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Letter: Governor should deny terminals

By Mike Senchyna, BATTLE GROUND
Published: January 28, 2017, 6:00am

Governor Inslee must reject the Vancouver oil terminal and Kalama methanol terminal proposals. Both are clearly out of character for our region.

Each might provide a tiny number of jobs, but at what cost to Washingtonians? I am a retired Vancouver fire battalion chief and know from experience that Southwest Washington’s ability to deal quickly with complex incidents is quite limited. The region already suffers from large gaps in fire service readiness, caused by chronically insufficient funding. Given those gaps, these new proposals are irresponsible.

But there is another issue that concerns me. Both projects would be built atop water-saturated river sediments. We know that liquefaction will occur in these deposits during a strong earthquake, with catastrophic results to infrastructure.

Oregon now regrets having allowed numerous petrochemical facilities to be built along the lower Willamette River, atop the same kind of sediments. With seismic risks now better understood, they know that the survival of much of that infrastructure is in doubt. For new facilities, current engineering offers only partial, and mostly untested, protection from liquefaction in saturated sediments.

With this timely information readily available to all, why would any Washingtonian want two new petrochemical nightmares built along our Columbia River?

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