EVERETT — When disasters hit home, are you prepared?
If not, now’s the time to take the first step toward being ready. September is National Preparedness Month, and this year, the focus is on turning awareness into action.
“It’s not enough to know what to do in an emergency,” Snohomish County Executive John Lovick said. “We need to take real steps to prepare ourselves and our families. If an earthquake or major storm hits and you’re trapped in your home, you should make sure that you have the resources you need to make it through.”
A countywide “Empower” preparedness fair on Saturday, Sept. 21, is designed to help local residents find preparedness ideas, tips and tools for emergency planning. The free event runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Snohomish Health District’s atrium, located at 3020 Rucker Ave. in Everett, and is cosponsored by the Snohomish Health District, Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management, the Medical Reserve Corps and city of Everett Office of Emergency Management. Low-income and uninsured adults can also get free whooping cough shots at the preparedness fair.
Preparing for an emergency doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The county Department of Emergency Management recommends taking one step each day toward emergency preparedness:
• Add one more item to your emergency kit. If you don’t have a kit, start one today.
• Find local sources of information that will help you before, during and after an emergency.
• Identify an out-of-area contact your household can notify in an emergency.
• Buy or prepare nonperishable food and water.
• Identify alternate routes to and from school or work.
For more helpful tips and information about National Preparedness Month and the Ready Campaign, visit http://ready.gov, or call 800-BE-READY or 800-SE-LISTO in Spanish.
ARLINGTON — Foster’s Produce & Corn Maze will host its annual Fall Pumpkin & Corn Maze Festival throughout the month of October, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Oct. 1-31, giving visitors a chance to celebrate their farmers and the harvest season on a local farm, and to reward their tastebuds with fresh-picked sweet corn and other farm goodies.
The family-friendly activities are set to include a pumpkin patch and a “Pirate Ship Adventures Corn Maze,” the latter of which will challenge participants to find all the pirates hiding in the maze and solve the riddle. Attendees can also enjoy tractor-drawn hayrides, a pumpkin slingshot, a hay maze and the farm’s animal barn. You can shop at the Harvest Market for local sweet corn and honey, squashes and gourds, apples and apple cider, or explore the selection of gourmet foods and the Halloween gift shop.
In the evening, sufficiently brave souls are welcome to play in the spooky Night Maze and Giant Pumpkin Hunt from 5-9 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 19 and 26. Bring your flashlight. The social bonfire will keep you warm, and the Harvest Market will be open to serve espresso, hot cocoa and pies.
Foster’s also offers Vintage Hay Barn Party room rentals and school tours. Call 360-435-6516 or email fosters@fosterscornmaze.com for more information or to make reservations.
Foster’s Produce & Corn Maze is located at 5818 State Route 530 NE in Arlington. For further details, log onto www.fosterscornmaze.com.
This fifth year of the annual Red Rooster Route’s celebration of local farms will also host the Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum’s “Pioneer Days” on Saturday, Sept. 21, as well as the Arlington Farmers’ Market Handmade Holiday Indoor Gift Market on Saturday, Dec. 7.
The Red Rooster Route is a self-guided tour through the Arlington farming and downtown area, off Exit 208 on I-5, made up of a nonprofit association of small, family-friendly farms that are open to the public during the harvest season.
To learn more about the farms and festivals on the Red Rooster Route, and to download a tour map, you can visit their website at www.redroosterroute.com.
MARYSVILLE — The long-awaited Marysville Walmart is finally set to open on Wednesday, Sept. 18, after a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 7:30 a.m. The new store is located at 8713 64th St. NE and will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to provide Marysville residents with one-stop shopping convenience for their grocery and general merchandise needs, as well as pharmacy services.
Marysville city officials have welcomed this new addition, citing increased opportunity for economic growth, commercial development and job creation.
“We want to welcome Marysville’s newest corporate neighbor, Walmart,” Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring said. “This is a grand opening that has been anticipated for several years, but will surely have been worth the wait for the many patient shoppers in our community and around the region.”
“We’re very pleased that Walmart is adding a second store to the Marysville community,” said Caldie Rogers, President and CEO of the Greater Marysville Tulalip Chamber of Commerce. “Walmart has been a valuable community partner since its first store opened in 2001. Their Tulalip store has provided their customers with literally hundreds of referrals to neighboring business when asked for a product they do not stock. This newest store addition will provide even more opportunities for economic growth, both in referrals as well as in sales tax revenue for our city.”
Store employees expressed their aim to offer quality, value-priced general merchandise, including apparel, electronics, toys, sporting goods, and lawn and garden items, as well as a full line of groceries, including organic and natural selections, in addition to local favorites. The store’s physical site is intended to serve as a convenient location for a variety of communities, including east Marysville, Lake Stevens, and unincorporated areas of Snohomish County.
The pharmacy likewise touts a full range of products and services. Pharmacy team members can answer product and prescription questions, and customers can ask about health and wellness solutions.
The grand opening celebration is also slated to include presentations of $8,000 in grants from Walmart and the Walmart Foundation to local community groups, including the Marysville Boys & Girls Club, the Marysville Community Food Bank, the Marysville Police Department and the Marysville Sunrise Rotary. The new store will also host a day-long toy drive, in partnership with the Salvation Army, on the day of its grand opening.
The new store employs approximately 300 full- and part-time associates, and more than 1,000 applicants submitted interest in working at the Marysville Walmart.
“Our associates are looking forward to a fun grand opening celebration, and cannot wait to welcome Marysville shoppers as we open the doors to our new store,” said store manager Sonia Smith, who began her Walmart career in 1999 as an assistant manager.
The Marysville Walmart will give customers a chance to meet Smith, and enjoy family activities such as face-painting, cupcake decorating and free food samples, while supplies last, during the store’s “Big Family Welcome” from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21.
If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.
Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.
In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.
The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.
“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”
Still trying to figure out what the big deal with fracking is? Hydraulic fracturing — fracking for short — is the controversial process that has fueled the new energy boom in the U.S., making it possible to tap reserves that had previously been too difficult and expensive to extract. It works by pumping millions of gallons of pressurized water, with sand and a cocktail of chemicals, into rock formations to create tiny cracks and release trapped oil and gas. It’s been tied to earthquakes and has led to a number of lawsuits, including one that resulted in a settlement agreement that barred a 7-year-old from ever talking about it. At the same time, fracking has also created a glut of cheap energy and is helping to push coal, and coal-fired power plants, out of the market.
But for all the fighting about whether fracking is good or bad (and research has shown the more people know, the more polarized they become), many people don’t understand what fracking actually is. The Munich-based design team Kurzgesagt has put together a video that explains why fracking — which has been around since the 1940s — just caught on in the last 10 years, and why people are worried. The video, which was posted earlier this month, has gone viral, and racked up over 1 million views in less than 10 days.
The video gets a lot right, but critics have also taken issue with a few of its claims. For example, the video states that fracking companies “say nothing about the precise composition of the chemical mixture but it is known that there are about 700 chemical agents which can be used in the process.” Energy in Depth, an industry group, has released a response noting that companies dodisclose some information about chemicals used in fracking. What that group doesn’t mention, however, is that companies don’t have to disclose chemicals that are designated as “trade secrets,” which is a pretty serious exception.
Energy in Depth also quotes former EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s testimony (among others) that “in no case have we made a definitive determination that the [fracturing] process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.” The key word here is “definitive” — there is a growing body of evidence that fracking can be linked to increased levels of methane, propane, and ethane in groundwater near fracking sites (likely due to faulty wells), and there are plenty of reasons to question whether pumping billions of gallons of toxic fluid into disposal wells is a good idea. (ProPublica has a couple of great, long pieces on injection wells.)
Kids are also cutting back on sweets and sugary drinks, eating breakfast more regularly, spending more time exercising, and spending less time in front of the television, the study found:
Pediatrics
The following graph shows the modest rise in the number of days per week that American kids engaged in physical activity (PA) and the decline in the hours per day that they sat in front of the television:
Pediatrics
These healthier habits have begun making a difference.
The average body mass index of thousands of kids studied increased between 2001 and 2005, then started falling between 2005 and 2009. That’s in line with the results of other studies, which have shown a plateau in childhood obesity rates. (Though as we told you last week, America’s most obese kids, primarily children of poor black and Hispanic parents, continue to get fatter.)
“Over the previous decades, the pattern had been that kids were getting less physical activity, and it’s been very hard to increase their fruit and vegetable consumption,” Ronald Iannotti, coauthor of the study and chairman of the department of exercise and health sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, told USA Today. “We’ve got a long way to go, but the good news is that those are increasing.”
TAHLEQUAH, OKLAHOMA – Over 2,000 Century-old journals, political messages and medicinal formulas handwritten in Cherokee and archived at Yale University are being translated for the first time.
Cherokee Their researchers and linguistic specialists have helped adapt 21st century technologies with their traditional culture.The Cherokee Nation is among a small few, if not the only tribe, that has a language translation department who contracts with Apple, Microsoft, Google and Ivy League universities for Cherokee translation projects.
One of the tribe’s 13 translators, Durbin Feeling, is transcribing some 2,000 documents at Yale’s Beinecke Library, to catalogue and eventually make public.
The documents, spanning from the late 19th to mid-20th century, are from the collection of the late Jack and Anna Kilpatrick, Cherokee researchers.
“Native American communities have endured some of America’s most sustained forms of cultural oppression, and contemporary Indian nations, tribal members and supporters work tirelessly to reverse generations of assimilation-orientated designs. The work of linguists and language speakers in such efforts is particularly essential, especially in keeping alive and vibrant the languages of the first Americans,”
said Ned Blackhawk, Yale professor of history and American studies, and advisory member at Yale’s Native American Cultural Center.
“The Cherokee Nation works at the leading edge of such linguistic activism. Their researchers and linguistic specialists have helped adapt 21st century technologies with their traditional culture and have developed among the most advanced pedagogical practices in the nation,”
Blackhawk said.
The Cherokee Nation translation department is also currently working with museums in Oklahoma and finishing up its largest translation of 500,000 words for Microsoft.
“Our speakers are taking Cherokee history, in the form of our language, and preserving it for our future by incorporating our written alphabet into smart phones and computer language settings, making it possible for our youth to email entirely in Cherokee,”
Principal Chief Bill John Baker said.
“They are one of our most valuable resources, not only passing on their wisdom to our Cherokee Immersion students learning to speak, but for our future who will know more about our lives and way of thinking, revealed in all these translated archived manuscripts.”
Feeling’s first language is Cherokee. He has a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of California, Irvine, and honorary doctorate from Ohio State. He has traveled across the United States and Germany sharing how to speak, read and write the 85 character Cherokee syllabary. He’s also taught Cherokee language and culture at the University of Oklahoma and Northeastern State University.
“Universities and museums often have all these documents and nobody to read them, to tell them what they say,”
Feeling said.
“They’ll choose the ones they’re curious about and let me translate, which benefits us all.”
The Cherokee Nation has a comprehensive language program that includes community language classes, online language courses, employee language classes, a language technology program, an office of translation and an immersion school for preschool through sixth grade and partners with Northeastern State University on a degree program for Cherokee language.
In addition to these initiatives, the Cherokee Nation also shows a strong dedication to language by including protection of language in the Chief’s oath of office, council resolutions supporting language and a quantity of signs on Cherokee Nation property that are written in the Cherokee syllabary.
WASHINGTON – The human mouth is home to millions of micro-organisms. These are not a problem in a healthy mouth, but where there is dental disease, these oral pathogens are extremely harmful.
Jessica Rickert DDS, Health Editor – Praire Band PotawatomiA common malady is periodontal disease, where the gums deteriorate. The bad bacteria present in active gum disease can include FUSOBACTERIUM NUCEATUM (Fn). There may be millions of these harmful germs. As they are swallowed, they can settle in the digestive tract. Yiping Han PhD, at Case Western Reserve University, discovered recently that Fn can attach and invade human colorectal cells. The molecules then turn on cancer growth genes and stimulate inflammatory responses in these cells and promote tumor growth. But, whether this FadA adhesion is an indirect or causal link remains unclear.
The Human papillomavirus is present in many patients’ mouths. When the HPV is present, it can cause an increase in oropharyngeal cancers.
Both cancers, and all cancers, are increased when the patients smokes tobacco and/or uses alcohol. Both cancers’ incidence and aggressiveness will be worsened by tobacco and alcohol usage.
A dentist is trained to look for oropharyngeal cancers at every dental checkup. But, if a sore which will not heal in 10 – 14 days is noticed, immediately see your dentist. Often, these cancers of the mouth are completely without symptoms.
Sound advice is to keep your mouth as healthy as possible by:
excellent oral hygiene;
a diet without white sugar and low in carbohydrates;
dental cleanings and checkups every 6 months.
It is time to quit using these poisons: tobacco and alcohol.
Those interested in helping Seattle’s homeless Native population can now do so by picking up a limited-edition, signed poster by Nooksack artist Louie Gong.
Proceeds from the posters, which are on sale at KessInHouse.com for $25 each, benefit Chief Seattle Club, an organization that provides food, services “a sacred space to nurture, affirm and renew the spirit of urban Native peoples.” The poster design is Gong’s “good morning” pattern, which features a pair of hummingbirds and a coffee cup that repeat seamlessly. (The pattern is currently the main motif of Gong’s new housewares line, and is featured on blankets, pillows, and shower curtains — check them out at eighthgeneration.com/collections/housewares.)
‘Good morning’ poster by Louie Gong
The 24″x36″ posters have been produced in a limited edition of 200, and each will be signed by Gong.
EVERETT – Drivers who use southbound State Route 529 to travel between Marysville and Everett should plan for nightly closures of the highway this week.
The southbound lanes of the SR 529 Snohomish River Bridge will be closed as contractor crews working for the Washington State Department of Transportation continue replacing the heavy pieces of machinery that operate the southbound drawspan.
The bridge will be closed nightly from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Monday, Sept. 16, through the morning of Friday, Sept. 20. Southbound drivers will be detoured to I-5 in Marysville.
Crews are replacing four steel axles, wheels and dozens of counterweight cables on the southbound lift span. The lift mechanisms are showing signs of wear and fatigue after years of raising and lowering 250 tons of counterweight with each drawspan opening.
