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To the editor:
The planning board at its meeting on
Tuesday night reached an erroneous
conclusion and placed a restriction on
the Birthplace Museum that is contrary
to a basic principle of law.
That basic principle is that
if a party is damaged by the actions
of second party, then a third innocent
party cannot be liable for that damage.
In this case Mr. Bates, the first party,
is claiming that he will be damaged by
the noise generated by trains operated
by the railroad company. He wants the
Birthplace Museum, the innocent third
party, to take actions to prevent the
purported damage that might be
inflicted, in the future, by the second
party, the railroad company. His request
was that the museum should be required
to leave a buffer of mature pine trees
alongside the railroad right of
way. Shame on the planning board for
failing this case study of elementary
law. Give Margaret Jones Stinnett a
grade of “A” for seeing and expressing
the hole in the planning board’s logic.
Mr. Bates and that
loquacious member of the planning board
fail to realize that mature pine trees
are poor baffles against noise. It is
foliage that baffles noise. But a mature
pine tree can be 70 feet tall, with 50
feet of bare trunk and the foliage
located at the top 20 feet. Mature pine
trees will not stop railroad noise.
That loquacious member of
the planning board failed in his
homework assignment. He should have
walked Main Street before coming to the
meeting. He could have counted that
there are already five rows of trees
between the Bates house and the front of
the Calvin Jones house. There are about
seven rows of trees and a garden with
extensive greenery between the Bates
house and what will be the front of the
new museum.
The true noise along Main
Street comes not from trains but from
road traffic and especially from the
sirens of emergency vehicles. If Mr.
Bates truly wished to combat noise he
would take issue with road traffic. Give
Mr. Bates an “A” for successfully
bamboozling the Planning Board with his
railroad noise non-issue.
The correct time to raise
the issue of railroad noise will be when
the railroad company comes before the
planning board with specific plans for
improving the railroad. It will be
incumbent upon the railroad company to
provide adequate noise abatement. At
this point, there are no specific plans,
only rumor and bluster. Shame on the
planning board members for trying to
place the onus for this baseless issue
on the birthplace museum.
I urge the town
commissioners to discard this spurious
requirement imposed by the planning
board.
Hugh Nourse
Wake Forest
Editor’s note: Nourse said he was unable
to identify “the loquacious member” on
television, but he wore a red shirt and
sat to Alphonza Merritt’s left and was
thus Mike Martin. |
