The Core Issue of the 9th Race: Personal Safety

The pressing issues for Keating and Chapman are energy and the environment. Yet both issues have a singularly simple underlying core issue. Protests against the nuclear power plant in Plymouth are merely about personal safety. Protests against a planned offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound are about personal safety as well.

Keating supports Cape Wind, says it’ll help create new jobs. Chapman opposes Cape Wind because it’s location presents too many safety issues. Keating ignores anything about the air travel safety issue and the potential peril the project’s location places upon fliers to and from the Cape & Islands airports.

The 9th district is mostly “coastal.” Which stirs the imagination of New Bedford’s fishing fleet, Westport’s Horseneck Beach, Chatham’s Katherine The Great (white shark), Plymouth’s Pilgrim Colony, Wareham’s cranberry farms, and the enchanted summers had on the Cape, the Vineyard and Nantucket. Would people visit these places if an unacceptable risk to their personal safety existed?

In 2012 the FAA completed an aeronautical study and made an official statement that the Cape Wind project “has no effect on aeronautical operations.” However, as long ago as 2002, FAA air traffic controllers having air traffic safety jurisdiction in the site location of the Cape Wind project, have had dire safety concerns about the project’s location.

As late as December 2013 FAA air traffic controllers have documented radar anomalies, as well as provided personal testimonies verifying the unacceptable radar impact being experienced since official notification was given from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (union) to FAA management in November 2010. In 2010, three land based industrial wind turbines had begun operation within the Cape’s air traffic control area.

In 2014 the FAA completed an aeronautical study and made an official statement regarding an Erie County, PA wind farm project. The statement was a reversal of the agency’s long held position that wind turbines have no effect on aeronautical operations. The statement said, in effect, giant wind turbines interfere with radar used by air traffic controllers.

Candidate Chapmen believes that if off-shore wind is so vital to the energy/environment question (to which it indeed is), any proposed project should not compromise the public’s personal safety by it’s sited location. Candidate Chapmen has told the truth about Cape Wind and the safety issue. He will protect our most basic welfare interest. Our lives! So after, we’ll have the opportunity to go to, or seek out a job. Or enjoy living ‘coastal’ in the 9th district. After all, isn’t it all about priorities...?