EARTHQUAKES! Plus radiation, drug overdoses, charity, food, jobs, a comet and more

A spicy plateful of Charlestown Tapas

By Will Collette

Run and hide! It’s an earthquake!

There were at least five small earthquakes recorded on Monday near Plainfield, CT approximately nine miles west of Coventry. The largest one was between 3.3 and 3.1 on the Richter Scale – large enough to be felt but not large enough to cause serious damage. 

Reports of shaking came in from as far away as New Bedford and Framingham in Massachusetts, South Kingstown and all over eastern Connecticut.

The Weston Observatory at Boston College monitors area seismic activity and says that small quakes are common in New England. They said there were two smaller quakes also around Plainfield that showed up on their instruments last week.

Coincidentally…

For the first time since I can remember, the Westerly Sun ran a major piece on problems at our local nuclear power plant, Millstone, which is just outside of New London. The piece ran in the Monday edition of our newspaper of record but actually comes from the Associated Press.

The article notes concerns, and growing impatience, by nuclear regulators with Millstone’s operators and their apparent lack of effective action to resolve chronic problems with their cooling pumps. These pumps are the main thing that keeps the nuclear reactors at Millstone from melting down, a la Fukushima (there's an item further down you should read on the Fukushima disaster).

Fukushima’s meltdown was the result of Japan’s cataclysmic 2011 earthquake knocking out the plant’s cooling pumps – a 9.0 quake, or roughly 500,000 times more powerful than our little Plainfield quakes. But nonetheless, as we're discovering at Millstone, it doesn’t take an earthquake to make those life-saving pumps fail.

Overdoses

If you recently received the expensive calendar put out by the Chariho Taskforce with your tax dollars, you would think that Rhode Island’s worst drug problem is marijuana and that marijuana prohibition – not legalization – is the answer.

However, not one single person in Rhode Island died of a marijuana overdose. 

On the other hand, Rhode Island ended 2014 with over 230 overdose deaths from opioids and, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Rhode Island has the third worst death rate in the US from alcohol overdoses at a rate of 22.8 per million.

Massachusetts was also bad, but its overdose fatality rate was about half that of Rhode Island. Rhode Island was the only state in New England in the national Top Ten.

Further, these alcohol overdoses are not concentrated among binge-drinking high school or college kids but instead are concentrated among those 35 to 64 years old. And 68% of those alcohol poisoning deaths occurred among non-Hispanic whites.

Perhaps that makes it good news that there is a new substance abuse treatment facility that has opened up in our area. Clinical Services of RI just announced opening shop in South County Commons in South Kingstown.

Generosity

Speaking of statistics, GoLocalProv did another one of its incessant comparison surveys of towns, this time comparing 69 Rhode Island zip code areas for how generous they are in terms of how much of their taxable income they give to charities and churches.

The #1 zip code area, to my surprise, was Barrington where residents donate 4.41% of their rather large median income. Not surprisingly, #2 is Central Falls (low-income people tend to be more generous with their charitable giving) at 3.17%. Burrillville came out at the bottom, #69, giving only 1.04%.

Generally, South County is pretty cheap when it comes to charitable giving. Wood River Junction was #67 at 1.14%, Bradford was #65, Shannock was #63 and Carolina was #58. Charlestown came in at #19 with our town’s folk donating 2.01% of their incomes to charity.

The only Top Ten finishers among South County communities are Kingston at #3 with a giving rate of 2.91% and Peace Dale/Wakefield at #9 and 2.25%.

Maybe we need some more of those ice buckets or whatever down here.

Congratulations, Tom. The OTHER Tom

In case you missed the article, once again we’d like to congratulate Tom Sgouros whose writings have appeared often in Progressive Charlestown for his appointment as Senior Policy Advisor to our new state General Treasurer Seth Magaziner.

And congratulations to the Charlestown Community Garden

Steve Stoehr wrote a very nice feature story on our home-grown hunger fighters at the Charlestown Community Garden. They almost doubled their production of fresh produce grown in 2014 over the previous year to 6,062 pounds.

All food grown is donated to local food panties and social service agencies.

The garden operates out of Ninigret Park. It was originally started as a project by a local Eagle Scout and grew into a major volunteer public service enterprise. The Garden runs under the sponsorship (and tax-exempt status, in case you want to donate) of the Jonnycake Center of Westerly.

Rhode Island population holds steady

Even though Charlestown continues to lose people – we have more deaths than births, plus we lose elderly people who can’t find affordable housing or assisted living in Charlestown – the rest of the state is remaining stable, according to an annual survey by United Van Lines. They say Rhode Island just about breaks even in terms of people moving in and out.

The states with the highest growth are Oregon at #1, followed by South Carolina, North Carolina, Vermont with Florida in fifth place.

Here’s a possible reason….

One reason for Rhode Island’s stable population is that a lot of Rhode Islanders can’t sell their homes, even in an improving market. Rhode Island was just ranked as the fifth worst state for “underwater mortgages,” where the house is worth less than the amount the homeowner owes on the mortgage.

This means underwater homeowners would not get enough from a sale to pay off the mortgage. That locks a lot of people in place. 13.6% of homeowners in the Greater Providence census tract (that includes us) have “negative equity” in their homes.

The good news is that our rate of underwater homeowners is dropping. 

In addition to a generally improving economy, a major factor in the decline in underwater mortgages is a higher than predicted climb in home values.

Charlestown is a good example. As recently as last summer, Zillow.com was predicting either no growth or a decline in Charlestown home values. However, Charlestown home values have climbed by 0.9% over last year to a median of $324,900 and Zillow now projects growth of 0.6% over the next 12 months.

If this trend continues, the CCA Party will be glad to hear, it will mean that more Charlestown homeowners will be able to afford to sell and then leave Charlestown, leading to the fulfillment of Charlestown Planning Commissar Ruth Platner’s goal of depopulating Charlestown.

Lotsa jobs

At 5.7%, Charlestown unemployment is now one point higher than the state average and the national average. If you’re out of work or looking to switch to a better job, here are recent job listings I’ve spotted.

For jobs in the non-profit sector, I highly recommend signing up for the daily e-mail from RI Community Jobs, a service of the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University. Click here to sign up. The other great place to look for local job openings are the various local Patch websites (e.g. Narragansett-South Kingstown, Stonington, North Kingstown, New London). You can access all Patch job postings by clicking here and plugging in what location you want to search.

Openings:

• Toddler Teacher at The Kids Co. Early Learning Center, LLC in Hope Valley. Click here for more details.
• Chief Financial Officer at the URI Foundation & URI Alumni Association. Click here for more details.
• Greenview Organic Farm in Wakefield is starting to recruit farm field workers now for the spring and summer season. Click here for more details.
• One position open for an Aquatics Director, another for a Personal Trainer and another for a lifeguard for the Greater Providence YMCA facility in Peace Dale. Click here for more details.
• Mystic Seaport (not Aquarium) has a boatload of job openings. Click here for full-time. Click here for part-time. Click here for seasonal.

Also,

• Assistant Director, Instructional Development Program (STEM), University of Rhode Island
• Director of Guest Experience & Member Relations, Ocean House in Westerly
• Marketing Manager, Director of Guest Experience & Member Relations for Ocean House & Weekapaug Inn in Westerly
• Director of Nursing - Registered Nurse and Assistant Director of Nursing, Brookdale Senior Living in South Kingstown
• Director, Engineering and Release Manager at General Dynamics in New London
• Clinical Pharmacy Director, Kurz Solutions in Westerly
• Director, Insight & Strategy- LOB, Oracle in Ashaway
• Financial Management Technician, Air National Guard at Quonset

And a possible threat to local employment at Electric Boat

If General Dynamics gets away with outsourcing at Bath, will Electric
Boat be next?

Something to keep an eye on in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, with our extreme dependence on Electric Boat, is a fight going on in Maine between the unions representing shipyard workers at the Bath Iron Works (BIW) and management over out-sourcing.

BIW is owned by General Dynamics, as is Electric Boat.

Even though defense contracts keep coming through (and with conservatives in control of Congress, will likely keep coming or increase), BIW has been cutting its costs by trying to get around its union contracts by farming out work manufacturing internal ship components to non-union contractors. Some of the work may even be done by contractors in Mexico.

The unions and General Dynamics are currently fighting it out in front of the National Labor Relations Board. If General Dynamics wins, and decides to expand the practice to their operations in Quonset Point and Groton, the impact on the local economy could be devastating.  

Fukushima radiation levels expected to peak on US West Coast in 2015

Radiation from Japan's Fukushima power plant heading for the US.

When the Fukushima nuclear power plant melted down after Japan’s terrible 2011 earthquake, it released deadly amounts of radiation into the air and water. That radiation has been working its way west ever since. New estimates are that the west coasts of the US and Canada will see peak levels this year.

The levels pose no immediate danger to live, but do increase long-term cancer mortality risks. The main effect to us will come through the food chain. As we get more of our favorite seafoods from the Pacific because our local fishing areas are so over-fished, we will be ingesting more radioactivity.

Again, I’m not saying this poses an immediate threat to life or health, but it does add to overall risk factors. You may want to pay attention to where your fish comes from. And, as always, we need to pay attention to the operations at the error-prone local nuke, the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant just outside of New London. See second lead story, above.

Looking for Comet Lovejoy

From Sky and Telescope

While Comet Lovejoy hit peak brightness on January 7, it was hard to see because of the full moon. 

As the moon changes phases, and if the weather should ever improve, we might be able to take advantage of that Charlestown dark sky that Ruth Platner is always blathering about. Lovejoy is the first comet of the year that can be seen with the naked eye (barely) and is certainly visible on a clear night with a telescope or binoculars.

The photos taken of it through good telescopes and equipment show a fuzzy aquamarine snowball with a long blue tail.

It is to the west of Orion and moving higher in the sky through Taurus between now and January 17. Click here for Sky & Telescope’s guide to viewing it.