Dear editor:
Happy New Year. I hope all of our community members enjoyed the beautiful and much needed rain and snow as much as I did. It was clean, natural, steady and stayed at higher elevations, just as Mother Nature intended.
If the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA) has its way, our future storms may not be nearly as beautiful and natural. It would like to perform cloud seeding experiments on our mountain area, and if our local water districts do not speak out against it, it will go ahead with or without the local residents’ consent.
I would like to strongly encourage everyone to research cloud seeding and decide for yourselves. Some of the many negative aspects I have found are:
• Silver iodide and acetone are used in the process and are highly toxic to fish, livestock and humans.
• The EPA Clean Water Act considers silver iodide a hazardous substance, priority pollutant and toxic pollutant.
• UC Berkeley Office of Environmental Health and Safety rates silver iodide as a Class C, non-soluble, inorganic, hazardous chemical that pollutes water and soil.
• Silver residuals have been detected several hundred kilometers downwind of cloud seeding events.
• Silver leaches into groundwater, streams, soil and the root systems of plants. Some of the consequences include rain suppression, flooding and tornadoes.
The essential thing I found through my research was that the process is uncontrollable and produces far more negative consequences than positive ones.
I hope you will research this for yourselves. Please attend your local water board meetings, whether it be in-person or virtually, and let them know how you feel about it. Hopefully, water board members and their general managers will do the right thing for the community to protect our drinking water by sending SAWPA a letter stating that we do not want this done in our area.
I enjoy drinking clean mountain water! Do you?
Dave Hunt
4th generation Idyllwild Hillbilly