Re: SENATE CLEANUP NUMBERS

["Laura Olah" <olah@speagle.com>]

I couldn't agree more with Sam's suggested strategies in response to 
scarce cleanup dollars. The Badger plant here in Wisconsin has been out 
of compliance with more than a half dozen conditions of its RCRA cleanup 
approval for over a year now. The cleanup approval was originally 
issued in 1995, following a $6 million RI/FS. The State won't get off 
the dime; their paper-thin response, of late, to our demands for 
compliance continues to be that taking an enforcement action may take 
the facility's attention away from cleanup and toward defending an 
enforcement action -- a contention that is, at best, silly as the 
military has been studying the contamination here since 1977 and has yet 
to put shovel to soil -- there is no cleanup to delay because there 
simply is no cleanup to begin with! 

We have asked for a Preliminary Notice of Violation which is of little 
more consequence than a verbal warning from a traffic cop, but the State 
continues to balk -- an ironic circumstance which is placing our 
environment at increasing risk, this according to their own personnel -- 
according to an April 18, 1997 letter from the Wisconsin Department of 
Natural Resources, potential risks to the environment of postponing 
cleanup as Badger (the Army) has requested include: "continued expansion 
(both vertically and horizontally) of known contaminant plume(s), 
potential for the discovery of additional groundwater contamination from 
new, as of yet unidentified contaminant plumes, continued uptake of 
contaminants (in soils) by sensitive receptors...and exacerbating the 
clean-up of existing or newly discovered contaminant plumes." Not good 
news for our communities, our natural resources, or our children.

Laura Olah
P.S. My mom -- an unusually articulate woman -- long ago tagged me with 
a title so (if you are Sam the Curmudgeon) then I am Laura the 
Belligerent, which I prefer to assume refers to my tenacity and not 
other less becoming attributes (smile). By the way, only my mom gets to 
use that one...