A local fight against global coal
Coal is a dirty business — the mining, the handling and ultimately the burning. And that is all very much on the minds of people in Bellingham, Wash.
photo by Paul K. Anderson
Steve McMinn and his wife, Julie Trimingham, are at a child-filled park that's sandwiched between the shoreline and the railroad tracks that run right through town. Trimingham's family goes back generations in Bellingham, and now for the first time she finds herself stepping up as a community activist, opposing a proposed coal-export terminal up the coast at the industrial site of Cherry Point.
She's concerned about impacts on the immediate environment of the terminal, as well as the inevitable increase in train traffic through town.
"There would be a train on the tracks at least once every hour, day and night," she says. "So there's the noise and the pollution. The diesel particulate matter." She wonders what it would mean if emergency vehicles had to wait more often at the crossings. "And we're not sure how the intensified rail usage would affect the businesses on the wrong side of the tracks or close to the tracks."
It also just seems wrong for this progressive college town on sparkling Puget Sound. "It's almost inconceivable that there would be a plan afoot to change this part of the world to a coal export facility," Trimingham says. "It seems ironic or cruel, or misguided at best."
And it's not just about quality of life — it's about the future of the planet.
