Drink up - all it can do is kill you

Not feeling any urgency to save lives from the pollution from the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company, two of the Flathead County commissioners and the governor of Montana, the Department of Environmental Quality, and Environmental Protection Agency, nothing is getting done with any haste to acquire Superfund monies to clean up the mess.

The new owners of CFAC, Glencore AG, could care less as it is saving them money. Their claim of contribution is to pass the obligation to the former owner, Atlantic Richfield and BP. And of course, there are the ridiculous findings from well tests, reported to U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, that no significant pollution was found. Not much social license here.

After all, what harm can drinking cyanide, fluoride, arsenic, lead, manganese, etc. from your tapwater possibly do? Well, for starters, given enough time, it can kill you. Not to worry though, the EPA, governor of Montana, two Flathead County commissioners, Glencore and DEQ don’t live here and so don’t have to drink this water — and CFAC is long gone from the scene.

So who does care? Apparently neither the residents of Columbia Falls nor the thousands who live along Cedar Creek and the Flathead River corridor clear down to Flathead Lake with personal, individual wells, since none of these stakeholders is squawking very much. We wouldn’t want to interfere with Glencore’s property rights now, would we?

I guess I shouldn’t care since I live many miles upstream of the toxic poison in the water, but I will raise this red flag and inform the apathetic citizenry that they don’t have long to live. Maybe they should have studied physics and chemistry and hydrology in school?

So, drink up, take a bath or shower, and we’ll see you in the next lifetime in a parallel universe.

Bill Baum

Coram