The license that enables 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 burning — and say regulators see a opportunity to explore new technology to fix an old problem.
Only a few people turned in the Blacksburg Public Library on a recent day for a meeting of the Environmental Patriots of the New River Valley.
“Is there anything we could post to get more folks involved? Yes, petitions, a letter campaign… When the EPA was pushed into the wall Louisiana, they said ‘Uncle. ’ We want you Senator Kaine and you also Senator Warner to do just what Senator Vitter did in Louisiana and write into the EPA and ask them, ‘How is this not a breach of this clean air act? ’”
Devawn Oberlender is looking to take a pager in the publication of a far off town, where citizen protestors succeeded in stopping outdoor burning explosives of weapons and arms waste in the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant.
“The chance that we have at this time only comes up very ten years, since the license is good for ten years, so what we will need to replicate is what they did in southern Louisiana in Camp Minden.
There they formed a”Stop the Burn” motion that finally brought together elected officials, both local and state authorities and the army for a plan to provide open burning up and use a contemporary indoor incinerator to eliminate the toxic substances. William Hayden is spokesman for DEQ at Virginia.
“We haven’t reached any decisions yet but this is something that would be considered as we move forward. We have asked the Arsenal to produce alternatives to open burning and we do expect to have some choices that go beyond the concept of just burning it the open.”
Brian Salvatore is a professor of Organic chemistry at Louisiana State University who contended for utilizing contained incineration.
“That is what we fought for here in camp Minden. And yes it included another 15million dollars and almost doubled the cost of this contract but this was something that, the EPA was ready to go to bat for us for. So I am grateful that the people in the EPA and in the state worked together here and they worked together with the Army as well to locate the additional cash. And we are quite satisfied here that this option — which, at the onset of this we didn’t know all the details of what these modern incinerators can do. We are quite confident here this is going to do the task and the total amount of material that’s likely to be released complete will be on the order of tens of g rather than heaps of these emissions. ”
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3, which includes Virginia, said it could not comment on the chance of incinerators such as being adopted at the Radford website, but a spokesperson for BAE Systems, the contractor in charge of the arsenal, supported it’s”looking for workable alternatives to its existing methods of waste disposal.”
The section of Environmental Quality has asked BAE to run an environmental impact study on its present open burning clinic. William Hayden says it’s the very first time DEQ has asked for one.
“Because we are getting in to an issue that has generated a lot of public attention in the Radford area we understood that the more information we had, the better. Folks from the public have been asking for us information; they have been asking Radford (the arsenal) for advice. ”
And among these is Oberlender who says,”We’ve been burning garbage on the market, open it because 1941. You know, it’s not going off.”
And are the ecological patriots of this new river valley. Taking another page in the narrative 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 team is looking to generate a national issue from one that has for so long been so local and among the few places where open burning of hazardous waste from explosives is still allowed.
Info from: http://wvtf.org/post/moving-forward-open-burning
