SamPratt.com

A power line runs through it?

Plans to lay a 335-mile, 2,000 megawatt transmission line from Canada to New York City and Connecticut were just announced, with a major portion of the line proposed to be buried in the muck of the Hudson River starting near Selkirk and Castleton south to the Bronx.

Calling the project the Champlain-Hudson Power Express, developers at Transmission Development Inc. (TDI) are making a public presentation from 6-8 pm next Tuesday (March 9th) at the Holiday Inn Express at 300 Broadway. The project would involve burying four five-inch-diameter cables in the River, skirting the PCB cleanups now underway north of Albany. A PDF document showing the full route can be downloaded by clicking here.

TDI’s principle backers are The Blackstone Group based on Park Avenue, a major investor in Hilton Hotels, Orbitz.com, Michaels craft stores, and various communications companies. The company has been the subject of several recent controversies, outlined here by CNN. Among other things, Blackstone owns Sea World, where a trainer was recently drowned and mangled by a killer whale. Billionaire CEO Steve Schwarzman also came under fire for his $3 million birthday party in 2007 before the stock market crash.

The Catskill Daily Mail repeats unchallenged TDI’s claim that "neither commercial nor recreational current use of the Hudson River will be affected by the line’s presence." (Note the word “current,” which would suggest it might affect future uses.)

Mastodons in the Valley

Image: Ephemeral New York

Who knew?

Tuesday, February 9: Charles Willson Peale, Mastodons and Museums: A Legacy for Orange County.

In 1801, Charles Willson Peale, famous artist and naturalist, exhumed the first complete set of prehistoric bones in recorded history, right here in OrangeCounty, NY. He found a mastodon (the elephant’s ancestor). The discovery had a profound influence on the scientific enlightenment and developed the theory of extinction. Join Joe Devine, local historian from Montgomery, NY, Tom Lake, SUNY archaeologist, and Evan Galbraith, who will share his vision of a Peale Museum of Discovery, as they discuss this fascinating part our heritage and why, since Peale’s discovery, more mastodons per square mile have been found in Orange County than anywhere else on earth.

Of the Valley’s Mastodon giganteus (later renamed Mastodon americanus) John Collins Warren wrote in 1852:

“Language is insufficient to give an idea of the grandeur of this skeleton as a whole. Standing as it does in the midst of those of various large animals—the horse, the cow, &c., and towering above them, its massive limbs make them sink into insignificance. Even the elephant, although nearly as tall, has a frame which might be called delicate when compared with that of the Mastodon.”

NOTE: Some political observers disagree that mastodons ever became extinct in the region. ... More info on C.W. Peale can be found here; more on mastodons in New York here. Below: Peale's painting, dated 1805-08, entitled Exhumation of the Mastodon: