‘The Briefing Episode #9: By the Numbers’ – Steve Edmiston’s ongoing attempt to “take on the Port of Seattle, one public comment at a time” – has been released:
This is the beginning of Act II, recorded at the Port of Seattle Commission meeting on Tuesday, July 10, 2018, where Edmiston launches into the briefing he believes the Port asked for (from the FAA and its own staff) in 2017, but did not receive. Edmiston starts with “the numbers†that he says are (i) the most important for airport neighbor cities, (ii) extremely hard to find in comparison with the Port’s glowing economic growth projections, and (iii) are actually the answers to two questions:- How many additional airplanes are already flying over our homes?
- How many more are coming?
THE BRIEFING PROJECT EPISODE 9 – BY THE NUMBERS
Thank you. I’m Steve Edmiston. I’m here to give you the briefing you asked for last year from the FAA and from your staff on the community impacts from NextGen and increased aircraft overflights. I’ve covered what went wrong with that briefing. Today, we begin the briefing you should have had. It starts with numbers. The numbers that drive everything else when it comes to the impacts of overflights on human health, the environment, crime, property values, social justice, and quality of life. They are the answers to two simple questions: How many additional airplanes are already flying over our homes? And, how many more are coming? The first number is your True Baseline Increase. We all seem to agree that the airport has reached its peak-hour capacity at 416,000 annual aircraft operations in 2017. This means that measured since 2013, roughly 98,000 new aircraft are already now flying over our homes each year. We now have 1,140 daily overflights, a jump of 271 new overflights every day. The daytime estimate is nearly one every single minute. This is why your communities are already crying out. It’s why Adam Smith dropped his Aviation Impacted Communities bill. It’s why neighbor city electeds are banding together. It’s why state legislators are pursuing mitigation and emission studies. It seems everyone got the memo here except the Port. But it’s the “how many more planes are coming” question where we really see things turned up to eleven. Your growth proposal — the SAMP — proposes a moonshot up to 496,000 annual flights extrapolating current numbers. That’s 1360 flights per day; 75 each hour; 1.3 each minute. It’s the new definition of non-stop. It’s another increase of 80,000 flights per year, and when all is said and done counting the baseline and phase I we’ll have added 180,000 more annual flights or 492 more flights per day. That’s like The Avengers picked up the entire airport — say Portland’s or Baltimore’s —and just dropped it on top of Seattle. These are big and frightening numbers. And it’s been frustrating for your citizens that they are also the hardest numbers to find. I checked the home page of the SAMP again yesterday, and all the passenger and economic growth numbers are flying. But not the answer to how many planes are coming. Your staff is burying the lead. Thank you for providing this citizen two-minutes to comment.
See all episodes at www.quadrant45.com/#/thebriefingproject/.
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