OILY TWEETS
RE: “Portland’s Finally Deciding on Whether to Clamp Down on Oil Train Transport” [News, Oct 21], regarding the routing of fossil fuel through Portland.
DEAR MERCURY—Twitter Oil Train Watch is recruiting volunteers. We still don’t have any Oregon tweeters. If you ride the Yellow or Orange MAX lines [or] use the Springwater path, and see a one-mile-long oil train with the 1267 hazmat placard, please tweet the direction of train travel, city/state/landmark, time, and hashtag #ORoiltrainwatch. Since the government and industry won’t give the public real-time oil train data, we will tweet it in their faces!
Matt Landon, Vancouver Action Network
- DAN LESAGE
PORTLAND’S CRYSTAL BALL
RE: “Portland in 2025” [Feature, Oct 21], a look at what the city might very well be like, from a development standpoint, in 10 more years.
You cannot keep Portland the way it was. People will not stop moving here, and they need places to live. One thing that makes Portland great, and desirable, is our location to unparalleled natural beauty. This beauty would not exist without land-use planning laws that were enacted in the ’70s, which define our urban growth boundaries and preserve the Columbia River Gorge as a national scenic area. If you want to keep Portland the way it is, work to abolish the urban growth boundary so that people can build their new homes and apartment complexes outside the boundaries, thereby possibly preserving some of the older homes and businesses in the city.
We’re gonna get a little Space Needle too? Maybe we can make it out of spun sugar, and watch it melt every winter.
The Crush (1993) was set in Seattle, but filmed in Vancouver, BC. There’s something not quite right about what ostensibly passes for the Space Needle.
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqApvhJ1CM