Dear Editor
Regarding "Dust riles Riverbend Trailer Park residents" (News-Optimist, Sept. 14), welcome to club.
Many of us in the heavy oil area have lived with thick dust for years. I believe we are supposed to put up and shut up; it's "progress," and if we are also subjected to polluted air we're told that's the smell of money, even as our breath is taken away.
With extra rain this year and less oil traffic past this gate, I've had a little break. The bit of oiled surface put on by the rural municipality lasted only a few weeks. I'm allergic to road dust and often am left choking and gasping, however. There have been times I can't see across the farmstead for dust. When the house was last painted it took the very professional workers a week to get the house clean and that cost extra of course.
On certain roads, when meeting an oil tanker, I have to put on the headlights.
Last spring the dust was so thick on headstones in our cemetery that those on the a slant could not be read. We have stood in thick dust during graveside services and the dust seeps into the church so a damp paper towel wiped across any furniture is a brownish black.
Crops alongside exceptionally dusty roads do not do as well and are difficult to swath. And what about cattle grazing along a dusty road?
These are just a few of the problems caused by dust. I'm not talking about a little dust, I'm talking about a curtain of dust, a boiling up of dust, a dust that spreads half a mile, a dust which, if there's no wind, hangs across the countryside in such manner as to look like a Scottish mist.
Not only that, studies have shown this dust is more harmful to our lungs than the smoke in forest fire areas, from which people are moved for the sake of their health.
Christina Pike
Waseca
