A Rhubarb update and gentle request for your support

May 29, 2023

Dear Readers and Friends

First off, I hope you’ve had a memorable Memorial Day weekend. I’m aware it is a gorgeous day out, wildflowers, birdsong, children down the way on bikes and scooters enjoying the sunshine and their time together. Life as we know it.

Secondly, I’m writing to let you know that Rhubarb Salon—the free subscription side of The Daily Rhubarb project—will be shrinking in June. It will continue to be free but the full scale of my work will only be available at The Daily Rhubarb. Honestly, my hope is to persuade you to subscribe to The Daily Rhubarb for the price of $8 a month, or $80 a year. If that’s too big a hit, I understand. These are tight times. Rhubarb Salon will continue, free of charge, with “Today’s Postcard” plus a few lighter features and progress reports on the The Daily Rhubarb fare.

Thirdly, I want to let you know where I’m headed with The Daily Rhubarb, which is designed to be an engaging mix of humor, photography, essays on science (physics and geology prominently), journalism, civil rights, and the nature of nature. For those of you who’ve just signed up, I’ll include, below, ten of the daily entrees since February that I think illustrate the breadth of what I’m doing. You can also go here, to the Rhubarb Skies mothership website and read and see more, including all The Daily Rhubarb posts to date.

While you’re there please check out the photo galleries Photo customers who spend $200 get a complimentary subscription to The Daily Rhubarb.

Two new feature series are in the works, and they will seem to come from opposite ends of the editorial universe.

•I have started a new journalistic investigation—a first in several years—into the breadth and history of the “forever chemicals” that have contaminated groundwaters on the plains west of Spokane. Specifically, this is a class of chemicals known commonly by one of their acronyms, PFAS—which stands for Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances. PFAS and their brethren are designer chemicals that have been used for decades in products like non-stick pans, stain-resistant materials, food packaging and firefighting foam. Most relevantly to the West Plains tragedy, PFAS make terrific flame-retardent foam to suppress fires from burning aircraft. This is why PFAS-laden foam—known as Aqueous film-forming foam or AFFF- came to be used at both Fairchild Air Force Base and the Spokane International Airport. The problem is that a large amount of the dangerous chemical compound inflitrated groundwaters that flow away from the airfields and thus contaminated drinking water over much of the area. PFAS chemicals are considered hazardous at astonishingly low-levels— literally measured in parts per trillion. The contamination has forced both the cities of Airway Heights and Medical Lake to abandon their municipal water wells and pipe in water from Spokane. My goal is to report on how this happened, why PFAS is implicated in cancer and so many other health problems, why it took so long to address the problem, and why the scope of the contamination of private wells on the West Plains is still so poorly understood. Investigative reporting is expensive, which is one reason why less of it is being done these days at a local level. I will need help from my readers to do this work. Simple as that.

•UFOs. Yes, and I’m sorry if coffee is coming out your nose. So how does a veteran, “just-the-facts” journalist get interested in UFOs or, as the government now refers to them—“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAPs for short. The full story is actually entertaining and it led, after a period of months, to a presentation I gave a year and a half ago at the Area 51 Taphouse up on north Division Street. Part of the motivation for my talk was simple pushback—for most of my life the U.S. government was not just suppressing information about UFO/UAP encounters, but relied on journalists, like me, to avoid doing stories on UFOs for fear we would be ridiculed and risk lose our credibility. It was hard to admit that at the Area 51 Taphouse, of all places. But I did. The rest of the story is bigger and meatier than most people realize, and continues to surprise me. I’ll break it down as best I can and share the surprises.

If you’d like to become a paying subscriber to The Daily Rhubarb you can enroll and pick a payment plan at this link.

As always I welcome your comments and suggestions along with your support. If you’d like to make a separate contribution to fund The Daily Rhubarb reporting, including the new West Plains pollution story, please consider a Venmo transfer. You’ll fine me at @Timothy-Connor-60

with respect and enthusiasm,

Tim Connor