New England Cable News network this morning is dominated by pretty much non stop helicopter footage of the flooded Peabody, MA, downtown area. This flooding apparently occurred in a period of about an hour or so, with something like 3.5 inches of rain. The damage apparently extends over major parts of the Massachusetts North Shore region.
Flooding like this has occurred twice in the past twenty years at Alewife. http://www.openeyesvideo.com/Floodpix.html is a group of pictures of the flooding in 1997?
The extreme irresponsibility at Alewife is the imminent project which will destroy an irreplaceable virgin forest and untold thousands of animals for storm drainage which will only drain a tiny fraction of the flood impact by the two major storms.
The con game, and so much in Cambridge is con games, is the constant nonsense that they are protecting, and the nonsense is proven nonsense when you ask the level of protection. TWO YEAR STORMS, the worst rainstorm in the average two year period. The flood danger is those two fifty year storms.
Directly across Cambridge Park Drive from the destruction area is that massive parking lot which should be able to hold 50 year storms or more.
The difference can be seen on Google Maps, http://maps.google.com, satellite view. Go to 100 Cambridge Park Drive, Cambridge, MA. Look at the virgin forest above and the massive parking lot below. Too much of the virgin forest has been destroyed in “preliminary” work, but the satellite map is from earlier photos.
As with the repeated bizarre environmental destruction on the Charles River, the destruction at Alewife is impossible to explain as the behavior of normal, responsible people.
The only explanation approaching reason is flat out contempt for the environment and its animals.
Cambridge and the DCR are doing things which can only be explained by contempt for nature and nature’s beings.
It is made much easier by the massive organization in Cambridge of which the fake protective groups are only the visible part.
They quite simply have no shame, and they know their machine will protect them.
