[CPEO-MEF] REUSE: "Environmental efforts clear land for development" at Redstone Arsenal (AL)

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Environmental efforts clear land for development

By KATIE DAVIS SKELLEY 
Redsstone Rocket (AL)
November 20, 2019

This fall, the Directorate of Public Works released around 300 acres to Family and MWR Outdoor Recreation for hunting use. That makes more than 1,000 acres of land that has been cleared of potential munitions and cleaned of hazardous materials by DPW’s Environmental Restoration Division.

For the past four decades, the team has worked to identify sites with contamination using historical records and known disposal or contamination release areas deemed hazardous. Due to Redstone Arsenal’s proficiency at munition manufacturing and disposal, 1.5 million munitions were transported to Redstone to be disposed of after World War II. Those disposal methods – while legal at the time – have proven to be problematic as technology and time advanced.

“The north Thiokol and south Thiokol production facility is where we made lots of different rockets,” Clint Howard, Environmental Restoration Division branch chief, said. “We made Patriot missiles, we made different things Thiokol built for the Army. A lot of those areas required heavy use of rocket fuels and lots of solvents out there. The reason we used solvents is when you put the rocket fuel into the rocket bodies, all of those parts have to be super clean so we have these big deep pits. We would dip the rocket body down in there, make sure it is clean and inject the solid rocket fuel. So these areas had a lot of contamination in the soil and underground because we had lots of spills out there – some of the tanks would leak and some of the pits would leak.”

 …

For the entire article, see
https://www.theredstonerocket.com/news/article_4b146f0a-0bad-11ea-bdfc-4746ac466b7f.html

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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org





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