In almost any setting, I find the presence of Frank Scavo intolerably toxic. I was happy to see him on Sunday afternoon at Old Forge Fire Department Headquarters.<\/p>\n
A crowd of about 50 citizens gathered for an informational open house hosted by the Lower Lackawanna Valley Citizens Alliance<\/a>, a new nonprofit mobilized by everyday Americans who live in Old Forge, Taylor, Moosic, Duryea, Ransom and Newton townships and other neighboring communities.<\/p>\n For the Sunday of a Labor Day weekend, it was an encouraging turnout<\/a>. LLVCA vice chairwoman Michelle Wadika walked neighbors through a proposed pumped storage hydroelectric power plant project obviously intended to power AI hyperscale data centers in the near future.<\/p>\n The pumped storage project has been in the works for a while, but became instantly controversial in July when Times-Tribune Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky broke the news that a developer intended to build a data center campus across hundreds of acres on Bald Mountain in Ransom Twp. Part of the land purchased for the project \u2014 which would sprawl to less than half a mile from Austin Heights and about a mile from the Old Forge School District \u2014 would host the pumped storage power plant.<\/p>\n Soon after the story<\/a> was published, the developer\u2019s websites detailing the data center plans disappeared<\/a>. As of Tuesday, no applications for a data center project on the property were filed.<\/p>\n The 1,300-acre pumped storage power plant project, however, is still in the federal pipeline. Renewable Energy Aggregators Inc. of Pittston and Sullivan\u2019s Island, South Carolina, applied for a permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). If the permit is granted, the LLVCA fears the developer could force the project\u2019s construction through eminent domain.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of us are engineers,\u201d Wadika said of the LLVCA, beginning a presentation that nonetheless offered more detailed information and easily understood illustrations than any testimony delivered over the past year and a half by a small army of alleged experts representing data center and power plant developers.<\/p>\n Using the project\u2019s \u201cPre-Application Document\u201d (PAD) as a primary source, Wadika explored potential impacts no developer would dare discuss in public, including slope instability, mine subsidence, deforestation, flooding, water contamination and plummeting property values.<\/p>\n Her presentation was packed with gasp-inducing comparisons designed to provide crucial context.<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to the PAD, the applicant expects that construction of the upper reservoir would require quote, \u2018preliminary grading with quantities on the order of 5.5 million cubic yards of soil and rock excavated,\u2019 end quote,\u201d Wadika said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is equivalent to the amount excavated to construct the Hoover Dam, or 1.6 Great Pyramids of Giza. If you piled all that earth onto a football field, the pile would be as tall as two Empire State Buildings stacked on top of one another.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would take 360,000 to 450,000 standard dump truck loads to haul it all out. If you lined up the trucks bumper to bumper, they would reach from Old Forge to Salt Lake City. Imagine the impact on our roads.\u201d<\/p>\n Ruined roads are a common concern anywhere in Pennsylvania. The uncommonly dire potential impacts of mountaintop reservoirs of acid mine water laced with heavy metals pumped from the Old Forge Borehole were enough for most in the room to reject the project.<\/p>\n \u201cSo all that gets pumped to the top of that mountain\u2026 that will itself become a Superfund site because all those metals will precipitate out and gather at the bottom,\u201d Scavo said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd if the project goes through, in 20 years or 10 or whatever the life of the project is, that will be so toxic that you won\u2019t even be able to remove it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cVery good (point),\u201d a woman seated behind me said. I had to agree, even though Frank was the one who made it. He\u2019s nowhere near as toxic as a hyperscale data center or a power plant. That alone made his presence not just tolerable, but welcome.<\/p>\n For the record, I don\u2019t hate Frank Scavo \u2014 or anyone else. Hate is like drinking poison and hoping the other guy dies. I hate what Frank did, and that he lied about it in a pathetic attempt to escape the punishment he earned through his poor choices. The president who conned Frank and his fellow domestic terrorists into an attempted coup pardoned the miserable lot of them, but I will never forgive nor forget what they did on Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n Sunday was Sept. 6, 2026, and America is once again facing an attempted coup, this time perpetrated by narcissistic billionaire broligarchs, bottom-feeding sharks and the bootlickers who worship them like gods.<\/p>\n The same president who conned the Jan. 6 rioters and enough Americans to win a second term is openly, enthusiastically siding with the broligarchs and sharks. More and more former bootlickers are waking up to the fact that their \u201csainted\u201d hero is a tainted heel happy to help burn down the world on his way out of it.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have to like Frank Scavo to love him as a fellow child of God and stand alongside him as an American answering the call to defend himself, his family, his neighbors and his nation from industrialized annihilation.<\/p>\n Frank doesn\u2019t have to like me, either. We just have to set aside our countless differences and get along long enough to get through what we both see coming \u2014 a long, lopsided fight everyday Americans can\u2019t afford to lose.<\/p>\n