Putting trucking for
Honua Ola in perspective
In Skip Sims’ letter to the editor, (“Power plant will produce air and truck pollution,” Feb. 27), he bashes the legacy of our sugar plantations, disregards bioenergy as a clean, renewable resource, and dismisses the reality of trucking on the Big Island today.
The trucks that will be contracted by Honua Ola will operate under strict regulations and will not produce the pollution and debris he claims. The trucks are permitted and licensed by the state’s Public Utilities Commission and Department of Transportation, and will represent a very small fraction of total traffic.
Sims’ emphasis on trucking lacks perspective. Our roads already support thousands of trucks providing services or delivering necessities such as food, medicine and fuel. The few trucks required for Honua Ola represent a tiny fraction of this industry. To single them out while ignoring the fleet that makes everyday life possible is appalling.
The federal EPA and the 91直播 Department of Health enforce rigorous environmental standards that Honua Ola and the trucking industry must follow to operate legally and remain good neighbors.
Looking at the bigger picture, these trucks will support a plant that is providing 24/7 firm power to keep the lights on for 19,500 homes and providing over 200 jobs, including qualified and licensed local truck drivers, mechanics, office staff and the supporting industries that ensure trucks can stay on the road.
These supporting companies sell tires, parts, oil, fuel and various other items to ensure that 91直播 Island’s transportation industry keeps on the road.
Kevin M. Balog
Manager, Edwin DeLuz Trucking and Gravel
An ‘insanity pandemic’
is devouring America
Even more terrifying than the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic is the relentless march of the insanity pandemic!
It erupted in America, and rumor has it, the White House’s shadowy basement laboratory was ground zero, right next to the storage closet for top secret presidential snack supplies.
Now, this monstrous contagion has gone viral worldwide, igniting an unstoppable global inferno as if fueled by climate-change Lahaina whirlwinds.
Warning: Nobody is immune, not even your dog, if he watches cable news.
It’s invisible, but omnipresent, and more haunting than your neighbor’s “I’m running for City Council” yard sign.
Catch a glimpse of any political party you despise, and you’ll see the symptoms everywhere: wild-eyed stares, foam at the mouth, and a sudden urge to write angry posts in all caps.
This madness started off as political hate, simmering, like grandma’s chili — then exploded into an all-consuming, zombie apocalypse. Now, loved ones and lifelong friends transform into voracious, snarling, rabid wounded predators at even the hint of any disagreement.
Gone are the days of “agree to disagree.” Replacing it is an insatiable hunger for destruction — if not literally devouring your brain, then definitely blasting you on social media with enraged insults.
Victims of this disease can’t form thoughts deeper than a four-letter word, usually spelled wrong.
This is the one pandemic that promises no survivors — not even the guy wearing a mask and selling homemade hand sanitizer on the corner.
America, already spiraling in the terminal phase of decline that befalls all great empires, desperately needs unity to cushion that fall. Instead, we get a raging storm of hate-fueled insanity, and the only thing we can agree on is that everyone else is nuts.
Leighton Loo
Mililani, Oahu
