Letters to the Editor

What You Say

Banner Year

I was disappointed to not see the Grateful Dead's banner being mentioned in the Greatest Music Moments article [Cover Story, "Top 10 Spectrum Music Moments," A.D. Amorosi, Nov. 5, 2009]. When they had their 53rd sellout at the Spectrum, a banner commemorating that feat was hung in the rafters along with the sports team's championship banners where it stayed for years until, rumor has it, it was stolen by Pierre Robert. To mention Bobby Brown and the Club MTV tour but not the Grateful Dead was, in my opinion, a terrible error in judgment. Hate the band all you want, but try to put together a list that is unbiased.

The Nov. 5 piece, A Million Stories [Naked City], missed the mark if its intent was to provide information about the Philadelphia Water Department's (PWD) planned security measures at the Queen Lane Water Treatment Plant.

A reporter would have shared some of the following information if the intent was to inform the reading public and to present an unbiased news article: The Queen Lane Water Treatment Plant is one of the three water treatment plants in the city that provides drinking water to over 2 million people. The protection of drinking water from potential threats is one of the PWD's top priorities.

Requirements for the security measures were established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The requirements are not voluntary nor are they helpful suggestions. A reporter would have checked this fact and contacted the EPA and DHS to verify this if for some reason this sounded questionable.

The Queen Lane Water Treatment Plant is a drinking water facility. It is not a public park.

PWD has been working with the community since April 2009 on our security plans: hosting an open house; presenting to the civic association; exchanging information through an e-mail list of interested residents. We never said that the community was cool with our plans. We said they seemed to appreciate our working with them to modify our security measures to the best of our ability while still meeting optimal protection requirements.