Residents of Boylan Heights, the neighborhood adjoining the site of the new Central Prison Regional Medical Center and Mental Hospital, are being dusted by the airborne residual from the demolition of old buildings and site grading that is being conducted in preparation of construction. North Carolina Department of Correction and the contractor Balfour and Beatty have filed to implement standard practices to mitigate so-called fugitive dust, usually accomplished by simply watering the material being worked. They are avoiding the effort and attendant costs by letting the dust blow onto their neighbors, much as a litterbug would toss cigarette butts out the window of a car.
“They’re supposed to water the site. That’s the law in every state,” said a construction worker who did not want to be identified. “I haven’t seen watering truck one. You see trucks carrying fuel to the dinosaur track hoes, but I haven’t seen a single water truck.”
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Given North Carolina’s statistical position in the US prison-industrial state, the attendant collapse of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services mental health sector and the already obsolete and dangerous Central Regional Hospital in Butner, a new facility to deal with the growing number of medical and mental cases remanded to the care of the Department of Correction is a genuine need.
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” V.I. Lenin famously boasted. Nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire Wall Street seems to be doing what Communism couldn’t: threading its own neck through the noose.
The Fourth of July, forty or so dedicated cyclists braved temperatures in the mid-nineties to ride in the First Annual Independence Day Paride…
Al Adams, former legislator and law partner of Terry Sanford told me a story the day before Jesse Helms’ funeral of the time Sanford found himself seated on an airplane next to, as synchronicity would have it, Jesse Helms, as diametrically different from the ex-Governor as two southern boys could be.
