People Must Prevail
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By Susan Hartley
A very good question raised at this important forum by LA City officials and residents: Why do most of the aircraft using SM Airport fly over LA and not SM? Why doesn’t SM Airport use the skies above SM?
Given the placement of SM Airport next to LA on the east end, arriving flights will use LA for most approaches to the airport. Hence the recent study showing elevated, dangerous air pollution in those neighborhoods.
Don’t be surprised, however, if more and more departing flights fly out over wider areas of SM, not LA, in the future. They have already started doing that. Pilots and the FAA use the skies like they are in the Old West thinking they can go where they damn well please. That has to stop. Concomitant with these deviations from the recommended flight paths will be the dispersion of these same toxic air pollutants identified in the UCLA study over wider and wider areas of SM.
Maybe when cancer rates increase in SM like they are east of SM Airport, SM will get its act together and close the airport instead of permitting its de facto expansion all over SM and the Westside. Maybe SM’s little coterie of councilmembers who mostly live in the small northwest corner of SM, far from SM Airport, will take action. Right now they treat the problems of SM Airport like it was in Pomona.
True, SM is engaged in litigation against the FAA to stop the large C and D aircraft from using SM Airport given the physical limitation of the runway and the likelihood of an overrun and disaster. Always hopeful about the success of the litigation, residents realize that that litigation is an important step not necessarily in being successful in stopping the C and D aircraft, but in supporting SM’s arguments against its liability should a crash occur. SM can say, we tried and it’s all the court’s and the FAA’s fault.
That’s not good enough. SM needs to step up its actions now against the FAA’s de facto expansion of the flight paths. SM needs to quit fighting air quality and health risk studies around the airport. SM needs to quit blocking studies of the emissions from the aircraft. SM needs to act like it’s serious about closing the airport.
Airport staff needs to stop protecting the pilots and the FAA, quit lying to the residents affected by the airport, and quit spending revenue earned at the airport to make improvements for the pilots. The focus now should be on closing down the airport in 2015. Most of the revenue earned at the airport absolutely needs to go to funding projects to protect the people whose lives and health are threatened daily by the airport’s existence in their midst, not to protecting and perpetuating the airport. It’s time that LA and SM families, not runways, prevail.
I am a piano teacher who lives and teaches out of her home on Clover Avenue, just east of the Santa Monica Airport tarmac. We moved into our home when I was pregnant with my second child 24 years ago. If I had know then what I know now about how our location would eventually transform into a place of daily unpleasantness from breathing air fouled by the fumes of fuel; a home dirtied by the constant presence of grimy soot coating curtains, blinds and furniture, both indoors and out; about the deafening noise that drowns out the sound of the piano as my students play and forces me to stop speaking until I can once again be heard, there is no way I would have bought my home and chosen to raise my family in this unhealthy environment. We can’t even enjoy our own backyard.
I am one of many in an otherwise lovely, wonderful neighborhood suffering from this. Is there anyone out there willing to do the right thing, to wield influence from a position of power and do only what they themselves would desire for their own loved ones? Do we really have to spend all this time and effort fighting, fighting, fighting for something that is such a “no brainer”? Thank you Susan Hartley for your call to action. Every day I thank God for those on the front lines who have so faithfully fought long and hard for a resolution to this issue. For every one of them, there are many others whose voices are not being heard. Is anyone’s voice being heard? I will believe it when I see things change.
At the risk of being called contrary on this, lest agree to dsagreeshall we? Now also at the risk of being called preachy or worse?
Aircarft have been flying in and out of the area here for a long time now. And I have to ask what has changed?
Oh yes to be sure the evolution of flight has given rise to some amazing inovations. Fster, higher, lighter, cleaner, wonders all. But now comes the scorn from who? The people who just woke up and realized that there is an airport here?
Or is it people trying to make an issue of things by calling for the closure of the airport all together, while we watch on the evening new s that in Haiti, during an earth quake of devastating proportions, the airport is a life line to the millions in peril there.
I am sorry, I have to wonder then what will Los Angles look like if such an eavnt leveled this city and the surrounding areas and this particular airport were closed instead.
I happen to feel the airport is a valued asset and part and parcel of this city in its totality.
I will say this much to those determined to see this airport shut down? As we watch the chaos in Haiti emerge as a desperate population begins to panic? It will be they who closed this airport for whom the bell will toll if this city goes up in flames, and there comes the day to hold some one accountable for the misery and loss of life.
AP today…
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hungry, haggard survivors clamored — and sometimes fought — for food and water Saturday as donors squabbled over how to get aid into Haiti and rescuers waged an increasingly improbable battle to free the dying before they become the dead.
Haiti’s government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies — not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press. He said a final toll of 100,000 dead would “seem to be the minimum.”
AP PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Precious water, food and early glimmers of hope began reaching parched and hungry earthquake survivors Saturday on the streets of this shattered city, where despair at times turned into a frenzy among the ruins.
“People are so desperate for food that they are going crazy,” said accountant Henry Ounche, in a crowd of hundreds who fought one another as U.S. military helicopters clattered overhead carrying aid
Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince
Demands Deployment of Lifesaving Medical Equipment Given Priority
Port-au-Prince/Paris /New York, 17 January 2009—Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) urges that its cargo planes carrying essential medical and surgical material be allowed to land in Port-au-Prince in order to treat thousands of wounded waiting for vital surgical operations. Priority must be given immediately to planes carrying lifesaving equipment and medical personnel.
LA TIMES-Despite an increasing flow of aid and U.S. troops, hundreds of thousands of residents were still waiting for food, water and medical attention. The influx of relief supplies and rescue workers has overwhelmed the Port-au-Prince airport, with one runway, and rubble-blocked roads have slowed delivery of supplies to neighborhoods in the greatest need.