June 7, 1968

Colonel Robert Bangert
District Engineer, Portland, Oregon

Dear Colonel Bangert:

I write you about peace of mind, Colonel Bangert – yours and ours.

The newspapers reflect daily your immense projects, your handiwork – intricate dams, vast bridges, irrigation systems through states and the harnessing of oceans for the good of humanity. The pressures upon you – man-made and natural grow greater. Where do you go for peace of mind? To some quiet stream to fish and forget for the moment? To reflect upon a wooded hill and look at a tranquil sky? To the sea in ships far from the whine of diving jets and the explosions of society?

Then know this: It is this very peace of mind that men as responsible to humanity as you, derive from living in view of and use of the quiet Columbia River. The pressures upon medical men are at least as great as your own. Of the dozens of medical men who live on the east side of the Columbia River, on “Pill Hill” and below, you need to know that one of them or one of them influenced by one of them may be operating on you or on one of yours tomorrow. As you lie upon the table under the knife held in the hand of the head neuro-surgeon of Portland Permanente Hospital would you like to be told that he could not sleep the night before surgery because he is in the direct path of the two North-South runways as planned by the Portland International Airport, that the planes which annoyed here SST’s, each as long as a foot ball field, that they took off one to four a minute, and that as the president of Swissair has said, their noise exceeds the noise of any planes, “by a very very large margin”? Would hundreds of other people in the same position to whom you feel responsibility like to hear the same fact? Would Mayor Terry Schrunk of Portland and Mayor Al Angelo of Vancouver, upon whom he operated, have been put back into working order under this same handicap? There is a question. And this is only one example.

These medical men on the east side of the Columbia River, head clinics, offices, groups of doctors, hospitals, departments in both the University of Oregon Medical and Dental Schools, Medical Associations, medical study clubs, and the number they teach and treat and influence in legion. Their scientific knowledge reaches to all parts of the world by way of former students and by their writings and visitations in deprived areas. When the stress of sharing knowledge, […] the health demands of the sick become too much they depend upon outside work and quiet, river or yard, and a good night’s restore them, for well they know that tomorrow is again broken limbs, heart disorders, carcenoma [sic] research, and restorations for hundreds – where a slip of the scalpel is maiming or death.

Nor can it be suggested that they move from their present homes. These men have been as able to pick and shovel as scalpel and drill. They didn’t come here with money. Every one of them has hauled his own wheelbarrow and run his own lawnmower, and as he has planted his flowers, so has he planted his own roots. This is their insurance for the short lifetime that is allotted medical men. Nor will they go for money, as is implied by the heartless negotiation by the president of the Port of Portland: “I’d bitch like hell if a freeway came through my front door.” These men on the east side of the river do not “bitch.” In spite of the noise and pollution and the danger of low-flying aircraft without instrument landing, there is not on file at the Port of Portland, prior to the current threat, one complaint from those dozens of medical men.

With foresight which is inherent to their profession; with study which is their way of life; with prevention of distress which is their purpose for being; they know that the environmental future of jetliners cannot be […] tolerated in so near an area to the Washington residents as the Port of Portland contemplates. “The supersonic jetliner, scheduled for service in the 1970s would drag along its route a 50-mile wide tail of noise sounding to a person on the ground like a not-too-distant blast of dynamite,” a National Observer recent editorial states. The chief of the national noise study for the Public Health Service, Alexander Cohen, says that “noise may contribute to hyper-tension, ulcers, undue anxiety and nervous disorders.” Foreign research reports increased incidence of cardiovascular ailments in rioters exposed to high level noises. Should we always kill the men and then ask the medical men to save him? Must we always make the mistake and then try to rectify it?

Apparently, yes. It must impress you, Colonel Bangert, to read in the press that there is an attempt in the Willamette area, where various members of the Port of Portland staff live, to reclaim land from industry for recreation. And if and when this is so even with us, how will we then remove an indissoluble concrete ledge built forty eyesore feet from fill level in the Columbia River when the Portland International Airport with its past misjudgments, goes, in fifteen years, after people have congregated there, to make mayhem in St. Paul, where they would go now if the airlines would “pick up the tab.” Medicine has an answer to these disorders: Health is more important than money and prevention is better than cure.

Now a word about freedom, which is part of peace of mind in our country. James Truslow Adams reminds us that we are free in our United States only so long as we do not interfere with someone else’s freedom. What democratic right has the Port of Portland, Oregon, to send its dregs, be it intolerable noise, (and according to the Port of Kennewick this begins at 65 decibels) befouling the view of the historic Columbia with concrete, kerosene and debris, saturating the air with stench (legal suits are being paid in Long Island for asthma incurred from jet plane stench from the New York airport) across the state line to the residents of Washington, compounding the work of medical men? If the answer is progress – in the wake of the hazard to health, “progress” becomes a dirty word, or as Paul Engle says in a recent issue of Life magazine, “We vomit the word progress when the country yearns.”

And what has happened to the freedom of the individual who spends his life in sacrifice and dedication when he must spend his resting hours and months fighting a power house which is bent “on kicking sand – […] million cubic yards of it – into the face of little Vancouver” (Seattle Post Intelligence, May 31). And why must we presume upon the time and patience of the U.S. Corps of Engineers who have more constructive work to do in our nation than sit upon a judges bench and decide that medical men and their patients have the right to live like human beings?

Have done with this threat to health, Colonel Bangert. For your peace of mind and ours and that of the thousands of petitioners, do not grant the Port of Portland a permit to dregs and fill, irrevocably, the Columbia River. Let the new airport of St. Paul. Yet for the Port’s threatened hurt to men who care for them, they have not earned the right to a city of that name. St. Paul preached mercy, a physician’s text.

9215 Evergreen Highway
Vancouver, Washington

Yours very truly,

Mrs. Vinson M. Weber