By Fr. Shay Cullen
Does a 150 meter high smoke stack belching black fumes from a coal burning power plant do more harm to children than burning ten million cigarettes? We may never know the answer to that but each have the same results – suffering lung-damaged children gasping for breath hour after hour, with tears streaming down their cheeks. It is happening right here on beautiful Subic Bay. It will be much worse. The Subic Bay Management Authority (SBMA) board members are trying to get more money from RP Energy before they approve the 600 MW coal plant.
The huge smoke and steam stacks will be an aeronautical hazard to planes coming into land and taking off at the Subic Bay airport. Experienced 747 Jumbo Jet, life-long pilot David Beechcroft-Kay says international pilots like him would not fly into Subic if the smoke stacks are built. In his life, he never flew into an airport with a giant smoke stack nearby. The government authorities in Manila approved the planned twin towers but allegedly it was based on faulty information provided by the power company.
The stack will scare passengers too and electric magnetic impulses from the huge turbines will affect navigation instruments, experts say. The airport will be dangerous and unsafe. The thing is the US Navy will not want to risk flying into that airport under the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). The airport will not get FAA international clearance for commercial flights. So the airport will be useless. It’s goodbye happy tourists and hello to dirty diseases.
Fumes, smoke, gases and air pollution of all kinds kill and hurt people especially children. Thousands of children worldwide are struck down with asthma. This is direct result of secondary cigarette smoke. How many more victims will there be from huge smoke belching from burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of all? Asthma in children is the most distressing and frightening result of irresponsible parents, relatives or neighbors smoking cigarettes in the presence of young children. Tobacco and coal-fired power plants company executives ought be made to visit the children’s hospitals and see the results of their dirty work. They ought to know and see that suffering to know what hell on earth they are creating for the children. Perhaps they will change to renewable energy production like geothermal, wind power and solar power.
Recently, a 2 year-old child called Ralph was so damaged by the secondary smoke from his father’s cigarettes that he almost choked and suffered lung failure as a result. He had an asthma attack and was unable to breath and was turning blue in the face from the extreme effort. He was rushed to the hospital still gagging where he was put on a nebulizer with medication that helped him breathe.
The ban on smoking in enclosed public places in the UK in 2007 has brought about a big reduction in the number of children admitted to hospitals across the UK. The good news is, it worked, there has been a 12.3 percent fall in the admission rates. If such a thing could cruelly inflict over 26,969 children with severe attacks, how much more damage does a smoke belching stack from a coal power plant do? It will cause hundreds of severe asthma attacks and inflict thousands of children who will be puking their lungs out day after day. That’s just one of the damaging effects of burning black sooty coal to produce electricity.
Coal is the dirtiest and most dangerous source of electric generation after nuclear. I repeat what I wrote previously, coal plants saturate the air we breathe with toxic chemicals that accumulate in our bodies 24 hours-a-day doing the damage that cannot be stopped. People living within the 50 kilometer danger zone of a coal plant are doomed to a shorter life and a possible, very painful death. The reason they build the smoke stacks so high is to carry away the deadly fumes from their own plant operators and neighbors, otherwise people close to the plant would be dropping dead like flies sprayed with pesticide.
The worst chemical of all coming from burning coal for electric generation is mercury, a toxic killer, if ever there was one. What is almost as bad is the radioactive cancer causing uranium that is found in the air near coal plants. Small amounts that accumulate in our bodies over time can kill us dead just as an arrow through the heart, only a lot more painfully. Sulphur, nitrogen compounds, silicon, aluminum, are being pumped into the air around us carried by the wind and sucked into our lungs with every breath. If we love life and our world, we need to keep it smoke free and clean.[end] email: shaycullen@preda.org, visit: www.preda.org
Email: shaycullen@preda.org
(Fr. Shay’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and on-line.)
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