To the editor,
As a resident of Oxford, I enjoy and love to walk the “bridle path” along with neighboring families who ride bikes, walk dogs and ride their horses along this path that goes for miles through our communities. The path goes through wetlands, has beaver dams, birds, wildlife. It’s a piece of land that is beautiful, calm, quiet and restorative after a day of work. It’s located less than a mile from the proposed CPV Towantic Energy Center.
I am appalled by the town and the state even considering allowing the CPV Towantic fossil fuel plant to be built near our recreational areas. It’s not just a personal issue of me giving up my daily walks once this plant is built, for who would want to breathe in the toxins, walk on ground-level toxic ozone, not hear the birds above the noise, or smell the odors coming from this plant. These are facts.
But the bigger issue is preserving our environment instead of destroying it. The costs of solar and wind have declined profoundly. Renewables are increasingly the cheapest source of new electricity. And the amount of water that is needed for this plant (58,000 gallons of water in gas mode and a million gallons of water used per day in oil mode) is astounding. Our water tables are dropping. When you consider that only 3 percent of the world’s water is drinkable and other states are vying for water from the Great Lakes and California’s drought has industries (agricultural, fracking, etc) fighting over the same water supplies, are we going to close our eyes to using up our finite resource?
From the original request in 1999 to build this plant, our town and the New England area have undergone many changes that make this facility unwanted and unneeded in Oxford. The residential areas have grown substantially near the airport. We have a very busy airport right next to the proposed CPV site that makes this plant known as an additional danger. Times have changed and our officials need to look again and realize this plant is not in our town or our state interest.
Janet Boyd
Oxford
