One of America's great rivers TPed...again!
Posted August 10, 2011 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
A five-mile stretch of the Lochsa River in Idaho has been toilet papered. It sounds like a High School prank until you realize that these are really, really big rolls of toilet paper that were dumped into the wild and scenic waterway after a truck lost control on the winding roadway last week. How big? 8,000 pounds dry. And Idaho officials guess that they are closer to 30,000 pounds now that the rolls are water logged. Oddly enough, this is not the first time the Lochsa has been TPed---it is the fourth time in as many years!
So, why blog about it? (Aside from the opportunity to highlight some great headlines like the Idaho Statesman’s, “Experts: Lochsa River is too high to flush toilet paper”)
The accident occurred on a pretty notable stretch of road: US-12. It is a scenic highway where battle lines have been drawn over massively oversized loads set to deliver equipment from Idaho to Alberta’s tar sands operations over serious objections from communities along the route concerned about safety and ruinous impacts on the landscapes they love.
Even though US-12 sees an industrial shipping accident every week, Exxon is planning to move 200 giant modules on the highway with little clearance and steep drop-offs through mountain passes in Idaho and Montana on the way to Canada. By giant, I mean that the biggest is 500,000 pounds, thirty feet tall, nearly 200 feet long and nearly 30 feet wide (almost as wide as the entire road they will travel on in places). Comparitively, the quicker pickerupper blocking the Lochsa is nothing.
We’ve covered the insanity of the proposed megaload transports on Switchboard in the past (especially Bobby McEnaney), but the toilet paper to-do makes absolutely clear how treacherous this highway can be as it moves through picturesque mountain passes. While Idaho authorities wait for the mega-rolls to dry out (the first two fell apart in the river when someone tried to fish them out) a further reminder sits just a couple miles upstream where the van involved in a fatal accident sits in the raging river until it is safe for crews to remove it.
If a truck loaded with toilet paper cannot navigate this route, how about a 100-ton mega-truck with only 6 inches of clearance? If one of those suckers takes a spill, we will need more than Charmin to clean up the mess…
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Comments
Robin — Aug 11 2011 02:00 PM
Beside the fact that they are hauling unimaginably large (tonnage) equipment on this road and already they have had too many spills into the waterways there, does it not seem excessive to you that somewhere, someone has manufactured these huge rolls of TP to sop up their mess? What happens to the TP once used, who cleans it up, where is it taken to and disposed of... AND, the most obvious thing to me is: HOW MANY RAIN FORESTS ARE USED TO MAKE THAT MUCH TP??? This is just insanity to me!!