THIS TIME, CALIFORNIA COULD BE A TREND STOPPER

French Valley, CA – As the country built itself out during the housing boom years, available land to develop ‘heavy industrial’ use projects close to populated areas got scarcer. Interestingly enough, power plant technology developed and the need for tall smoke or plume stacks was diminished. These two seemingly unrelated facts are now two parts of a perfect storm deathtrap for light fixed wing aircraft and hot air balloons alike. You see, Sports Fans, folks are always trying to make a buck and when you’re ‘bird-dogging’ a power plant project, where do you look for land nowadays? In West Virginia, Alaska (hey, do you know Sarah P.?), and So Cali, one place with land still relatively bare is the land around small commercial airports, like the space around French Valley’s airport. Though a small airport, approximately 300 aircraft either land or take off daily. Though that’s not O’Hara, this ain’t Mayberry either. On top of that, 40% of the air traffic is transitory. A national trend is starting now to try and build power generating plants close or next to airports as evidenced by recent permit filings indicate.

The sole purpose for a plume stack is to project the waste preheated gases up into the atmosphere. Innovations have led the way to lower plume stack height, but preheated gases are still released into the air. At a lower level, the heat path grows wider quicker before it cools off. How many times have you gone from one temperature zone to another and felt the degree difference? The drop in temperature feels like chunks, not a gradual easing up a degree at a time. At 1600° you have to wonder how long the plume would take to reach surrounding air temperature of say, 75° or less. Since the plume would be as translucent as heat vapors rising from a radiator, how would one of the 40% transient pilots know where a plume current might be at any given moment with how the wind blows in this valley? ‘But wait, Mr. Wizard, wouldn’t the rising heat currents cause the plane to billow upward? You would think that, Timmy, but you see all gasoline engines need an oxygen level of 20% to operate. The oxygen levels in the plumes would be 3.5% which would stall the engine and cause the light plane or helicopter to crash.’ In this whole valley area, not just French Valley, there is another aerial attraction also besides motored aircraft. The hot air balloon business still thrives in these hills and there would always be a chance a balloon might be drawn into a plume by the rising air currents and crash. The fact that the valley floor elevates upward to the proposed power plant ground site only adds to the potential danger. Of course, realistically, all the balloon owners would move away to a less hazardous location.

The power journey of a thousand $miles begins with a single step, or in this case, several steps into chamber doors of the Murrieta Planning Commission, the Temecula Planning Commission, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, and the RC Planning Commission and the Winchester HOA. This happened early in 2008, a year before any hardcopy plan was submitted anywhere to anyone. This is called ‘getting your ducks in a row.’ Murrieta said ‘yes’ (a prognosticator of their ‘YES’ vote for Liberty Quarry). Temecula said ‘Yes’ with Chuck Washington and Ron Roberts touting it the greatest thing since sliced bread. The County Board of Supervisors said ‘yeah’ with Jeff (Ron R’s boss) Stone showing his big-hearted ‘thank you for smoking’ smile. (An aside here: You see folks, sooner or later, through all my articles, stories, and opin pieces, the MMJ people, the punks, the tea baggers, the anarchists, the tree huggers, the Recall groups, the dirt culture, the youth scene, the lowlifes, the BMXr’s, the bikers, and any others who feel the ‘crackdown on their inalienable rights’, will stop looking down their noses at each other’s group, realize that the same dicks are pissing on everybody’s parade, then tear down the walls that separate them from the others, and that’s when things will get interesting. Of course if things were done the right way for the right reasons, what the hell would I have to write about? Music is just the ‘A’ side of my 45.)

In March 2009, Kent (no kin to Clark) Fickett paid various monies and submitted the power plant plans to the proper channels, expecting his project to slide through like grease through a goose. But as I tell my friends back east, ‘I live in the sticks’, (pause, a John Cleese tilt of the head, expression, and fore finger in the air), ‘ahem, the FAST sticks’. The valley that gave us a ‘Bipsy’ is not a valley without its idiosyncrasies or divine intervention. So one day in August after I picked up trash off the front lawn announcing the grassroots opposition to this ‘under the public radar’ project, you, Dear Reader, and I enjoined the latest fight to save the valley from those who would pimp it like a ‘ho. (See archive story, ‘A Case of Gas…’.) Word on the street is, after Fickett was to get the ground floor (Phase 1of two phases) developed, it was to be resold, giving our energizer bunny Kent and all his ‘die hard’ political friends a chance to cash out. After all, there are plenty of other small American towns with clean air and Christian churches to attend that DON’T have any power plants polluting their air quality (yet) that you can retire to with a boatload of cash. Now YOU know the back story.