Thank you for your articles relating to the outrage against FirstLight’s Turners Falls Dam and the Northfield Mountain Pump Storage System. In the rush to adopt energy storage systems for solar and wind energies, our state and federal agencies have agreed to approve some very bad solutions to permit, adopt and license. One example, of course, is to allow solar on precious forested land, while there are plenty of roofs and degraded lands around that can be used. The Northfield Pump Storage System is another example of a horrendously false solution. I have heard that the amount of water from the Connecticut River pumped up and released can fill a football field every 3-4 seconds. All life residing in that water is destroyed. Articles about how even our legislators have testified against relicensing this project as proposed have come out in your paper and I applaud the legislators for their advocacy. However, they say they are willing to compromise to 30 years of license instead of the 50-year license that FERC is expected to permit.

I am not alone in stating that one year of license is too long. How much life is lost in our river for each minute, hour, day, week, month and year that this system runs? How can this ecosystem possibly afford to continue such a horrific process for another day? Thirty years is more than one third of a human life. How many generations of river life are we willing to sacrifice to permit FirstLight to destroy our river? Northfield Mountain Pump Storage System must not be relicensed at all. The environment and its creatures need it shut down immediately.

Miriam Kurland

Williamsburg