Leaky trash site chosen as national treasure

By Paul Rogers

Aug. 28— Other presidents have honored Pearl Harbor, Mount Vernon, Alcatraz and Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace as national historic landmarks.

Now, the Bush administration has added its own hallowed place: a garbage dump in Fresno.

Citing its historic role in landfill design, US Interior Secretary Gale Norton on Monday included the Fresno Municipal Sanitary Landfill among a list of 15 sites across America that she designated as her first national historic landmarks since taking office this spring.

The former dump operated on Fresno’s southern edge from 1935 to 1987 “is the first landfill to employ the trench method of disposal,” Norton said in a news release.

But what the release didn’t mention is that the area is also a Superfund site — meaning it’s one of the most polluted spots in America.

The decision to place 79 million cubic yards of rotting junk alongside 2,100 other national historic sites, most of them venerable buildings, battleships, churches and stately homes, is believed to be the first of its kind. It also makes the dump eligible for a bronze plaque and government betterment funds.

By Monday night, however, with environmentalists mocking the choice, reporters joking about gift shop opportunities and staff members scurrying, Norton appeared to be backpedaling.

The landfill has been on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund list for 12 years. It has so polluted the Fresno groundwater with leaking oil, paint, solvents and other toxics — and is thick with explosive methane gas that must be burned off — that it will cost the city $23 million to clean up, according to the EPA.

After several press inquiries, Denis Galvin, deputy director of the National Park Service, released a letter Monday night recommending that Norton withdraw the honor.

“We were unaware that the landfill was listed as a Superfund site,” said Mark Pfeifle, a spokesman for Norton. “With that new information, we’ll consult with local officials and the EPA and make a decision.”

The site was added to the Superfund list in 1989 by the administration of President George Bush. It also was approved by an advisory panel to the parks service.

Environmentalists spent the day talking trash. They said for a state with the rich history and natural wonders of California, the interior secretary could have done better than a dusty junkyard on 140 acres in the Central Valley.

“This is what the Bush administration undoubtedly would like to do to the entire state of California,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Trench it, compact it and shovel dirt over it.”

Pope noted that Norton and other Bush administration officials have been critical of the new Sequoia national monument, established in the Sierras by the Clinton administration. They also have sparred with environmentalists over logging limits in national forests and offshore oil drilling.

“Should the federal government be protecting a Fresno landfill while not protecting California’s remaining wild forests, or its giant sequoia trees, all the while trying to reopen the coastline to offshore oil drilling?” Pope said. “I think it is an insult to the state.” EPA officials treaded lightly.

“Despite good intentions and what was once state-of-the-art engineering, this landfill continues to pose a threat to human health and the environment,” said Leo Kay, a spokesman for the EPA in San Francisco.

“While it is not necessarily our place to agree or disagree with such a designation, it does seem to take our national landmark status to a new level.”

Among landfill scholars, however, the Fresno dump is sort of a Statue of Liberty to solid waste, an Old Faithful of old castoffs. Supporters said it belongs with Norton’s other new national monuments, a list that included the Dutch Reformed Church in Newburg, NY, the Merchants Exchange Building in Philadelphia and the Modesty, a 19th-century Long Island fishing sloop.

The men who first recommended it for national landmark status are Martin Melosi, a professor of history at the University of Houston, and Robie Lange, a historian with the national park service in Washington, DC.

Melosi, a San Jose native, wrote the 1981 book “Garbage in the City,” exploring the history of solid waste disposal in America. He said that people may laugh but that the site is a milepost in public health.

It was in 1935 that Jean Vincenz, a Fresno public works commissioner, came up with the idea that to reduce rats and other vermin, the city should dig a hole and cover its trash every day with dirt, rather than burning it or piling it up. The ‘trench method’ worked, and remains a national standard, said Melosi, copied by US troops in World War II and used to reduce disease outbreaks in developing nations.

“I appreciate people might not think it is important,” said Melosi.

“But you have to ask what is significant to our history? Garbage dumps are things we would like to forget, but they are essential to our society, and this one became a model for public health.”

When the city of Fresno completes its cleanup next year, it plans to open soccer fields on the site.

What about gift shops? A tourist site? Don’t laugh. It could bring Fresno some fame, said Martin McIntyre, the city’s public utilities director.

“I would anticipate that history buffs and those who have an interest in the evolution of public health will make a specific trip out here to look at it,” he said. “This is a one-of-kind sanitary landfill.”

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Green groups sue to block Alaska anti-missile site

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

Washington, DC, Aug. 28— Eight US environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday to force the Pentagon to update its assessment of how President Bush’s missile defense program and a test range in Alaska would affect the environment.

The suit, filed in US District Court in the District of Columbia, argues that the Defense Department violated federal law by failing to update an environmental impact statement on its ballistic missile defense program after revising it to include airborne lasers, sea-based interceptor missiles and space-based heat sensing satellites. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace USA, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the other groups also want a specific assessment done before work proceeds on a 135-acre missile defense site at Fort Greely, an Army base 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Pentagon last week said a private firm had been hired to clear the site in preparation for construction of the test base. Christopher Paine, a senior researcher with the council, said the groups were poised to file an injunction preventing work on the Alaska test site within a month or six weeks, depending on the government’s response to the lawsuit. Paine said the government’s last comprehensive environmental impact assessment on missile defense was in 1994.

It could take six to eighteen months to complete a supplemental assessment, he estimated.

If a federal judge agrees that more study is needed, it could complicate the administration’s effort to have an “emergency” anti-missile system operating by as early as 2004. Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the government had prepared detailed environmental impact statements (EIS) on the Alaska site and found that any impact would be minimal.

“We spent the past three years doing a very detailed EIS statement for Alaska and North Dakota,” the two sites the government was considering for its “emergency” test base. “We prepared a very extensive document outlining what turned out to be very minimal environmental impacts,” Lehner said.

He also rejected the groups’ argument that a more comprehensive overall assessment was needed, noting that each individual program covered by the administration’s missile defense program had already been evaluated individually. “It wasn’t piecemeal at all,” Lehner said, describing the existing environmental data as “obviously sufficient.”

“Basically, they’re apparently using environmental concerns as ... a subterfuge for their opposition to missile defense as a way to slow down the program,” he added.

But the council’s senior attorney, David Adelman, said the groups had serious environmental concerns. “The restructured Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program ... will result in significant environmental impacts at the Fort Greely site and numerous additional sites in Alaska, Hawaii, the Marshall Islands and the continental United States,” the complaint states.

Adelman said the administration acknowledged making major changes to the BMD program, including expanding missile defense testing activities into ecologically sensitive areas in Alaska, including Kodiak Island. He said the current multi-layered defense plan bore little resemblance to the Clinton administration proposal assessed in the 1994 environmental impact statement.

The complaint cited major potential damage from the missile defense program, including construction of new facilities and testing programs at the site in Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, California, and other possible locations. It said the new test range could disrupt ecosystems by laying fiber-optic communications cables and by leaving space debris in the path satellites.

It also cited electromagnetic radiation hazards from operation of missile tracking radars; extensive storage and use of solvents and other explosive chemical compounds, and the release of ozone-depleting chemicals from the numerous rocket launches proposed.

The other groups listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Alaska Public Interest Research Group, Alaska Action Center, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Kodiak Rocket Launch Information Group, and No Nukes North: Alaskan and Circumpolar Coalition Against Missile Defense.

Source: Reuters