From CAPT Jeff Ogden, Captain of the Port, Coast Guard Sector Detroit:
I am extremely pleased to see that we have been successful in improving our information flow on our ice breaking operations to the citizens of Harsens Island. I feel it is crucial to the welfare of the island that you have the opportunity to understand where we are operationally and how that may affect your ability to use the Champion's Auto Ferry. I also want to reiterate how much I appreciate the great turnout at the Town Hall meeting that we held back in December. I feel the open forum to address questions and concerns allowed you to understand us as we try to meet our ice breaking responsibilities and challenges...and it helped us to better understand your concerns about how our actions impact you. Thank you for those who braved the cold and participated.
That said, I want to restate that we are using this blog to provide timely information to you so you can be as prepared as possible in case we would need to send one of our ice breakers down the north channel. I cannot, however, use the blog to answer individual questions on our policies, procedures, and operational decisions. There are just too many facets to our operational ice breaking to adequately explain in a forum such as this. I simply don't have the personnel capacity to answer each question from individual citizens and I am over tasking LT Westmiller as it is to ensure he keeps you as updated as possible. I appreciate that you may have questions and will try to mitigate your concerns through timely information flow. I also appreciate your support of our endeavor to work with you as best we can. So far, this blog seems to be a good means to quickly communicate any news. We will continue to update the blog as conditions warrant, ensuring you have the most current information.
As we mentioned in our last update, we will NOT be going into the North Channel over the weekend. Unless the situation changes drastically over the next few days, we will wait to provide another update until next week once we see how the weekend weather will impact the water levels along the river. Again...I will not take any action to flush the north channel unless I feel it is absolutely necessary and our best option to meet the extensive ice breaking, maritime and environmental requirements we are balancing. And, as always, we will not send an ice breaker down the north channel without giving you advance notice through this blog and your leadership on the island.
Thank you for your patience as we partner through another challenging winter.
Respectfully,
CAPT Jeff Ogden
Commander, Coast Guard Sector Detroit
8 comments:
Captain,
Everyone appreciates your reports and advance information regarding the activities of the USCG assisting the residence through another challenging winter. The long term residense have been throughso many challenging winters without disruption in the past, they just want to know the differences in the past several years in comparison to the current years with these tremendious ice jams. Ice comes and ice goes, winters do the same, but is it the efforts to keep commerce going with providing frieghters the right of passage? This seems to be the missing variable in the whole equation.
"I cannot, however, use the blog to answer individual questions on our policies, procedures, and operational decisions." - CAPT Jeff Ogden
Mike D, we should feel lucky enough that we are getting ANY information this year. While I (a full-time resident), too, would like to know the answer to your question, we must be satisfied with what information the Coast Guard is willing to provide. After all, they DON'T HAVE TO give us this information: they're volunteering it (which is a huge improvement upon past years!), of which I am extremely thankful.
LT Westmiller and CAPT Ogden: please continue to provide updates through this blog as often as you can. Thank you.
Thank you for the updates and providing information as it becomes available, I understand and will keep any questions I have for the appropriate forum and time.
Being distrustful of government, I'd noticed the Lt was ignoring a handful of the same questions. Now we hear from the Capt. and it sounds as though he is , at the least, discouraging us to seek answers to a handful of questions. To me, this feels like a brush-off. A smooth-over-the-natives kind of political operation.
I could be wrong though and so in this spirit, can we summarize our most pertinent questions into a bulleted list or FAQ style (Frequently Asked Questions)?
If we can get a list of our top ten questions, we could submit them (or paste them here) to the Capt. to be answered and then these could (hopefully) be prominently featured here on the site.
A few of my questions (and we could have someone edit/narrow the words down too) would be:
-Where/what causes brash ice?
-If brash ice is the culprit in building ice dams and consequently flooding upriver* while dropping lk st. clair, shouldn't the halt and elimination to brash ice be of utmost concern?
-Regarding any operation in the North/Middle channels, we know those two reach the lake in shallow water so there is not much room at all for any ice to go...is the thinking that they just want to pack those 2 channels up as much as possible when the main river gets bad?? (a bandaid to say the least)
Mike's question is related:
- but is it the efforts to keep commerce going with providing frieghters the right of passage?
My last question regards flooding. Last year and now this year, they have trotted out the line about up river flooding. I know people from algonac to marine, to st. clair, to p. huron and last year and this year so far, NONE of them could find any signs of flooding.They just announced that huron is even down right now due to low precip in 2010. This is the worst to me. I feel they trot out that flooding line to justify screwin up the river for some corporations freighters.
Thoughts???
Jefferson
Most bad government has grown out of too much government.-Thomas Jefferson
whoa......holy cow, I need to say this.
TheMost: The Coast Guard is a branch of OUR government. I wonder how old you are because unfortunately,I see a lot of that resigned, submissive attitude in our younger citizens.
TheMost, you act like you are thankful for the bread crumb left you by the CG. You and all of us deserve a whole lot more than that as it is for us they are in existence.
THEY should feel lucky we put our trust in them and that they get to serve us and our country.
Please understand TheMost that I'm not attacking you, I just can't stand to see fellow Americans settle for less than what those who founded our country intended.It's the tone of your post, not a specific thing you said. I don't want to see anyone carry the notion that they should bow before government.
OUR coast guard does indeed owe us. Never forget that. And we should definitely NOT be satisfied until we are truly satisfied. On our merits.
I do however appreciate that they are moving in the right direction and so I thank our LT and Capt.
jojo: My age is irrelevant.
I separately emailed LT Westmiller to ask if he had been paying attention to the questions on the blog, and he had... but he had also expressed to me the blog was not the forum to answer such questions. This is likely the reason he had his Captain issue the response to the barrage of questions.
And I AM thankful for that breadcrumb, because it could have been LESS!
GOOD ARTICLE ON ICE JAMS OF THE ST.CLAIR RIVER ON (WWW.IRE.USACE.ARMY.MIL)GO TO DETROIT DISTRICT AND TO NEWS AND INFO. IT TELLS ABOUT THE 1984 JAM WHEN THE WATER LEVELS WERE 3 FT. HIGHER AND IT LASTED 26 DAYS. OTHER GOOD INFO TOO.
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