Letters: Covered cars | Steel facility | Affordability crisis | Recalibrate lines | Delta tunnel

East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for July 20, 2023

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Don’t rely on covered
car promise in coal fight

Re: “City goes to trial with developer in ‘coal war’” (Page B1, July 8).

Thank you for your timely coverage of the Oakland “coal war.” However, despite his quoted comment about preventing coal dust, Phil Tagami has never committed to using covered cars. For good reason — covers for coal cars are not commercially available. If they were, they would be prohibitively expensive and might lead to the spontaneous combustion of the coal.

The Utah coal company behind Mr. Tagami still ships coal in uncovered cars to Richmond, where a recent scientific study documented that those coal trains increase toxic fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) more than other freight trains do.

PM 2.5 disproportionately affects infants, children, the elderly, the poor and people of color. It causes cancer, heart and lung disease, dementia, adverse birth outcomes and learning disorders.

Mr. Tagami in 2013 said he would not use his proposed terminal for coal. We can’t count on covered rail cars either.

Ann Harvey
Oakland

Steel facility closure
will have brutal impact

With USS-UPI closing in December 2023 after more than 100 years in business, what do we need to do to help save hundreds of jobs?

And what it will do to the city of Pittsburg when great-paying jobs with excellent benefits are all gone? There is nothing else to offer the 600-plus people that will be without jobs. And it will cause a ripple effect in the canning business, driving up the price of canned foods.

We need ideas and stories to get the government to hear us.

Gustavo Chavez
Pittsburg

Prop. 13 at heart of
affordability crisis

Re: “7 of state’s major metro areas have lowest young adult homeownership rate in U.S.” (Page A1, July 17).

According to the article, “California’s divergence from the rest of the nation is really due to the affordability crisis.” The East Bay Times examines only the result, not the cause.

Proposition 13 keeps taxes for long-term owners artificially low, causing no incentive to move. And it also benefits long-term landlords who raise rents and pocket Proposition 13’s inflationary pressure.

Keeping a home’s assessed value artificially low underlies so many issues such as low funding for schools, police, fire and infrastructure. It’s a sad commentary on California’s “liberal” values.

Other states have figured this out without bankrupting seniors, but I’m not holding my breath on a fix to the root cause anytime soon.

Dave Ruede
Oakland

PG&E must recalibrate
outage-prone lines

Re: “PG&E adds new tools to fight escalating wildfires” (Page B6, July 16).

PG&E’s new super-sensitive wires are too sensitive.

Since last September our area has had six phantom outages due to a leaf landing on the wires. There was never any danger of a fire starting. The wires need to be recalibrated so that they don’t throw us into an outage, normally lasting four or more hours, for no reason. We never have a warning and typically it hasn’t even been windy or particularly hot. That’s not a good way for PG&E to make friends.

I invite Patti Poppe, PG&E’s CEO, to be on our line. I’m sure that would result in this issue being addressed.

Kathy Craig
Lafayette

Delta tunnel will
mitigate sea-level rise

Re: “Newsom should kill off his zombie Delta tunnel plan” (Page A8, July 2).

Those opposing the tunnel taking water from the Sacramento River under the Delta to the state and federal water pumps near Tracy cite environmental dangers.

But the Delta will be inundated by sea level rise by the end of the century. Many Delta islands are already 20 feet below sea level. The island levees probably cannot withstand as much as 3 feet of sea level rise, which is forecast in a relatively few decades.

When the ocean invades the Delta, salt water will reach the pumps. Without a tunnel to the fresh waters of the Sacramento River, Contra Costa County will lose its water supply. The Livermore Valley will lose more than 80%, and southern Alameda County and Santa Clara County will lose nearly half.

Failure to build the Delta tunnel will be seen as incomprehensible madness by those living in the Bay Area just a few decades from now.

Gerald Meral
Deputy Director, California Department of Water Resources, retired
Inverness