Topock Maze Controversy

There's an interesting case out near Needles where Pacific Gas and Electric were being sued by the Fort Mojave Indian tribe for building a water treatment plant right next to the Topock Maze. The Topock Maze is a fascinating area where the rocks and pebbles have been arranged to form a large field of lines across the desert; the Mojaves hold it sacred as a place where their souls go to reach the afterlife. This article details the controversy; building the plant was exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process because hexavalent chromium in the groundwater was in danger of reaching the Colorado River. You can see it on Google Maps here if you pull back one magnification level. Today PG&E issued an apology to the Mojaves and agreed to replace the water treatment plant with another one that doesn't disturb the site. The takeaway lesson here is that even if you get a CEQA exemption (because you're doing an emergency cleanup of the environment), you shouldn't treat it as a free ticket to not pay any attention to the possible environmental impacts of your project.

Anyway, if you'd like to see what the perspective of an insane crank are on this project, look no further than Mr. Wayne Lusvardi, who spends most of his time imagining himself as some sort of truth-teller of follies in Pasadena, seems to think they made up the whole "sacred site" thing and that it's all a shakedown by the Indians looking to extort money from PG&E. Not that any of his ideas were supported by the facts of the L.A. Times article or anything. Now that they've dropped the lawsuit, instead of admitting that this proves his whole "milk cow" theory was bullshit from the beginning, this loony is taking credit (see Nov. 10) for exposing the "phony shakedown" and "deterr[ing] any monetary settlement." Yeah, right.