ALASKA SITES MAPPED

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>]

From: Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>

ALASKA MILITARY SITES MAPPED
A team led by the Environmental Justice office in US EPA Region 10 has 
put together a list and G.I.S. (geographic information system) map of 
649 potential military contamination locations in Alaska, including 162 
facilities where active mitigation is underway. The map is available as 
an ARC/INFO plotfile on the World Wide Web at 
www.epa.gov/region10/www/maplib.html.
The accompanying report, "The Alaska Military Sites Project" (July, 
1996) conducted preliminary analysis of the data. A major purpose of 
the project was to start to define the impact of military contamination 
on traditional Native Alaskan land use, which is legally protected, 
even in many vast areas that are not under Native ownership.
The reports' authors make the following recommendations:
"1) The State, local governments, Tribal governments, Native 
Corporations, Native nonprofit organizations, plus all other interested 
parties should make the development of a statewide G.I.S. with detailed 
and specific traditional land-use a top priority.
2) The U.S. military, State, local governments, Tribal governments, 
Native Corporations, Native nonprofit organizations, plus all other 
interested parties should make the development of a statewide G.I.S. 
that allows on-going updating and documentation of the status of all 
abandoned military sites a top priority.
3) On-going (multivariate) health risk assessment matrices should be 
developed for all regions of the state.
4) Congress, Department of Defense, and EPA should be focused on 
providing the regulatory flexibility, monetary and technical resources 
to allow more contaminated military sites to be remediated faster.
5) EPA, the U.S. military and State of Alaska should jointly publish 
quarterly progress reports and outreach literature to educate and 
inform the public, especially rural Alaska Natives, as to the dangers 
that the contaminated sites pose in the various regions and as to what 
progress is being made toward remediation.
6) It is imperative that local concerns and life-styles receive serious 
consideration in the site identification and remediation process (e.g. 
more Restoration Advisory Boards (RABs) due to the closeness of the 
native people to the land in both proximity and ideology."
 
This initial report is a giant step forward. I believe, however, that 
the approach implicit in recommendations 2 and 6 is more important than 
the objective of recommendation 1. It's more important to give impacted 
populations information about military contamination, so they can judge 
its impact on their lifestyles, than to give government officials a 
computerized key to traditional land use, much of which will always 
remain difficult to quantify.
Lenny Siegel