Northeast Transplants - Thoughts?

[MissMillyDee]

My family just moved here from Southern California 10 months ago, but my husband worked at NASA Goddard and lived in Maryland before that, and he says the summers here are better. It is still hot and humid, but the sky is not that uniform gray you get in the D.C. area with no breeze to relieve you. We are very happy with our move. The cost of living is less, housing is great, the schools (in Madison City, where we live) are amazing, utilities and gasoline are cheaper, property taxes are less, and the people here are very nice. It took us a few months to get used to everyone being so kind and accommodating after so many years of having our guard up in So. Cal., but we are really enjoying the fact that our blood pressure has dropped, and our kids are a lot calmer. I feel like we have improved our lives and the future prospects of our children in almost every way. The only thing we wish is that we had moved 5 years sooner. Good luck!

[RocketDawg]

Originally Posted by MissMillyDee

My family just moved here from Southern California 10 months ago, but my husband worked at NASA Goddard and lived in Maryland before that, and he says the summers here are better. It is still hot and humid, but the sky is not that uniform gray you get in the D.C. area with no breeze to relieve you. We are very happy with our move. The cost of living is less, housing is great, the schools (in Madison City, where we live) are amazing, utilities and gasoline are cheaper, property taxes are less, and the people here are very nice. It took us a few months to get used to everyone being so kind and accommodating after so many years of having our guard up in So. Cal., but we are really enjoying the fact that our blood pressure has dropped, and our kids are a lot calmer. I feel like we have improved our lives and the future prospects of our children in almost every way. The only thing we wish is that we had moved 5 years sooner. Good luck!

Glad you like it here and find it a friendly place ... almost everybody I know of who is from somewhere else, me included, love it here. I retired and stayed. When I first moved here, there were very few natives. There are more now, of course, because kids are growing up. But there is still a large migration into the area and I hope it stays that way.

Did you know that all our gasoline, including jet fuel at the airport, comes here via truck from Birmingham? Not only is that dangerous to have loaded tankers traveling I-65 daily, it makes prices at least 10 cents a gallon higher than in Birmingham. We need pipeline service ... not totally safe, but safer than tankers on highways, in my opinion.

[harry chickpea]

There are pipelines around here. I remember one having a leak and it taking about four years for the site to be declared safe. IIRC, it was transporting ethane at the time. That said, the spill was nothing like the one in Shelby County.

[RocketDawg]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

There are pipelines around here. I remember one having a leak and it taking about four years for the site to be declared safe. IIRC, it was transporting ethane at the time. That said, the spill was nothing like the one in Shelby County.

Weren't there actually two "spills" in Shelby County? At least one was more than a mere spill ... a decent size explosion with casualties, as I recall, a year or two ago.

There was also a tanker that had an accident around the 20/59 interchange several years ago that literally burned down one of the bridges. AlDot had it replaced within 90 days, which shows what the CAN do when they want to.

Neither method of transport is totally safe, but fuel is a required commodity.