Heat Wave Bakes Milford

Today and yesterday were bad days to try and discredit global warming. The temperature here in town soared to a record 98 Degrees and our towns kids were dripping in sweat as they sat in classrooms without air conditioning.

Our staff contacted the school superintendent and expressed concern over the extreme heat, especially after several schools either let their students out early or just took the day off all together.

Milford's Superintendent, Polanski said he spent a good part of his day walking around asking teachers and students how they were coping with the extreme heat. He gave an encouraging report, indicating that the kids and teachers were doing well.

This, however was not what some of the local kids said to me at the bus stop this morning. The consensus was that only two classrooms they were aware of had air conditioning, and they said that during their final exams they found the heat a to be a major distraction to their testing.

When I mentioned that I called their Superintendent to express their concern, one student sarcastically replied, "easy for him to say that, his office is one of the few that has air conditioning."

Parents expressed concern over the fact that the schools were even open at all during this excessively hot day, some did not understand why the school could not afford air conditioning in such extreme weather; at the very least it should be turned on in the event of an emergency.

The high cost of energy, combined with crippling property tax increases, declining ED funding and forced cutbacks to save our teachers jobs, in my opinion is what has led to this bad situation. Some time ago I wrote a blog stating that just this would happen if the city and state did not initiate a conservation program, and begin to install solar panels and budget friendly technologies in our city buildings.

A energy conservation expert at TriCity said that if the city abandoned its current technology in favor of geothermal heat pumps alone, this would cut the cities energy consumption by nearly 1/3 shortly after it get turned on. The problem is not recognizing the merit of this technology, it is getting the city to come up with money to begin installing it. If they do not do it now, then over the next decade they will have paid for it just through the current inefficient system.