MMR Treatment System "celebrated"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

>From the Cape Cod Times, September 23, 1999. For the full story, see
http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/base23.htm

Triumph of cooperation: 
Residents, military celebrate plume treatment operation 

By JEFFREY BURT
STAFF WRITER

   MASSACHUSETTS MILITARY RESERVATION - Thomas McCall recalled that time
a year ago, when the debate was raging over how to clean up the plume of
contaminated ground water known as Landfill-1.

The Air Force believed the natural processes in the ground would get rid
of the pollution in the plume just as quickly as if a treatment system
was built.

Residents and regulators vocally opposed the idea of letting nature take
care of the plume, which stretches from the base west through Cataumet
and into Buzzards Bay.

"We had a scientifically valid, lower-cost, longer-term solution with
natural attenuation that the public just didn't buy," McCall, assistant
secretary of the Air Force, said yesterday.

Air Force officials and engineers regrouped and came up with a system
that treated the most contaminated parts of the plume and let the rest
go, a proposal more palatable to residents and regulators.

Yesterday, in a tent next to the treatment plant for LF-1, more than 50
residents and regulators, local politicians and military officials
celebrated what they called a triumph of cooperation.

...

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org