[CPEO-MEF] Activist leaves Cape Cod review team over perchlorate dispute

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Key volunteer quits base watchdog team 

By AMANDA LEHMERT 
Cape Cod Times (MA)
April 1, 2005

Frustrated and feeling ineffective, the last of the original citizen
activists monitoring the cleanup at the Massachusetts Military
Reservation has resigned.

Richard Hugus, a Falmouth resident who has pushed the military on
environmental issues at the base since the early '90s, said he no longer
wants to be a part of a process. For nine years he was one of the
citizen members of a committee that monitors the Camp Edwards cleanup,
known as the Impact Area Review Team.

"The (National) Guard's use of citizen members to provide legitimacy in
the public eye is no longer balanced by our ability to be heard and
effect change," Hugus wrote in a resignation letter to the EPA. 

Hugus quit the voluntary post after Sandwich residents confronted the
panel about perchlorate in their private drinking water wells. 

Six homes on Peters Pond Drive in Forestdale tested positive for low
levels of the chemical found in rocket fuel and explosives based on a
new test method developed by the EPA. 

Officials from the Army's Groundwater Study Program said they would not
provide a connection to town water for those residents - at a cost of
$20,000, according to an EPA estimate - because there is no standard for perchlorate.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.capecodonline.com/cctimes/keyvolunteer1.htm

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org
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