Fire Rescue ambulances are no longer accepted at the Emergency Room.
In a plush office on Temple’s campus, executives are toasting their success in eliminating a “service line” that lost them money. Corporate hatchet man Ed Notebaert achieved the goal that made him worth millions to Ann Weaver Hart and the other decision makers at Temple when they hired him last fall.
Not heard in that office are the pain and loss of hundreds of newly unemployed workers, and thousands of patients and their families who don’t know where to turn. Northeastern, the largest employer in Port Richmond, an institution that generations have relied on, is now an empty shell. No longer will nurses be taught in their community to serve their community. The Hospital you can walk to is gone. A few doctor’s offices under the guise of an “ambulatory care center” won’t fool anyone.
In a supreme act of cynicism, timed to the closing Temple has put up billboards in the service area advertising that their maternity service is “always there”.
Despite its dependence on public funding and status as a public institution, Temple’s corporate managers proved impervious to the efforts of local elected officials to force it to alter its plans. We appreciate especially the efforts of Representatives John Taylor and Michael O’Brien, and Senators Mike Stack and Lawrence Farnese. The indifference of other elected officials, including Governor Ed Rendell, helped Temple along. Temple’s conduct cannot be forgotten, and the question of its accountability is still open.
Norma Fiorentino's drinking water well was a time bomb. For weeks, workers in her small northeastern Pennsylvania town had been plumbing natural gas deposits from a drilling rig a few hundred yards away. They cracked the earth and pumped in fluids to force the gas out. Somehow, stray gas worked into tiny crevasses in the rock, leaking upward into the aquifer and slipping quietly into Fiorentino's well. Then, according to the state's working theory, a motorized pump turned on in her well house, flicked a spark and caused a New Year's morning blast that tossed aside a concrete slab weighing several thousand pounds.
Fiorentino wasn't home at the time, so it's difficult to know exactly what happened. But afterward, state officials found methane, the largest component of natural gas, in her drinking water. If the fumes that built up in her well house had collected in her basement, the explosion could have killed her.
Dimock, the poverty-stricken enclave where Fiorentino lives, is ground zero for drilling the Marcellus Shale, a prized deposit of natural gas that is increasingly touted as one of the country's most abundant and cleanest alternatives to oil. The drilling here -- as in other parts of the nation -- is supposed to be a boon, bringing much-needed jobs and millions of dollars in royalties to cash-strapped homeowners.
But a string of documented cases of gas escaping into drinking water -- not just in Pennsylvania but across North America -- is raising new concerns about the hidden costs of this economic tide and strengthening arguments across the country that drilling can put drinking water at risk.
Dr. Alan Steinbach, Northeastern Hospital's Director of ICU describes the need Northeastern serves in the community and asks people to contact Ann Weaver Hart of Temple as well as elected officials to ask them how the need will be accounted for in the city if the hospital closes. Click here for "Who to Call" info . Also, check out Media Mobilizing's report on the Rally to Save Northeastern.
