A huge thank you
I just wanted to compliment the Asotin County Road Department on their incredible work on the chip seal project in and around the Clarkston Heights area.
There was minimal interruption to travel and such a fine end result. All the efforts including the polite and professional traffic control and signage.
A great effort by all. Thanks.
Slim DeWitt
Clarkston
Unanswered questions
It saddens me when I think of how the pandemic was handled in this country. I worked in a building located in the parking lot of a local hospital, right by the emergency room. I remember quite clearly looking over at the lot and not seeing a soul around, except one lonely nurse in a tent outside.
Those days most workers, including medical staff, were sent home with unemployment plus $600 extra per week. They were running on a skeleton crew.
Not once did I see a line of people outside. The parking lot was eerily empty and quiet. On the contrary, the media were reporting ill people were beginning to flood the hospitals, filling fast to capacity. Yet I was there everyday, looking at a bare lot.
Why was the media exaggerating, deliberately scaring people? Were they given misinformation?
Our life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.1 years by 2022. COVID-19 erased 2.7 years of life expectancy growth. Other countries only dropped one year. In peer countries, we have the lowest life expectancy, five to 10 years less than the others. Yet we pay double the amount in health care. Why?
How many young people died to drive those numbers down in that short time? I don’t believe it was COVID-19 alone. If so, why was our survival rate worse than many Third World countries?
So many unanswered questions.
Evelyn Babino
Clarkston
Why no fish ladders?
You wonder where the Idaho fish biologists, who are now retired, were when Hells Canyon, Oxbow and Brownlee dams were being built without fish ladders. Why didn’t they put forth the effort to properly have fish passage at these dams? They are now putting forth to try to have the four lower Snake River dams removed when they know fish and dams do co-exist with proper fish ladders that these and Columbia River dams have?
Breaching these dams would be an environmental disaster on the landscape. Think of what it would be like to lose our beautiful lake reservoirs and have the weeds, scrub bushes and tree growth ... .
If the tribes did not take the wild salmon and steelhead from the river system above Bonneville Dam there would be plentiful numbers of wild fish. Sport fishers can only catch clipped-fin hatchery fish. Think about the number of wild fish that end up in the gill nets set in the Columbia and Snake rivers.
The tribes say they are by treaty allowed 50% of the fish in the rivers, but it does not say they are allowed to take these fish by whatever means, including gill nets. If there were a study of the number of wild fish caught in those nets, that don’t get to spawn in the natural rivers that are tributaries of the Snake, I am sure it would show large numbers of wild fish taken before they ever pass the lower Snake River dams.
Marvin J. Entel
Clarkston
