The permit that allows the Radford Army Ammunitions Plant to burn hazardous waste from guns outside is up for renewal. Community activists see an opportunity to deal with environmental and health concerns about the open burning — and state regulators see a opportunity to explore new technologies to solve an old issue.
Just a handful of people turned in the Blacksburg Public Library on a recent day for a meeting of the Environmental Patriots of the New River Valley. Yes, petitions, a letter campaign… When the EPA was pushed to the wall in Louisiana, they stated ‘Uncle. ’ So, we want you Senator Kaine and you Senator Warner to do precisely what Senator Vitter did in Louisiana and write to the EPA and ask them, ‘How is this not a breach of the clean air act? ’”
Devawn Oberlender is looking to have a pager from the publication of a far away city, where citizen protestors succeeded in stopping outside burning explosives of arms and weapons waste in the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant.
“The opportunity that we have right now only comes up very ten decades, because the license is good for ten years, so what we need to replicate is exactly what they did in north western Louisiana at Camp Minden.
There they formed a”Stop the Burn” movement that finally brought together elected officials, state and local regulators and the army for a plan to provide open burning up and use a modern indoor incinerator to dispose of the toxic substances.
“We haven’t reached any conclusions yet but that is something that will be looked at as we move forward. We’ve asked the Arsenal to come up with alternatives to open burning and we do hope to have some options that go beyond the idea of just burning it the open.”
“That is what we fought for here at camp Minden. And yes it added another 15million dollars and nearly doubled the price of the contract but this was something that, the EPA was ready to go to bat for us for. So I’m glad that the people in the EPA and in the state worked together here and they worked with the Army as well to find the additional money. And we are quite satisfied here that this option — which, in the beginning of this we didn’t know all the specifics of these modern incinerators can do. We are quite confident here that this is going to do the job and the amount of material that is going to be released complete will be on the order of tens of grams rather than tons of these emissions. ”
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3, which includes Virginia, said it could not comment on the possibility of incinerators like that being adopted at the Radford website, but a spokesperson for BAE Systems, the contractor in charge of the arsenal, confirmed it is”looking for viable alternatives to its existing procedures of waste disposal.”
The department of Environmental Quality has requested BAE to conduct an environmental impact study on its present open burning practice. William Hayden says it is the first time DEQ has asked for one.
“Because we are getting in to an issue that has generated plenty of public attention in the Radford area we knew that the more information we had, the better. People from the public have been asking for us information; they’ve been asking Radford (the arsenal) for information. ”
And one of them is Oberlender who states,”We’ve been burning waste out there, open burning it since 1941. You know, it is not going away.”
And neither are the ecological patriots of the new river valley. Taking another page from the story of Camp Minden Louisiana’s successful effort to get its outdoor burning moved inside. They are scheduling meetings with federal and state officials to keep the pressure on. The first is this Friday with U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith who sits on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has oversight of the EPA. The group is looking to make a national issue from one that has for so long been so local and one of the few areas where open burning of hazardous waste from explosives is still allowed.
Info from: http://wvtf.org/post/moving-forward-open-burning
Info from: http://wvtf.org/post/moving-forward-open-burning
