Where was our CodeRED?
For over 4 years Newtown has a CodeRED system. The town tells residents it exists for emergencies and points to things like missing persons, wildfires, and criminal activity as the kinds of incidents it is meant to address. Yet we had no CodeRED for Kateri Doty, no CodeRED for the brush fires, and no CodeRED for yesterday’s manhunt with police and tracking dogs moving through our backyards.
That is not one oversight. That is a pattern.
Under sleepy Bruce Walczak, the town has an emergency notification system that never seems to get used when actual emergencies happen.
Whether or not Bruce physically sends the alert himself is beside the point. If the system is not being used, if residents are left hearing about dangerous situations from Facebook and the neighbors’ kids instead of from their own government, then that failure belongs to him.
Newtown residents should not have to guess when there is a public safety issue unfolding around them. If Bruce Walcz"zzz"ak cannot make sure an emergency alert system is used for emergencies, then what exactly is he doing?
So your counterpoint is that The Bee prints the same number of pages regardless of how much content appears in it. If that is true, then I stand corrected. I actually doubt that is the case.
Thank you for continuing to read my letters and bringing attention to them. As I said the last time you went through this tortured calculation, the Bee would be printing the same number of pages with or without my contributions. Why not spend your time writing a letter to the editor trumpeting all the great triumphs you think Trump has accomplished?
The Bee publishes about 3,800(1) copies each week. This is now the 24th installment of “Trump’s Triumphs,” and these pieces generally run about 9 to 11 column inches each. Given the Bee’s broadsheet page size of 16.75" by 22.75" — or roughly 136 column inches per full page — that means this series has consumed the equivalent of about 6,700 full broadsheet pages over 24 installments, or roughly 0.42 acres of paper surface.
If those pages were laid down end to end, sheet by sheet, they would stretch from the flagpole all the way to the transfer station — about 2.4 miles.
On the theme of Earth Day, it is worth remembering that at some point, it stops being civic discourse and starts looking like a remarkable waste of paper.
Source figures: 3,800 copies per week, approximately 10 column inches per installment, 136 column inches per full page, 7.35% of a page per installment, across 24 installments.
