Oops.
Last week, a group of well-meaning, but sorely misinformed, citizens gathered outside the Niagara Falls Wastewater Treatment Plant to protest the use of chlorine in the disinfecting process.
They followed the protesters' playbook flawlessly. They waved signs. They chanted. They even had a fancy map printed up, showing the range within which lungs would be scorched if the chlorine ever leaked.
And oh, how our colleagues in the media ate it up. The Buffalo television stations dispatched camera crews. The Other Paper sent a reporter and photographer, reserving front-page space for the story.
Sorry. Make that "non-story."
Seems chlorine hadn't been used at the plant in months.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love protesters of all varieties, except when they resort to chants that start with "Hey, hey, ho, ho." But such protestation is exponentially more effective when there's actually something to legitimately gripe about.
And it's not as if there aren't plenty of environmental catastrophes, problems and annoyances to go around in these parts. After all, Niagara Falls did give the world the phrase "environmental disaster" more than a quarter-century ago. And this remains probably the only city in the civilized world to claim both a landfill AND a garbage incinerator within its borders.
Then there's the dirt that tends to catch fire over on Highland Avenue. And the old hydraulic canal filled with God knows what running through downtown. We won't even get into whatever's buried under the Lewiston-Porter schools.
Mike Schade, the director of Citizens' Environmental Coalition (not to be confused with Environmental Defense, the other group protesting in vain) told the Niagara Gazette the plant was still using chlorine the last time anybody from his organization checked.
Last spring.
Um, you're obviously busy fighting the good fight, Mike, but it's almost winter.
Due to their good intentions, we'll give the protesters a pass here. The media, though, is another matter.
One Buffalo station ran a lengthy segment on the non-story, extensively quoting the protest's leaders on the dangers of chlorine, showing off that fancy map and generally doing whatever could be done to scare the crap out of anyone within that 25-mile radius.
Only during the last 15 seconds of a two-minute segment did the reporter mention that, oh, by the way, the protests had been rendered thoroughly irrelevant months earlier.
As for the Gazette, the non-story still ran on the front page, with a picture of the rather confused-looking Mr. Schade holding that map. In an attempt to salvage some news value, the headline read "Water plant switches chemicals," a highly creative use of the present tense if ever there was one.
A couple of lessons here:
For aspiring protesters -- it's always a good idea to make sure the situation you're planning to rail against still exists no more than a couple days beforehand. Mistakes like this one really don't help anyone's credibility.
And for the media -- sending a reporter and photographer to cover something doesn't make it a story.
Memo to anyone who thinks that the federal case against former leaders of Laborers Local 91 is going to quietly go away following the death of longtime honcho Michael "Butch" Quarcini: Don't count on it.
Assistant U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. is going back on the case.
Hochul, the top trial lawyer in the Buffalo office headed by U.S. Attorney Michael Battle, had been taken off the Local 91 case to oversee the case of six Lackawanna men accused of providing support to al-Qaeda.
Two of the men were sentenced last week, with the rest of the cases scheduled to be closed before Christmas.
Hochul had also been handling the prosecution of a tobacco wholesaler on federal smuggling charges. Page Martin, president and sole stockholder of A.D. Bedell Co., pleaded guilty in October to racketeering conspiracy in that case. He faces more than two years in prison and a $3 million fine at sentencing.
With that case wrapping up and his prosecutorial calendar clearing, Hochul is expected to return to the Local 91 prosecution by early 2004.
In recent weeks, contractors have grumbled to Citycide that the strong-arm tactics favored by Quarcini's administration have started to resurface, while Local 91 members have said that some within the union fear a return to power by the "old regime," including several indicted former officers.
If Battle has any intentions of letting the Local 91 prosecution fade quietly away, putting his top gun back on the case is a funny way of showing it.
We like it when good things happen to good people, and the most recent hire by Memorial Medical Center can only mean good things for everyone involved.
Longtime Niagara Gazette reporter and editor Pat Bradley has finally earned his parole from that institution and starts his job as public-relations manager at Memorial on Dec. 17, according to a memo obtained by the Niagara Falls Reporter.
"Patrick will be responsible for all public relations functions relating to the Medical Center and its affiliates including written communication, Web page management and production of a new quarterly community publication to be initiated in January," read the memo issued by Patricia Berggren, Memorial's vice president for public relations and the Center's Foundation.
Bradley, who served 14 years at the Gazette covering a variety of beats, fills a vacancy created by the retirement of the widely respected Diane Glynn.
Best of luck to Pat in his new job and to Diane in her retirement. We won't even speculate on what that might mean to The Other Paper, where her husband, Don, remains an institution even in semi-retirement.
Bradley's escape comes weeks after veteran reporter Valerie Pillo went over the wall to take a job as Assemblywoman Francine Del Monte's chief of staff. That leaves longtime television newsman Rick Pfeiffer as the city desk's senior full-time reporter, with almost three years of print journalism experience.
But as long as someone in the venerable building at 310 Niagara St. knows how to log onto the Internet every Monday afternoon -- when that week's Reporter is posted at www.niagarafallsreporter.com -- you can rest assured there will usually be at least one remotely interesting story in Tuesday's Gazette.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 9 2003 |