LETTER: Any water bottling plant is a very bad idea

Back to the Creston Water Bottling Plant again. If you have been paying attention you know by now that the water-bottling plant in Creston has applied for a permit to bottle 1.2 BILLION bottles per year.

Once that water is bottled, it has to be shipped. We have to assume it will be shipped by truck. So let’s do the math. One billion, 200 million 20-ounce bottles per year equals, 3,287,671 20-ounce bottles every 24 hours or 137,000 bottles each and every hour of OUR Montana water.

A tandem axle truck has a Montana Department of Transportation load limit of 34,000 pounds. Frost laws apply from Feb. 1 through June 31 and restrict the load limit to 16 tons. OK, that’s 24,000 bottles per truck load and he has 140,000 bottles to ship every hour, that’s 5.8 16-ton trucks per hour, every hour, 24 hours every day. Will they travel Highway 35 south to 82, or will the trucks stay on Highway 35 and head down to Polson, a route that is 15 miles shorter. Remember, 5.8 trucks per hour times 24 hours a day adds up to 140 trucks going and 140 trucks coming back to reload.

By the way, 5.8 trucks per hour equals one truck leaving the loading dock every 10 1/2 minutes. ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT. Now if they plan to ship from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, that’s a truck going and a truck leaving every 5 1/4 minutes. If you drive out Egan Slough to the building site, you might conclude that that small building is not big enough for such a large capacity. Who will provide the money to expand the buildings to meet the capacity? Will it be Nestle, or Coca Cola? With so much money at their disposal we (YOU) will never get rid of them! And WE will be the only ones to blame for letting this happen.

There is a meeting with the Department of Environmental Quality at the Creston School on Monday Aug. 1 at 6 p.m. to discuss the waste water effluence emitted into Egan Slough and the Flathead River. Your presence at this meeting may help convince the DEQ, the DNRC and the county commissioners and the planners that ANY water bottling plant in this or any other county in Montana is a very bad idea and will attract others to exploit our water resources. —Bill McGunagle, Kalispell