Drilling in the Valley
Millions of gallons of water are used to literally fracture the earth to get at the natural gas below. And below is the operative word – hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, as it’s commonly called, aims at natural-gas reserves anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface.
The good news is that natural gas is potentially a steady source of bridge fuel as our nation moves away from oil and toward renewable energies. The bad news is, well, if we don’t do it right, we could turn our own backyard into a wasteland en route.
“In the current climate, with the lack of any kind of adequate state or federal regulation, it would be absolutely not responsible now to do it. Whether or not someday in the future technology will be developed and safeguards will be in place, and best-management practices will be developed so that we can extract natural gas in a safe, responsible manner, I don’t know. I hope that we will, because it could be an important domestic source of energy. But at this point, I can say with certainty that the regulations are not in place to make it a responsible thing to do,” said Kate Wofford, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Network, a Luray-based community group that has been working to raise awareness of facts relative to hydrofracking. Read more
Building a new industrial sector in Waynesboro
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Waynesboro was once the envy of Western Virginia for its manufacturing economy. As recently as 1990, almost half of the city’s workforce was employed in manufacturing, whose rate of pay has traditionally been at least 40 percent and some years approaching 50 percent higher than the median income in the city.
The manufacturing interests in Waynesboro not only formed the basis of our economy. It was also the foundation of our way of life. Physicists at DuPont and engineers at General Electric demanded the kind of school system that could educate their sons and daughters to be just as productive in their adult years if not more so, and so our schools were also the envy of Western Virginia, if not the entire state.
The decline of manufacturing, from that 1990 measurement that had 4,400 jobs in the Waynesboro labor force to today, when the latest numbers from the Virginia Employment Commission, through the second quarter of 2009, has us at 1,619 jobs in manufacturing, has had myriad effects on the quality of life here.
Our standard of living has decreased, no question about it. Waynesboro still boasts a higher per-capita income than its nearest neighbor, Staunton, but in the past two years we’ve lost significant ground to a sister city just to our north, Harrisonburg, which actually has more manufacturing jobs than we do now, on an order to two to one, and has also made significant inroads in what I believe and others believe will be the economy of the 21st century, technology. Read more
Can Waynesboro be a tourist destination?
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Waynesboro doesn’t have a facility like The Biltmore to pull people down off the Blue Ridge Parkway like Asheville, N.C., has. But what if it did?
Consider that between 2 and 3 million visitors go in and out of the Shenandoah National Park each year, and 20 million people travel the Blue Ridge Parkway each year.
“When you consider that you’re strategically located between those two, that’s something that no other community can boast. No one else can say that they are located in between those two huge tourism assets. That’s tremendous untapped potential there,” said Brian Ososky, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association, which coordinates tourism-marketing efforts for localities from the Roanoke Valley to the Winchester area.
Waynesboro is perhaps the best situated from a tourism-marketing standpoint of any locality in the Valley. We are literally at Milepost Zero, the entrance both to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs south and the Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah National Park that runs to the north. Read more
Winter Weather Advisory: 1 to 3 inches of snow in Greater Augusta
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Weather Advisory for Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro through midnight tonight.
The forecast is calling for snow accumulations of 1 to 3 inches. The snow is expected to begin between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. The heaviest snowfall is forecast between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Snow is expected to end by late evening.
Valley gets $5M for green job training
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Blue Ridge Community College and James Madison University are among a group of Shenandoah Valley partners that will take part in a new program to train workers for jobs in the emerging green sector.
U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb on Friday announced a $5 million investment from the federal economic-stimulus package that will go to the Shenandoah Valley Workforce Investment Board to get the job-training program off the ground.
“The formation of the Shenandoah Valley Energy Partnership is exactly the kind of forward-looking collaboration we need to help jump-start our economy and create next-generation jobs in the clean energy field,” said Sen. Warner. “This investment in training workers for new green energy represents an exciting opportunity for the entire Valley region.” Read more
Snow Emergency Blog: The latest on road conditions and more
Moderated by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The Shenandoah Valley is under a state of emergency with the winter storm that is expected to dump as much as 30 inches of snow on the area this weekend.
The Snow Emergency Blog has the latest on road conditions from the Virginia Department of Transportation and the latest on the availability of emergency shelters from the local governments in Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro.
Look for updates from the AFP in the Comments section.
Local beef in local schools: A win-win
Posted by afp on March 15, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
And then you think about it for a second, and it occurs to you that, you know, maybe it makes sense that like everybody else we just order food for school lunches the way everybody else does, by going the mass-supplier route.
I mean, seriously – it’s not like you can just call up Farmer Fred over in West Augusta and get him to save you a side of beef and a bushel of corn without having to have the USDA and numerous other acronyms involved in the effort.
It took Amy Brown reading a magazine article about local food and then committing most of her free time over the past nine months to making local-foods-in-local-schools happen in the Shenandoah Valley to get us to where we are today. Read more
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