On Monday August 26,2019, three people were sprayed with herbicides (glyphosate and more) from a Pope Resources helicopter while defending our, Port Townsend’s, drinking water reservoir, City Lake.

They were not on Pope land, but on Hwy 20. Because of the high wind, the spray drifted covering them, while a rep from DNR and a rep from Pope Resources were sitting in a truck at the site, watching.

One of the people sprayed did a video. Cars on Hwy 20 were also covered with spray, one a local hospice nurse who swabbed her car and the samples are being sent to a lab. Spray sites are City Lake, Tarboo Lake, Anderson Lake (one of the most toxic lakes in the world) Eaglemount neighborhoods where Ellen O’Shea lost her bees to “death by herbicide,” and many other locations. Many organic farms are at risk of being sprayed. The herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) as anyone with a TV knows, is involved in a Monsanto millions of dollars class action suit, for anyone who is suffering from non-hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer from using Roundup.

I don’t believe that people in town know what is going on in outlying areas where Pope harvests the trees and aerially sprays herbicides to kill the broad leaf plants that interfere with their money-making tree farms. Do you want your children drinking water that is contaminated with a known carcinogen?

Read “A Bitter Fog-Herbicides and Human Rights” by Carol VanStrum, available at the Port Townsend and Port Hadlock libraries, or at Amazon. It was written in 1983 about the community crisis in the Alsea/Five Rivers area of Oregon where I lived, and where many in my community suffered continual miscarriages, cancer and other ailments, died, had babies born with spina bifida and no brains, and deformed animals. We won a lawsuit, Merrell V Block and the Ninth Circuit Court ruling affirming it against the U.S. Forest Service and BLM, that banned aerial spraying of herbicides on all Forest Service and BLM land in the United States.

Educate yourselves and join us, the Jefferson County Environmental Coalition, in working for a Community Rights Initiative whereby we have legal rights and local control of an environmentally safe habitat in Jefferson Co. Attend our next meeting Sept 26, Thursday at the Cotton Building 4-8 p.m., attend Monday 9 a.m. meetings with the County Commissioners at the PT courthouse, and every other Monday meetings at 6:30 p.m. at the City Council at City Hall.

(Barbara Foster is a retired fitness instructor and massage therapist. She was an intervenor in Block, Merrill and Van Strum v. Bureau of Land Management, a 1983 case by which federal land managers were banned from using certain herbicides in the Siuslaw National Forest.)