Stansbury Hall bricks
represent pride, too
According to the Daily Athenaeum, WVU’s student newspaper, bricks from the Stansbury Hall demolition will be landfilled:
“Joe Patten, head of the Design, Planning and Construction team, explained that there are no plans to sell the bricks.
“The bricks left over from Stansbury Hall will be used as fill material at another location,” Patten said.
“It’s typically how we handle demolition.”
Discussion on social media and elsewhere notes displeasure about what folks see as callous disposal of a structure many have cherished over the decades for the events held there and their personal experiences related to the building. While these feelings may seem old fashioned in today’s world, they have a certain validity in how alumni and others feel about the institution.
The general consensus is the bricks could have been collected, cleaned and sold as mementos with the proceeds going to scholarships or other useful ends. While such an undertaking would have required cost for labor, packaging, marketing, etc., it seems possible that volunteers could have been found to assist in such a project or a company found that would undertake it.
A brick is just a brick to some. But to others a brick represents pride and love for an institution. Those feelings should not be taken lightly in effect by dumping them in a landfill.
Lew McDaniel
Morgantown
Investment in fossil fuels
robs children of future
The plan to expand Longview Power Plant with a gas-fired plant (DP-Sept. 13) is disturbing. The company wants the Monongalia County Commission to approve a huge tax break, a PILOT (Payment In Lieu Of Taxes) instead of assessed property taxes.
Another fossil fuel plant means even more air and water pollution, resulting in higher health expenses. While natural gas claims to burn cleanly, fracking is not a clean process. Fracking pads leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and generate millions of gallons of toxic waste water. There is no such thing as clean fossil fuels.
Longview is an electric wholesale plant, so all the energy generated there goes into the national grid and is not necessarily consumed here. Nor will it make our rates any cheaper. That Longview filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2013, two years after it went online, does not instill confidence for future performance.
According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, “continued investments in gas-fired power plants will present stranded cost risk for customers, shareholders and society, while locking in 100 million tons of CO2 emissions each year.
RMI research shows that “clean energy portfolios” comprised of wind, solar and energy storage technologies are now cost-competitive with new natural gas power plants, while providing the same grid reliability services.
Children around the world are begging us to protect their future. Why should we invest in fossil energy sources that are guaranteed to rob them of it?
We should not give tax breaks and incentives to fossil fuel industries. The Mon County Commission has an opportunity to say yes to the children by saying yes to solar energy but no to another fossil fuel plant.
Betsy Lawson
Morgantown
