We welcome your opinions and letters — with name and address. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, P.O. Box 358, Deale, MD 20751 • E-mail them to us at [email protected].

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Another Luna Moth Sighted

Dear Bay Weekly:
While I always look forward to reading the entire Bay Weekly, I really found Gary Pendleton’s article on the luna moth [Earth Journal: Vol. XII, No. 32: Aug. 5] interesting. I read it Friday, August 6.

When I got home from work the following Monday at about 8pm (just getting dark), as I walked up to the front of the house, something caught my eye on the boxwoods in front.

I have joined Pendleton’s ranks, seeing a beautiful luna moth for the first time, perched on the shrub.

If not for his article, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought or known what it was.

Thanks,
—Joel R. Kahn, Silver Spring

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Pipelines Scarier than Wal-Mart

Dear Bay Weekly:
On July 31, the BBC World News broadcast reported a terrifying gas pipeline explosion near Brussels in Belgium. The pipeline was similar to the one that runs through Calvert County from Cove Point. In spite of the 11 pages of pipeline accidents with fatalities and injuries listed with the National Transportation Safety Board, nothing is more gory and horrifying than the account of this explosion: 15 known dead and 20 injured; debris and human bodies scattered over a 500-meter radius; fireballs leaping dozens of meters in the sky.

Our country has its own recent gas pipeline disasters, among them New Mexico, August, 2000: 11 killed, many injured, a crater 86 feet long and 20 feet deep.

Calvert County government seems to have greater concern for problems that Wal-Mart might create than the possible serious danger from the Cove Point Liquefied Natural Gas facility with the many, many enormous tanker loads of fuel and the 36-inch diameter pipeline through the county.

Now Dominion Inc. [Cove Point’s parent company] proposes to expand the LNG facility at Cove Point, including a second 36-inch-diameter pipeline. If the gas facility is expanded with many more tankers coming to Cove Point and another huge pipeline in this narrow county, Dominion is doubling the chances for many more people here to be blown to bits or seriously injured. Our Homeland Security color will have to stay red.

Calvert County does not need more LNG structures and another huge pipeline. There is no natural gas shortage in this country, and there are other kinds of fuel available. With the exception of two or three states, no other states want this extremely dangerous business while Dominion makes lots of profit.

Calvert County residents who do not want this additional danger should write or call the county commissioners and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to let them know, since the Dominion application may be filed soon.
—Phyllis S. Johnson, Port Republic