It's difficult to build on an ever-changing, ever-expanding, unevenly settling footprint that melts pavement and emits toxic fumes including hydrogen sulfide and sufuric acid.
But Mr. Aszkler has it all figured out. <sarc>
I'm not a fan of Big Government or Collectivism, but this column neatly ignores the fact that it was a basically unregulated private enterprise that created this disaster.
A pox on the worst of both their houses. Gummit was more than once in a position to put this pestilent blaze out but never quite got ‘round tuit.’ Why? Couldn’t the civic disaster be foreseen?
Correct. So was the Johnstown flood.
But in the case of Centralia, it was the enviro-whackjobs which turned it from a small disaster into a mega disaster.
In the case of Johnstown, it would also be easy to envision the revenue hungry local government seeing a private fish pond for the wealthy as creating more taxes than a bunch of tenements downstream and approving its construction accordingly as in the Kelo case.
Most conservatives (such as myself) support balanced regulation which includes holding private industry as well as government accountable for any environmental messes which they make.