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September 9, 2015- by Steven E. Greer
The local news is reporting a case of a local high school football team that suffered burn injuries to their hands because the artificial turf field was so hot. The news crew measured 130 degrees.
Besides being heat capacitors, the fields become filthy, and the rubber pellets are full of toxic metals. Knee injuries are also more common on artificial turf. The recent women’s soccer World Cup was played on cheap inferior artificial turf fields, causing the women to complain that the men got the better grass fields.
Artificial turf fields are one of the worst trends in sports. So, why are they proliferating? For one, the local mayors and officials love to build them because the construction contracts go to their crony supporters.
The officials claim that the fake grass fields save money compared to real grass fields, but the math does not add up. The cost to mow a field for a year is miniscule compared to the millions of dollars required to install the artificial turf.
In Battery Park, the BPCA, headed by Dennis Mehiel, has been instructing the parks staff to close the West Thames grass field for half the year, so as to give them the excuse to convert it to fake grass. The BPCA also prohibited the parks from fixing the water sprinklers, or the PEP from enforcing the field rules. As a result, the field was trampled into bare dirt, which could have been prevented with basic maintenance.
We suspect that the BPCA wants to give a 7-figure contract to a crony of Governor Cuomo to install the fake grass disgrace. Stay tuned.
It is not impossible to have a grass community field that is used a lot. Every high school and college has plenty of grass recreational use fields. Despite the BPCA’s best attempts to destroy the grass field, more than 70% of the grass survived. Imagine how well it would do if a competent greens keeper were hired.
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This is 1000% correct.