Letter: They missed the message
When Brett Kavanaugh led the Supreme Court’s agreement that the Surface Transportation Board had sufficiently considered the Uinta Basin Railway’s environmental impacts when it approved the plan in 2021, Eagle County’s attempt to halt the Uinta Basin Railway’s travel along the tracks abutting the Colorado River was effectively defeated.
I don’t know if the Supreme Court justices were allowed to see photographs, but if they could have been shown (or told about) the picture of the train traveling only a few feet from the edge of the river — the same photo that often appears in the Vail Daily — or shown a picture of the vast field of rocky rubble above the tracks waiting to plunge downward when sufficient vibration or weather change occurs, I wonder what they would have thought. What would they have thought if they were told that the highway from Dotsero to Glenwood Springs is really two very long bridges and that when (not if) the train drops a few carloads of waxy crude oil into the river, it will be near impossible lift them out to stop the contamination as it makes its way from Western Colorado through Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico.
Here in the High Country, we hold our environment dear to our hearts. But in this case, Eagle County officials and others missed the message. It wasn’t about the environment, it was about the life and death of the Southwest.
Once spilled, the river will carry the oil westward. The civil chaos that will follow such an event is beyond imagination. Eagle County and its associated groups have a very slim chance of changing the narrative from environment to humanity and the future of the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River.
I wish them good luck. But I’m not optimistic.
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Carolyn Swanepoel
EagleVail
