Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists are carpooling to a Sunday, April 15, demonstration at Jon Dam Plaza in Richland, Washington, organized by Occupy Portland and called A15 Hanford Rally: North America’s Fukushima?  At this event between noon and 5 pm, participants will express their dismay with the failure and corruption of clean-up efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear waste site with nine decommissioned weapons-production reactors, as well as their concerns about the safety and health of facilities contractors and workers and resident Native Americans and downwinders in the Tri-Cities and surrounding region, whose lives has been decimated by Hanford.  Occupy Portland and local protesters plan to heighten the American priority, increase the funding, transparency, and efficiency, and spur the external oversight of the Hanford clean-up, while uniting the people and communities affected by the Hanford situation.  To learn more about this massive, nationally supported rally, featuring speakers such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, John Brave Hawk, Paul Gunter, and Paige Knight, and about the millions of gallons of radioactive waste leaking from underground storage tanks at the most contaminated high earthquake risk zone in North America, visit the event facebook page or website.

Ever vigilant of the root causes of climate change, Wild Idaho Rising Tide organizers are networking throughout the region to raise awareness and instigate protests against ongoing Alberta tar sands transportation ventures originating at the Ports of Pasco and Vancouver in Washington.  During the Hanford rally, we plan to talk with plenty of local activists opposed to dirty energy projects and, at 5 pm after the demonstration, travel with them five miles north to the Port of Pasco to protest ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil megaload traffic across our region.  Approximately 100 tar sands modules remain at the port, where we will converge with signs, banners, musical instruments, and voices, to exert pressure on oil companies considering and/or currently staging transport of their deadly construction components to escalating Alberta tar sands operations.  As radioactive waste poisons the Earth and its waters and greenhouse gases cloud the skies and scramble the planet’s climate, take a stand with us in Richland and Pasco: it is our responsibility to halt and remedy our collective industrial energy bad habits.  Meet your WIRT comrades and Moscow community members on the south, Troy Highway side of the Eastside Marketplace parking lot at 9 am on Sunday, April 15, to drive or ride to the Tri-Cities and return by 9 pm that evening.