Friday, May 09, 2008 |
Although it wasn’t very well attended, the hospital open house Sunday, hosted by the Southern Coos Hospital Foundation, was certainly well worth giving up a couple of hours to see the many innovative services that our hospital has to offer. Hospital employees gave up their Sunday afternoons to show off their individual departments, and the mobile MRI unit set up a day early especially for the open house.
For those of you who missed it, all I can say is you would have been impressed with what Southern Coos Hospital and Health Center makes available to the people of our community.
Cleaning up the gateway to Bandon
I know a lot of you have expressed concern about the unsightly condition of U.S. Highway 101 from the Bandon Shopping Center north to Bullards Bridge. I’d like to believe that people really aren’t just tossing their garbage out the window, but rather things are blowing off their pickups as they head to the Beaver Hill Disposal site. But I’m not sure. The highway in that area is such a mess.
Bandon Dunes General Manager Hank Hickox said he would provide a crew if I would contact the state highway officials in charge of that section of the highway. After several phone calls, I did connect with a man in the Port Orford maintenance office. He said he thought that section of highway had been adopted, but I assured him if it had, they weren’t doing a very good job (or any job at all) of keeping it clean.
Then Margaret Pounder, chairman of the Old Town Merchants Association, contacted Matt to see what could be done. He told her that Hank and I were working on it. To make a long story short, Margaret contacted Gina Dearth, executive director of the Port of Bandon, and it seems that we can get an inmate crew to clean up for $250 a day, and Hank has pledged $500 toward the work.
We’ll all be happy when it gets cleaned up. I realize that rural Coos County is pretty much of a mess because of an apparent complete lack of ordinances, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do something about the gateway to our community.
Keep your fingers crossed that once it gets cleaned up, it will stay that way for awhile.
Abandoned houses are the problem
My latest efforts at getting some pretty bad houses taken care of has run into a stumbling block, as I knew it would. I looked back at the minutes of the meeting and my emphasis was clearly on houses that appear to be abandoned, not your house and mine, which may have some missing shingles, rolled roofing or a garage door that doesn’t work. My concern was about the really obvious houses, like one on 11th Street that probably hasn’t been lived in for 10 or 15 years. It looks like a good strong wind would blow it over.
But as Daryl Barnes pointed out in his letter to the editor, if we went looking at houses and commercial buildings throughout town (not to mention the city shop on Elmira), we could write a lot of citations.
And that is not what I want. I want the owners of a few abandoned (that’s the operative word here) houses cited. If a house is not livable, surely there must be something that the city can do about it.
I won’t give up on getting some of the worst places cleaned up, but I realize it may be a losing battle.
One need only drive around rural Coos County to see what happens when no one cares (neither government nor property owners) and I just hate to see that happen here.
Wow, I could have had a ... glass bottle!
I’ve heard that V-8 juice is one of the healthiest drinks you can have — as long as it is bottled in glass. High-acid tomato juice is just one product that I don’t want to buy in a plastic container. I’ll admit that these days it’s hard to find anything that isn’t packed in something containing plastic, even if it’s the insides of many cans, but some stores do carry high-end juices bottled in glass. What really scares me is the number of products that are sealed in plastic, and are ready to be popped into the microwave. I can’t help feeling that you’re getting a lot of chemicals along with your meat and potatoes.
But the thing that amazes me most is the huge number of plastic water bottles that people drink from. I am sure they think they are opting for better health (i.e. more pristine water) by gulping it from plastic. But science is saying that simply isn’t so. Of course, if your source of water is contaminated, or you are hiking into the backcountry where treated water is not available, by all means carry a plastic water jug (although I would still opt to carry my water in a clean V-8 glass quart jar).
The safety of plastic is being questioned more and more by scientists and health care professionals, and until they can absolutely assure us that plastic is healthy when heated or frozen, I’ll stick to glass or ceramic for my food.
(Mary Schamehorn is Bandon’s mayor and a lifelong resident.)
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