Fix needed for ongoing 911 and telephone service disruptions

Forks Mayor Nedra Reed is on the right track in calling for a showdown meeting with representatives of Century Tel and Qwest, the two telecommunications companies with phone lines on the North Olympic Peninsula.
The recent seven-plus hour outage of 911 lines, long distance lines and broadband Internet service from south of Forks clear through to Clallam Bay and Neah Bay showed something is seriously amiss.

This issue was said to have been resolved years ago when over $1.5 million was spent to lay fiber-optic cable to bridge what is known as the “Sappho Gap.”

Mayor Reed told the Forks Forum this cable is in place, but that there is apparently a lack of a signal across the gap.
That’s like paying for a costly water pipe for irrigation only to find out that no water runs through the pipe when drought comes.

This signal, which also bridges Century  Tel’s service in Forks and the West End with Qwest lines in Port Angeles and beyond, provides what telephone folk call redundancy. In simple English, that means if a phone cable is cut or breaks south of Forks phone signals have another route to run north of Forks. Reportedly a crew working on guard rails dug a hole where they were told no cable lay and must have been surprised to find they had cut the cable far to the south of Forks along Highway 101.

If everything was working correctly, this problem wouldn’t have been noticed in Forks.
The mayor’s meeting will hopefully resolve the finger-pointing between the telcos and get down to resolving this potentially dangerous and costly situation.

Thankfully, a backup 911 system was in place that used radio signals sent through intercoms - 30 year old technology - to keep the safety net alive on the West End.

We live in the 21st century. Digital signals are a necessity for trade, education, medicine, emergency signals and for the communications of daily community life.

Peeling back the layers of bureaucracy to see what is really going on underground at the Sappho Gap should resolve this situation once and for all.

Posted September 3, 2008

Letters to the Editor

Give immigrants a chance

When I was in the 8th grade in 1950-51, we had a big fat blue history book; the rule was that we had to pass the 8th Grade Constitution and U.S. History test or we wouldn’t be allowed to graduate and go to high school.

I remember one vocabulary lesson where we had to learn the meaning of some very big words, and we had to understand what they meant in the context of American history.

Xenophobia was a word that came from the Greek and meant a “fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or foreign people.”

Nativism had to do with fear that your culture would be adversely affected by immigrants.

“Know-nothings” were people who belonged to a political party in the U.S. in the 1850s who were afraid that Catholic immigrants from Europe would overwhelm the U.S. and be controlled by the Pope.

Children were expected to memorize things in those days in the 1950s: the Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Constitution, the words of the National Anthem, and the words engraved upon the Statue of Liberty.

We 8th graders had grown up during WWII. We knew well the ideals which our fathers and uncles and fought for. We 8th graders were proud to know that our country was far beyond the ignorance of the xenophobic, nativistic Know-Nothing people who were ignorant and prejudiced, and who didn’t believe in what the constitution said. We knew that America stood for something better than that. 

We didn’t know yet that there was a long way to go. In our early adulthood we lived through the Civil Rights Movement. We saw our peers take great risks to make sure that America would become what we had been told in 8th grade it already was.  
Now I am old, and I see a resurgence of navitism and xenophobia. Do we really need to protect ourselves by rounding up young men like Edgar Ayala and expel them from our country. I don’t know Edgar. I hear he was an honor student at FHS where I taught for 27 years, a member of the FHS wrestling team, a potential recruit to the U.S. Navy? Sounds to me like just the kind of person we’d want to keep here.

What are we becoming? Does anyone still study the constitution and care about protecting what it stands for? My ancestors arrived in 1642. They didn’t have permission to enter this country. They didn’t have title to the land they settled on. They didn’t have a passport or a visa. They did what people do. They migrated to where they thought life would be better for them and their children. We have no “right” to this land. We live here with others who got here in a variety of ways. We better just get along with each other, show respect, and accommodate to others who join us.

Please don’t protect me by betraying the ideals on which this country is founded. Don’t protect me by deporting Edgar Ayala and people like him! Let’s not let the “Know-Nothings” take over our country – they were an embarrassment in 1850. They should know better by now.

Marsha West - Forks


Dogs on the loose

This might come as a shock to some people, but while dogs are intelligent animals, they don’t understand physics; simple concepts like force, mass, acceleration, and inertia are not only mysteries to them, but they don’t even attempt to think about them. After all, they’re just dogs, right?

They also appear to have only the most rudimentary understanding of cause and effect, the consequences of decisions, the fragility of life and finality of death, or the pain that comes from loss – that basic awareness we take so for granted is all but absent in them. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people from maintaining remarkably high expectations of their dogs; they expect them to stay off the road, not drink the antifreeze on the neighbor’s driveway, not chase that kid running down the street...

You may be even more shocked to learn that there is a law against dogs running at large in Forks. And if I may take you back to something you should have been told in elementary school, the fact that “everyone else does it” doesn’t make something okay. Stray dogs have been tortured and even killed here; how much do you trust your neighbors? Everyone in this town is mentally stable and completely trustworthy, right? You’d probably let any one of them babysit your kids, no questions asked. I know, it’s not the same – children are family, but the dog, well, it’s just a dog.

But get this, some of us don’t believe there’s such a thing as “just a dog.”  Some of us see dogs not as possessions, but as loving companions, and we consider it our responsibility to protect them. And to that end, we advocate the use of a radical, technical marvel of the 21st century, it’s called a fence. Google it.

Steve Markwell, Olympic Animal Sanctuary


Letters to the editor policy

The Forks Forum belongs to the readers of the newspaper. The opinion section is the place where reader thoughts appear as letters to the editor. Letters longer than 300 words are sent back to the writer for revision. We only edit for spelling and grammar. Any substantial changes are sent to the letter writer for revision. While we strive to publish all letters, those focusing on local issues take precedence over statewide or national issues. No personal attacks or unsubstantiated allegations are accepted. Those letters are returned to the writer with an explanation why the letter is not going to run in its existing form.

Deadline for letters to appear is noon the Friday before publication. Letters are published on a space-available basis, with time-sensitive letters on local issues taking first priority. There are times, therefore, when a letter might not appear for a week or two.

Letters to the editor can be mailed to the Forks Forum, PO Box 300, Forks, WA 98331; e-mailed to editor@forksforum.com; faxed to 374-5739; or dropped off at our office at 494 S. Forks Ave.

All letters must have a name, address and telephone number for verification purposes. Only the writer?s name and hometown are printed in the newspaper.