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Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra Tammy’s views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy’s neighbors, Wayne Mayo, Betsy Johnson, Joe Corsiglia, President Trump, Henry Heimuller, VP Pence, Pat Robertson, Debi Corsiglia’s dog, or Claudia Eagle’s Cats. This Tammy’s Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or even reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she refuses to be bullied by anyone. See Standard Disclaimer.
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Spraying Poison on Trees & People
Timber companies are still spraying herbicides in Oregon and poisoning people. It happened in the fall near Gold Beach, Oregon. Helicopters were heard and the timber company was spraying young fir trees above the tiny valley, winds swirled around the hillside. The people who lived in the valley was unaware of what was going to happen to many of them.
One man developed a severe nose bled and 33 other people, scattered up rabbit-hole roads throughout the valley, suffered in different ways: Strange rashes bloomed on their arms and foreheads, and some victims crouched over the toilet for hours, crippled by sudden diarrhea. Others were struck by nausea, headaches and asthma attacks. Everyone had felt fine until the helicopter began working nearby.
Local doctors and nurses were mystified by the ailments that plagued members of this coastal town, some people got sicker and stayed ill and a dog died and a horse went blind. Nozzles on the helicopter sprayed heavily four recent clear-cuts, and then illegally sprayed surrounding properties with a cocktail of herbicides containing substances such as triclopyr, imazapyr and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant.
A local man knew what was being sprayed as he was a gunner in Vietnam; he said I never bled through my lungs before in my life, Mr. Wright age 60, and a chief of the local fire department. A former logger and commercial fisherman, he once survived for six and a half hours in 43-degree water after his crab boat capsized in the Pacific Ocean. Wright tends to joke about his own suffering, rarely mentioning the 42 pieces of shrapnel in his body or the bullet wounds he got in Vietnam. But as for the spraying of the community by the timber company he is totally upset. He spoke of how he felt the timber company and the state cares nothing for the community in which they had just poisoned and violate.
Oregon has relatively lax regulations, limited oversight, and the proximity of forests to homes throughout the coastal range put Oregonians at the greatest risk. Also timber is a $20 billion dollar a year industry throughout the state. Exposure to the poisons is fairly routine in Oregon because of homes which are close to timber stands.
Starting in the late ’60s, chemists developed an array of substances designed to destroy specific forest shrubs. In the years prior logging companies used to burn logged over areas but it was dangerous because many of the fires could get out of hand and the burning did very little to kill out vegetation which competed with fir seedlings.
Then in the 80’s the companies hired a 5 man crew and they walked around with a can of spray and they sprayed individual trees, not spraying into water systems, or around homes. But the companies went away from this practice, because they found helicopter spraying was quicker and cheaper.
About 37 percent of Oregon’s timberland which is about 9 million acres is privately owned, most of it divided into corporate-owned parcels of at least 5,000 acres apiece. Using ground crews on anything over 100 acres doesn’t make economic sense says of the Oregon Department of Forestry. It takes 10 workers an entire day to treat the same acreage that a helicopter can spray in a half hour, while an industrial-grade clear-cut could take months to treat on the ground, without aerial spraying. That’s why timber companies went to the crop dusting practice.
In 2008, the last year that Oregon tracked spraying, more than 800,000 pounds of herbicide were dropped on the state’s private timberlands. Aerial herbicide spraying is banned on Oregon’s federal lands.
At high concentrations, these herbicides can cause a host of human health problems, from eye and skin irritation to vomiting and diarrhea. A person who drinks 2,4-D is likely to incur kidney failure and skeletal muscle damage, according to the National Pesticide Information Center. But regulatory agencies and timber companies, citing decades of science, insist that at the low concentrations likely to result from aerial spraying drift, most of the herbicides in widespread use are fairly harmless, yet 33 people can prove otherwise.
Atrazine and 2,4-D, two of the most commonly used chemicals in forestry, affect the endocrine system, the hormones and glands that regulate vital functions such as sexual development and behavior, pregnancy and many aspects of childhood development. Prenatal exposures have been linked to low birth weights, according to a 2013 article in Environmental Research. In 2011, an Environmental Protection Agency scientific advisory panel found evidence of a link between atrazine exposure and diseases including ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and thyroid cancer. And when chemicals are applied in a mix, they can interact, which may lead to more harmful effects than when they’re applied individually, according to a 2009 article in Environmental Health Perspectives.
I would hope that with the new facts and the number of people being made sick and have the long term and short term health issues that our law makers in Oregon would make the necessary laws to protect its citizens and all other living creatures from the effects of herbicides. We need to put pressure on our law makers to demand more oversight on timber companies to prevent contamination of our water and communities. But again this will be hard because money is the talker here and no one in government wants to put pressure on timber companies because the state law makers want the tax revenue from timber as it always has been the saying money talks.
Tammy
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