Shell is cleaning up the cracker plant site
The oped piece “Your Health vs. Cracker Plant Jobs” (April 6) is the epitome of fearmongering. I assume it was written in response to the PG’s recent series on the petro chemical plants in Louisiana. Those articles noted how family incomes and the investments in and quality of education in the two regions surrounding the plants were substantially higher than the rest of the state. The articles included families living near the plants — families who had an overall positive opinion of how the facilities were operated.
However, in the Perspectives commentary the writer chooses to spew her own rhetoric. She implies that our region has birthed an exponentially worse polluting dragon on the site of an old zinc plant — a plant whose toxic legacy includes suffocating the plant life on the surrounding hillsides, something she fails to mention. Instead, Shell, from the start, has worked to be a good neighbor. In contrast to other industrial sites that have languished for decades after the demise of the companies that once stood there, Shell has cleaned up the hundreds of acres on this site in short order.
It would serve our children better if we took time to explain to them that the real threat to their futures is, in fact, an all-invasive government and the dearth of jobs it causes. When a government dictates so much of what goes on, companies are unwilling to invest in new plants. We need these plants to produce cost-effectively the raw materials that other companies want to buy, so they can produce the goods we use every day. DAVID CRANSTON JR. President Cranston Material Handling Equipment Corp. Robinson universities are risks to fetal development and poorer birth outcomes. The risks to infants and children in a region already burdened with industrial pollutants are real, as are risks to the rest of the area’s population.
Adding another major source of pollution, I am certain, will only broaden and intensify the health risks already documented in academic studies and by our health staff at the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project. BETH WEINBERGER,
Ph.D. Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project
Peters
The April 10 editorial “History as Imperative: Why the Passover Message Resonates for All” is worth the price of a year’s subscription! That and the story eight pages earlier, “Palm Sunday Church Bombings in Egypt Kill 44, Wound Dozens,” are good examples of why I look forward to my morning cup of coffee with my PostGazette — to continually remind us that the stories of our past have relevance to our present and future.
Three thousand years later the stories of hate, oppression and slavery continually repeat themselves. “Why is this night
We welcome your opinion
different?” Perhaps because we have a free press with a memory and a conscience? Thanks for the memory.
This Roman Catholic will be keeping this lesson in my heart and prayers during what we believe is the holiest week of the year. To my fellow readers of the PG, I pray we all know peace. Shalom. PATRICK M. JOYCE
Robinson