Where is the plow?
Following the megastorm this week, the question on nearly everyone’s mind on Wednesday and Thursday was: “When will my street be plowed?”
Kudos to the town of Barnstable, which tried to keep residents informed about the storm cleanup through social media and its website. The town announced Monday night it would post updates on road conditions and closings on its Facebook page and it consistently kept them up throughout Tuesday and Wednesday. The town’s website also had a section dedicated to Department of Public Works updates.
Unfortunately, Barnstable was one of the few towns that offered consistent plowing updates. Most Cape towns did a poor job of informing its citizens of the pace and progress of clearing streets. With all the ways towns can communicate today -- Facebook, text alerts, emails, even reverse 911 -- they should be able to give people a ballpark estimate of when their neighborhood will be plowed. It would save DPW offices a lot of time if they answered some basic questions online.
Of course, some towns were better than others in communicating with their residents. Falmouth posted updates on its website through the storm, and the local emergency planning committee posted updates on Facebook and Twitter. Mashpee, Yarmouth and Chatham police posted road updates on Facebook. Some towns activated reverse 911 calls to keep residents informed.
But why can't town DPWs regularly post information about road conditions on their websites?
Inflated numbers, deflated balls
In case you have not heard, the Super Bowl, one of the biggest international sporting events of the year, is Sunday night in Phoenix, Arizona.
The NFL championship game is viewed by 171 million people in 180 countries, according to some sources. That seems exaggerated, since there are less than 200 countries in the world.
Such inflated numbers help sell 30-second TV advertisements, which cost $4.5 million this year. Companies are expected to spend $359 million on ad time for this year’s Super Bowl.
Here are some lesser-known statistics:
--1.25 billion chicken wings will be consumed during the game;
--7.5 million households will buy new TVs for the game.
--Fans are expected to gamble $115 million on the game.
And as far as Deflategate goes, we have only one question: If the air pressure of the football is so important to the game, why does the NFL allow each team to handle the balls on the sidelines? The NFL should oversee the balls.
Marine animals imperiled
If you knew that marine animals were about to become extinct at an alarming rate, wouldn’t you do something to help?
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has found that, since the year 1500, human activity has caused the extinction of 514 animal species, most of them land based. Despite extensive overfishing and pervasive water pollution, marine animals have fared better, with only 15 known human-caused extinctions over the past 500 years.
But that may be changing. Many marine species are threatened, including ones we are all too familiar with here on Cape Cod: right whales and Kemp's Ridley turtles.
Rising ocean temperatures because of climate change increasingly imperil many ocean creatures, according to a review of the research by Harvard. This dynamic is contributing to a set of changes in the oceans called acidification, which is happening faster than at any time in the past 300 million years, according to a study published in the journal Science.
Now comes a study published this month in Science, “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean,” which suggests we could be facing a sweeping loss of marine species in the near future. Key points in the study include:
--Marine extinction rates today look similar to the moderate levels of terrestrial extinction observed before the Industrial Revolution.
--In the last 40 years, marine vertebrates (fish, seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals) have declined in abundance by an average 22 percent. Marine fishes have declined in aggregate by 38 percent, and certain baleen whales by 85 percent.
--According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 40 times more wild animal biomass is harvested from the oceans than from land.