From the Editors
Both of our homes were flooded. Jonny and Stacey’s beautiful old house got two feet of water on the main floor. By a miracle, the Grace of God and the small rise of land my riverfront home sits on, I merely got seven feet in my basement. However, as nasty as that left my basement I thank my lucky stars that I was able to move back into my home as soon as I got electricity hooked back up.
So many other Perth citizens are still displaced and don’t know what to do…they are living in kind of a limbo while they wait to see what happens with their homes. We will do our best to keep you informed as to plans, ideas, and the personal feeling of our citizens as we work our way through this awful mess.
So onward ho with our Blackfly Gazette, which we plan to be a community based newsletter for our village and the surrounding areas. Our goal is to offer entertaining and informative ways for our friends and neighbors to stay connected and keep abreast of local scuttlebutt, neighbourly news and what’s going on with local businesses. We have lots of fun features that will be in future issues but for right now we’re going to focus on the burning issue of the Flood of 2012.
We believe it is vitally important to support our own local economy, even more so now in the wake of the flood disaster. The community is very worried, and with good reason, about the future of our health care services. Focus on the outcome you want and tell the government. Don’t wait to see what they say…if they don’t live here they don’t care. Our rural village might as well be on the other side of the planet as far as city based politicians are concerned. Most people cannot empathize with what is not immediately in front of them, and bureaucrats in general are even less empathetic than the general population. So, we have to stay in front of them. Write letters and call. It will take our dedication and our love for our village to restore Perth-Andover! Imagine and demand the very best for our village.
How do you want our town to look? What kind of businesses would you like to see here? What amenities would it be wonderful to have? Keep those visions in mind!
Spend your dollars locally to add to the tax base that supports our system. Money is energy and should be directed at supporting our own economy, not the USA.
As they say, hindsight is golden and it now is obvious that a flood of this magnitude has always been a possibility since the dams were built, given the right confluence of conditions. The chances of such a flood occurring again are only going to increase given the combined effects of global warming, clear cutting, silt run-off & build-up, yet more silt from agricultural run-off, and how and when the dam gates are opened.
It does appear that our village was sacrificed in favor of preserving communities further downriver, which brings up the ugly specter of various government officials gleefully rubbing their hands together in anticipation of getting rid of the Hotel Dieu.
Full disclosure here: from an ecological point of view I believe dams destroy our rivers’ eco- systems . Yes, I know we need power, I am speaking only of the effect the dams have on the river system, the wildlife and the fish population.
Damming rivers creates silt build up. It’s an inevitable result of the system. And I am sure that everyone in Perth has now dealt with enough silt to last them a lifetime, but what is the stuff anyway? It is far finer than regular dirt. Because of its fine texture it tends to stay suspended in the water. Silt is necessary for river health in a natural, free flowing river system. It gets deposited along the river banks as the river flows and nourishes the eco-system. Silt collects at the mouths of rivers as they empty into the sea, then washes back to build up the shoreline.
A river that is dammed becomes a series of stagnant lagoons. The silt that washes into a dammed river doesn’t flow naturally, and stays suspended in the water. If you attended the April 12 meeting you heard Al McPhail give us an informative lesson about the nature and function of dams. He gave us a verbal illustration of how he dug channels between puddles as a child. To borrow that same homespun example, what happens when you have a bucket of water that you start dumping dirt into?
Here’s a hint: Check out Archimede’s Principle. This is about how stuff displaces its own weight of fluid. Meaning that all that silt in the river is exponentially adding to the river volume every year, and it’s only going to get worse as long as the dams are in place. In other words, you start dumping dirt into your bucket of water, it’s gonna eventually overflow.
Unfortunately, there is no way to remove silt from rivers. It is ultra-fine, and is suspended in the water. Until it ends up all over your town, in your homes, covering your yards and making a slipping sliding hazard of our sidewalks, as we’ve just experienced.
The St John River is absolutely choked with silt, and has nearly doubled in volume as a result since the dam was erected.
Every dam causes this effect, and even if the Beechwood Dam were to laste forever the river behind it would simply keep getting higher and higher until it spilled over the top of the dam into a man-made waterfall. So silt continues to build up unless there is no dam.
A potential solution that is being discussed is setting up ice breakers on the river before the spring melt.
Eco Technology in Caraquet has used these machines to successfully break up ice jams and prevent flooding in a number of other provinces for years. I personally had no idea these machines existed, but hey, I grew up in Florida. They are most impressive to watch in action. There are videos on youtube of the ice breakers attacking some massive ice jams. If these machines are set up in Beechwood I personally will feel much safer come next spring.
A good source of ecological data and insight about our province can be found in the online environmental magazine “ Elements. It’s a publication of the New Brunswick Environmental Network and it offers a wide spectrum of environmental information. They publish articles, poetry, satire, science, personal opinion and have a children’s story section. Interviews are also offered in both the Mi’Kmaq and Maliseet First Nation’s languages.
The story that has become clearer than ever to me is that dams are destructive to the environment in so many ways. And now, because of our dams, our riverside villages and towns have all become ticking time bombs…when will their numbers come up in the Great Flood Lottery?
Which town will be the next victim of unopened gates?
As I am writing this I am thinking about what this means for everyone along the river. More and more businesses have relocated up along the Trans Canada corridor. If this continues, I envision a day in the future when all of our pretty riverfront communities will be clusters of new construction along the highway.
Now…For Something New!
What if the dams were gone, and our rivers were back to their former pristine condition and filled with healthy native salmon and there was no danger of flooding?
This may sound like a fantasy but we are closer to this reality than you might think.
For many years inventors have been working on methods of producing the Holy Grail of Free Energy. Since 1900, at least 6,000 patents in this field have been applied for but denied, suppressed or bought out. The giant corporations that have controlled our fuel, electricity and energy have no interest in allowing any invention that might cut into their obscene profits and control of humanity be developed in any way, shape or form.
Even if this information is completely new to you, you can’t help but have noticed that energy corporations and all industry connected to them have done absolutely nothing to make life any easier for us mere mortals.
As gas prices rose, auto companies came out with bigger cars! Hello gas guzzling SUV’s! Then auto manufacturers whined that they couldn’t possibly improve gas mileage which is a big, fat lie.
A self taught mechanic in Witchita, Kansas named Johnathan Goodwin can modify the engines of even big luxury cars to reduce emissions, increase power and more than double their fuel efficiency.
We’ve all been made the patsies of one of the greatest scams ever run in this quadrant of the galaxy!
The Grandaddy of Free Energy is a genius named Nikola Tesla. Over 100 years ago he developed a method to harness the energy that hums in the very air around us. He invented a wireless method to channel these electro-magnetic waves that surround us all and store it in a system of batteries.
Tesla wanted to provide the world with free, clean, wireless energy and he succeeded. Unfortunately for posterity and our planet, his financial backing was provided by J.P.Morgan.
Morgan was one of the original Robber Barons, and he had absolutely no interest in humanitarian causes. He was only interested in energy sources that could be
measured and charged for. When he discovered that Tesla’s electrical radio tower could not be metered, he withdrew his backing.
Tesla himself drove a car for 2 years during the 19030’s that he had modified to run on his wireless “radiant energy.” The car, a luxury Packard, had the engine removed and replaced with a battery pack that was continuously being charged by a mysterious black box in the glove compartment.
Imagine never paying for power for anything ever again! This is what Tesla invented but has been denied to us by powerful corporate interests..
Tesla died under mysterious circumstances in a cheap hotel room in 1943. All of his papers and research notes were promptly collected and whisked away by government agents.
Now, however, there is a movement afoot to recreate these fantastic futuristic technologies. The power of the internet has spread previously forbidden knowledge far and wide and inventors all over the planet have been working on discovering Tesla’s secrets and other methods of creating cheap, clean energy.
There are many sources of information on the internet but for a good introduction to these ideas and technologies check out the documentary ‘Thrive’.
This movie was released last November and is now available to watch for free at this site:
Www.thrivemovement.com
This website also provides plenty of documentation and further fascinating information on the subject of free energy and the history of its suppression and how we are taking back our right to have this technology.
Stephanie Kelley
