s careless (without care), incapacitated, and speeding drivers. But, if you still think it’s the bicycles, how about some bike lanes?

Sincerely,

Ken Nicholson
Concerned Biker & Driver

We finally got some rain down in the basin, a little over .5 of an inch for the year now. If this keeps up, we should have over an inch by end of December. The mountains have gotten a little, but I’m not sure how much. All the mountain communities are busy thinning out the trees and underbrush around populated areas. I hope they will continue through out the “pined” area. In all the old photos from late 19th Century you see how thinly populated are the trees. Vision would have been several hundred yards through the pines. I used to think it was because they clear-cut it all, but that was the natural state of the forest. What we have now is the ability to see less than 5 yards. This is an example of environmentalism run amok. Damn you Smoky Bear! Now the forest is still closed, even to use the dirt roads between towns requires a permit.

I just recovered from the desire to become a town person. I was getting tired of the drive into town and my mess out here. Much to my surprise, I have excellent credit, so I started looking for a house in town. In that process I remembered that there is no place in that town I want to live. The only thing I can say about Alamogordo is that it is contractor friendly. And ‘growth at all cost’ friendly. We are just about out of water and the city commission has just approved four new sub-divisions and is building a new golf course club house at taxpayer’s expense. City folks can water their lawns once a week now.

They are proud that they keep drilling new wells into the almost depleted aquifers of drinkable water and they are stalled at building reverse osmosis plants and making our generous supply of brackish water drinkable. Oh, and they are using our drinking water to grow alfalfa, nuts, and chili. The chili, of course, is a necessity. There have been several offers from non-profits to set up RO equipment and use existing undisputed wells to the west. They even had private investors lined up. The commission prefers to use public money and disputed wells to the north.

This wouldn’t bother me so much, except that I get my water out of the same aquifer and they keep drilling more wells as the snow fed mountain surface water has ceased to appear the past years. So, build on Alamogordo! And remember that growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell, and you can’t drink money!