How Some Decisions Get Made

The GA EPD just announced that a permit to expand the number of combustion turbines at Plant Dahlberg was granted. I covered this story earlier in the year when public meetings were held and various organizations were disputing some of the claims that Southern Power made about the affect that this expansion would have on the community and the amount of pollutants that would be emitted. For more details on that, look for my story on the Grady Journal soon.

Besides the environmental and health impact, what interests me now is how the permit was actually passed. In a very formal but completely lackluster public hearing, concerned citizens were allowed to go on the record stating specific problems that they had with the permit, or general concerns about how the new construction would affect them or their community. The comments are not responded to then, but in writing by the EPD. However, the formal responses to the grievances are not available to the public until after the permit is issued! The only option after that is a lawsuit.

Most interestingly, Southern Power representatives and the engineer at the meeting in Jefferson shrugged off comments and casually acknowledged a lack of specific details about the amount of pollutants already emitted by the plant. None of the people at the meeting made any specific comments about changes they wanted made to ease restrictions. Well, if you look at the permit, a majority of the final comments responded to are not by the public, they are by Southern Power, and they are asking for restrictions on pollutants to be eased. Does it make any sense that they can make these requests, not stating them publicly at the meeting, and then no one has an opportunity to see these requests - all of them granted - until the permit has already been passed?

Toilet Talk

This will be a way-deep-south blog.

I visited my friend who was a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador the year after I graduated from college. I had traveled through a few third world countries, but nothing could have prepared me for this. I got off the plane in scorching hot and dry San Salvador, and to quench my thirst, I drank water out of a plastic bag for the first time. Yes, that is how it is often sold there. We took a pick-up ride to his little town, and through the whole 2-hour trip we were in a cloud of smoke from the sugar cane fields that line the highway, which they burn before harvest to clear out brush and get rid of rats and snakes. Soon we were winding through village behind a school bus. I was appalled by the coke bottles and potato chip bags that were being tossed out the window into the road side ditch, which was already full of trash. What a country, I thought. Over the next couple of weeks, the poverty, overpopulation and environmental degradation only seemed to worsen. I never got used to it as I had any other not-so-bad countries.

So, I could Identify with the quest of the 'toilet lady'. Sanitation was obviously a huge problem. Many towns only had running water for a few hours a day. The schools lacked adequate facilities, and as Christine Moe said at the Voices of the Vanguard talk, this caused many girls to leave at a young age. My Peace Corps friend did not even have a bathroom.

He took some time off and we travelled around the small country working on other volunteers' projects. One of the volunteers was building toilets just like the one's Christine Moe showed last week. To cut a long story short, it was a fun project and attracted the attention of the other villagers, who lead a struggle of an existence, often walking miles a day to carry water that barely sufficed for cooking. Sanitation was a privilege, but once people saw the benefit and comfort it provided, they wanted to be next in line to get one. The topic was raised in discussion at the lecture of how to spread the idea of actually wanting to live in a more sanitary environment. As I observed, these simple toilets did bring an amount of prestige to the families that got them, and once the ash was spread over the human waste, the smell was not bad at all.

What does this have to do with Jackson County? Well, I think we all make decisions on an everyday basis that affect our health and the quality of our environment. It made me realize how ridiculous it was to be flushing drinking water down the toilet several times a day when we all have learned through recent droughts that we don't have an unlimited supply of water in this part of the country. Maybe we don't all need composting toilets, but we can do other things that may influence our neighbors, break stereotypes and create a healthier and more sustainable environment for all of us.

The Sometimes Forgotten Costs

I recently followed up with Dr. Jonathan Murrow, the cardiologist that spoke with our class, to get some more information about how the health care system can prevent the expensive costs that come with the trend of frequent rehospitalizations in this country. I am continually trying to figure out what programs are being implemented to work out this problem. During the conversation, I was again reminded of the collateral costs related to CVD and other chronic conditions. In addition to the high cost of an ER visit, which is estimated at almost $33,000 dollars per heart failure related incident in Georgia, our society must endure the long-term costs of repeat hospitalizations, extensive care-giving and loss of job productivity.

As we increasingly hear big-dollar numbers relating to health care reform, I think it's important to consider all of the manageable and preventable costs, which tally up at much more than drug costs and doctor visit bills. I did some research to figure out some expenses that also sap resources in this way. According to a CDC study that compared bills of healthy vs. obese people, obesity cost the U.S. an additional $147 billion in 2008. A study by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service says that addictions cost the U.S. almost $67 billion dollars per year, including loss of productivity. This means that everyone pays almost $1,000 a year to deal with drug addiction. And, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, mental illness costs the U.S. about $150 billion per year.

Wow. There is a lot more going on in health care than what happens in a doctors' office and hospitals. I think that the danger of looking at health reform in an overarching way that mainly looks at dollars is that we can overlook the fact that daily and even hourly decisions, and those of everyone else in this country, will affect the bill we will all be footing over the years.

Of course, all of this can not be prevented, but it seems that there must be things we can do to mitigate these soaring costs, since many of these problems deal with behavioral issues. When we make a laundry list of all of the costs associated with health problems, I think it can be easy to forget that leaving someone out of a job, or having them in a position where they have to rely on others for physical and financial support affects all of us a lot more than just tax dollars.