RE: Truth be told

     Dear readers:

     I don't wish to be controversial but I can not let this pass without comment.

     I was involved with the group RRG in the very beginning. In short order, I realized that at the minimum they were misdirected and at the most this was "Greenwashing." I'm not saying that JH was aware but what I am saying is that he is trying to perpetuate this MYTH that the PCBs were headed here. I am posting some articles, JH's quote and some information that was given to the heads of RRG, and it was ignored to the detriment and misdirection of the community. I guess you have to control the information to get the outcome you wish.   LR

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     Mr. Hufnagle writes:

> "when it looked like the Hudson River PCB’s were going to be shipped to CWM in Porter a couple of years ago, I walked from Albany to the gates of CWM in a barrel, 350 miles, and was on TV, radio and at least a dozen newspapers statewide. Recently, the EPA announced that Porter was an unlikely destination for the PCB’s. I may have been part of the snowball that got that avalanche rolling.">

Unfortunately, the following is true and documentable--

Subj: Fwd: PCB's "most likely" not coming to Niagara
Date: 1/28/2005 6:22:35 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: NiagaraNet 

       
      I told Mr. William Choboy and Rev. Charles Lamb person-to-person and clearly in an email that these materials were not destined to be sent here, dated March 26, 2002.   I cited an article in the magazine The Scientist (and Web reference--PCB Dilemma, by Ricki Lewis, March 19, 2001), that included a statement by a specific EPA spokesperson (Richard Caspe, Dir. Superfund-EPA Region 2. Dec., 12, 2001), stating the final disposition would be in Texas-by rail or barge. PLEASE SEE DATES!

      I suggested at that time to RRG, that they send a letter to the EPA official asking specifically if the Hudson PCB dredgings were destined for here or not, before they launched their anti-PCB effort.This information provided to RRG was completely ignored--(or maybe not), as no inquiry letter was ever sent to this EPA official and RRG proceeded to foster the perception that the PCBs were headed to Niagara County. "The PCBs are coming, the PCBs are coming." 

     A great misdirection of effort. Read on.

      Imagine all the human capital and volunteer energy that was expended by RRG, all the money collected, all the flyers passed, the ribbons on trees, telephone poles and sign posts--To protest the PCB's which they weren't coming here in the first place.

...---...ALL THE WHILE The High Level African K-65 radioactive wastes buried in Lewiston were quietly reclassified through an unprecedented and little known, Bush Administration supported-2004 Energy-bill appropriations legislation, and now will remain buried here in Niagara County forever.

     In addition to this--

     Plutonium was found in direct contact with soils at the LOOW site, and, the LOOW site Air Force Plant #38 (Nazis, lasers and rocket tests) was demolished without a peep in Lewiston-Porter.

     Literally and concurrently, RRG held press conferences about PCB's--directly across the street from where the demolition was taking place. Talk about turning your back on issues! Or, perhaps more appropriately, directing the lens of the camera. "HEY, LOOK OVER HERE."

     This mentions nothing about their (RRG) involvement with the L-P school grounds testing.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the name of this group should have been GRR.  Government Responsible for Residents...responsible for how they think, how they vote, what they're told, how they're told to act-react, what to oppose and or not, responsible for creating public opinion, deciding who's credible, etc.

Lou Ricciuti
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Forwarded Message:
Subj: PCB's "most likely" not coming to Niagara
Date: 1/28/2005 5:04:16 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: NiagaraNet


NIAGARA GAZETTE
--------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
Wednesday, January 26, 2003, page 3A

       PCB's "most likely" not coming to Niagara

       Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency announced that contaminated sediment from the Hudson River are not likely to be headed to CWM Chemical Services in Porter for disposal.

       The CWM site will "most likely not be the site" where the dirty sediment to be dredged from the Hudson River starting in 2006 will go, according to David King, director of the Hudson of the EPA Hudson River Field Office, in a release from the office of state Sen. George Maziarz, R_Newfane.

       The final decision has not yet been made and will not be made for several months, according to John Haggard, Hudson River Program Manager for General Electric.  Over a thirty year period, GE dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson.

       Sites in Texas, Michigan and Utah are the top candidates because they are all accessible by rail or barge, an EPA requirement in this matter.

       CWM in Porter is not accessible by rail or barge.
---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------

BUT
If you look up the titled article, you will see that what I am saying is the accurate account of what's going on behind the scenes, and behind your back. This HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE was promised for 60 years to be removed...yes, there was an original government agreement to send this stuff back to where it came from (Africa--just like what Bush said was in the Mid-East). Needless to say, you, the citizens of Niagaera County have heard nothing of this and NOTHING FROM RRG while all this was happening!

That's the facts. I'm sorry if this seems confrontational but the truth be told or we are all destined to do the slow health meltdown into oblivion.

Cheers,

Louis Ricicuti

The following is an excerpt from an unpublished article I've written on the subject.

Copyright-2004-2005  Louis Ricciuti

>> "A mile behind that dirt pile sits a rocket fuel factory and testing facility located on the LOOW site that was operated by the US Air Force and Bell Aerospace for more than 40 years. Called Air Force Plant #38, the facility conducted highly secretive military activities in the buildings and concrete bunkers located on several hundred acres in the woods of Lewiston - Porter. These activities included the creation and testing of high-energy rocket and jet fuel--including the liftoff engine and hypergolic (self-igniting) space fuel for the Apollo Lunar Module, thousands of rocket engine firings from a steel I-beam test stand, communications transmitter testing, and, something called C.O.I.L., the acronym for Chemical Oxygen Injection (Iodine) Laser. This laser testing was the precursor to the Star Wars space-based laser defense system touted in the 1980s by President Reagan.

Recently, AF Plant 38 was demolished without any public notice, meetings or environmental impact statement. More than 20 buildings were scraped to their foundations and the demolition debris was trucked to various metal scrappers including one in Canada. According to Town of Porter Supervisor Merton Weipert, part of the load "exploded at a Canadian scrap yard causing some degree of evacuation." Supervisor Weipert described one type of load as containing something resembling "hand grenade-like canisters."

How these materials were allowed to be shipped across one of the US - Canada International bridges without notice is a question in need of an answer. Why these materials are still being found on the LOOW site after years of numerous "cleanups" demands another.

Unfortunately, the US military is not governed by, and are exempt from environmental laws, so there has been no official explanation or statement regarding this recent demolition and the incident in Canada other than that offered by Porter's Weipert. Whatever materials that were used for various secret experiments in the woods of Lewiston and Porter may remain buried just below the surface now forever." >>

quote:

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Originally posted by: mike of the mountain
"green washing - there is more coming - sean whats his name is stirring also .      -    is it time yet ?  "

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      ....

-- Edited by Dovey at 11:24, 2005-06-13

   

The research shows the tremendous medical, financial and emotional burdens that those treated in the 1970s and 1980s are now facing. One study found that 1 in 10 survivors are saddled with $25,000 in cancer-related debt.

"We've concentrated so much on our 5- and 10-year survival that we haven't paid attention to the impact of our treatments," said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy medical director of the American Cancer Society.

Today's patients shouldn't suffer as many problems, specialists say, because cancer treatments have vastly improved in recent years.

Survival is at an all-time high. More than 3 out of 4 children are cured of cancer today, up from 58 percent in 1975.

"But the individuals cured currently pay a large and unacceptable price for that," said Dr. Harmon Eyre, the cancer society's medical director.

Nearly 10 million Americans have survived cancer, including 270,000 who were diagnosed when they were 15 or younger.

Researchers across the country studied 10,397 of them who were diagnosed and treated between 1970 and 1986 and 3,034 of their siblings who did not have cancer.

By age 45, cancer survivors were from two to six times more likely than their healthy brothers and sisters to develop various health problems. Examples include heart disease, kidney problems requiring transplants or dialysis, blindness, infertility, mental retardation, paralysis, blood clots, lung problems and even another cancer.

Those who had Hodgkin's disease fared the worst, followed by those treated for brain tumors, said the lead researcher, Dr. Kevin Oeffinger of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Radiation is responsible for much of the damage because doses were much higher decades ago than they are today, he said. Chemotherapy drugs also have taken a toll. Some, like the widely used breast cancer medication adriamycin, are known to cause heart problems.

Less toxic drugs are needed, and cancer survivors and their doctors need to watch more carefully for health problems and try to prevent them, said Dr. David Johnson, a Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center doctor who is president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

"We want to make primary care physicians aware of these problems as well as patients," said Johnson, himself a cancer survivor, diagnosed with lymphoma 15 years ago.

The National Cancer Institute funded the study, discussed at the society's annual meeting.

A separate one, funded by the Lance Armstrong Foundation, found that half of survivors said their financial and emotional issues were harder to face than the physical issues, and that these needs weren't met by their doctors.

"We focus predominantly on the medical issues of cancer, yet what this survey says is that the non-medical issues are as prevalent," said Dr. Steven Wolff of Meharry Medical College in Nashville.

He presented the research, which was based on an Internet survey of more than 1,000 randomly selected cancer survivors.

Nearly half of them said they still talk about cancer at least once a month and that their lives are affected by it "more than a little." More than half reported having to deal with chronic pain and depression.

As cancer doctors, said Johnson, "We are very well equipped to deal with their physical needs. We aren't so well-equipped to deal with their psychological needs

Truth be told - Good articles

quote:

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Originally posted by: alwayswatching
"This is a powerful message if you take the time to think about it. Even so, we can be confident that the world emerging will be a better place than before. It is fundamentally healthy, intrinsically right, for people to be able to choose their own information and make their own choices. Why? My newspaper's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it this way: "God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience." Those are the basic tools of human progress; we all have them. Give us better information, and most of us, most of the time, will make better choices.-- Edited by alwayswatching at 14:44, 2005-05-22"

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every action has a ripple.

.....

-- Edited by Dovey at 11:25, 2005-06-13

I was looking at some of my old files and came accross this, it might be informational to some of you.

Buffalo News
14 June 2001

LEW-PORT DISTRICT

EXPLOSIVES, CHEMICALS FOUND CLOSE TO SCHOOLS

By BILL MICHELMORE
News Niagara Bureau

PORTER--High levels of chemicals and explosives have been found 200 feet from
the Lewsiton-Porter schools and close to a wilderness preserve where families
camp and fish, area residents were told Wednesday night.

Deadly chemicals including cyanide, lead, arsenic, barium and PCBs were
found scattered throughout the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, said
engineer Sandy Staigerwald.

The 7,500-acre site, which straddles the towns of Lewiston and Porter, is
less than a mile from the schools, where 2,500 students attend.
"We found something that was a bit of a surprise," Satigerwald said. "We
found explosives."

Staigerwald works for a Maryland firm called EA Engineering, which was
hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to find out what is buried in the
former Army research site used during World War II's Manhattan Project.

The explosives were found near a walleye pond that is frequented by the
Niagara River Anglers Association. The pond is part of a 50-acre wilderness
preserve used by the anglers group for camping and recreation.
"I don't want to alarm our members," said Anglers Association spokesman
Michael Gillis. "There is no immediate danger."

Gillis said he was more concerned about the dangerous levels of lead that
were buried 200 feet from the school where Gillis' two children attend. But
Gillis said he is worried that digging it up may unleash a greater problem.

"There are enough chemicals in the soil and water for us to recommend
that a risk assessment be prepared," Staigerwald said.

The findings came after a yearlong investigation. A further study is
needed to determine the levels of concentration of the chemicals, Staigerwald
added.

The hazardous remains of the Army research that developed the atomic
bomb and Cold War-era production of nuclear materials have been buried there
for decades, but it was only recently that the Army Corps began investigating
the area.

TNT, uranium residue and the radioactive remains of animals that had been
injected with plutonium during experiments at the University of Rochester
during the 1940s and 1950s are just a few of the toxic substances known to be
buried on the site.

Peter Lax, in Oslo to receive the $980,000 Abel Prize for mathematics, said that working as a 19-year-old student on the U.S. Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945 among top scientists felt like living in a science fiction plot.

"The original use of the bomb on Japan I think was justified," the Hungarian-American mathematician told Reuters, stepping into the controversy which has raged over the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The alternative of a U.S. invasion of Japan would have been "far bloodier" than allied landings in Normandy, France, in 1944 that paved the way to the defeat of Hitler, he said. "It was all ended (in Japan) by dropping the bomb," he said.

"And there's another aspect that occurred to me much later ... the horror that humanity has of nuclear weapons comes partly because we have seen what it can do," he said. "It was a kind of inoculation of humanity against using nuclear weapons," he said.

The bombs killed about 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945 and thousands of others died later from illness and injuries. Many other experts argue that the bombs were among the great evils of the 20th century.

U.S. President Harry Truman saw the atom bomb as a way of reducing casualties in the war after fierce battles in the Japanese islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Abel Prize awards excellence

Lax, now 79 and of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, won fame for work on equations that have had applications ranging from how to pump more oil from underground reservoirs to improved aerodynamics for planes.

The Abel Prize was named after 19th century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel and set up in 2003 to promote maths, reward excellence, and fill a gap left by the Nobel Prizes for science that are awarded in Stockholm.

Lax won the prize "for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of partial differential equations and to the computation of their solutions," the prize citation said.

As a promising student, Lax was drafted in 1945 to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. He returned to Los Alamos in 1950 for a year for work linked to the hydrogen bomb and worked there each summer for a decade after the war.

He said he had no idea where he was going when drafted. "Security was uppermost: nobody had any idea of what was going on. Once I got inside the fence I was told we were building a bomb out of plutonium, which is an element that didn't exist."

"By the time I got there the design of the bomb had been frozen for some time. But they were continuing working on future bombs," he said. "It was like living science fiction ... I don't read very much science fiction, having lived it."

quote:

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Originally posted by: NuclearLou
"
Ps-This year marks the Sixtieth-Anniversay (1945) of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6 and 9, respectively.  When Niagara Falls Mayor, Vincenzo Agnello was on Scott's show a few months back, I asked him to make this recognition of the anniversary, and it was pooh--poohed by both the mayor, and Scott--sorry Scotty, but you misquoted me then on-air in saying that I stated "Celebration." I did say "Commemoration," as I listened later to the Podcast.
It's too bad that we American's will not respect or recognize these dates as being very reverent and important in human history. That is a very bad thing, I think, considering that saying about history repeating itself.-- Edited by NuclearLou at 22:25, 2005-05-24"

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Lou,

I appologize for pooh poohing your idea. Maybe I can attone. A quick check of my calendar tells me that August 6th is a Saturday and August 9th, a Tuesday. Would you be my guest on Dialog on the 9th to discuss Nuclear Niagara? If the city won't officially commemmorate it, we can.

so i voted , the #s are nice and even now .   

for the record last night in the local liberal rag the poughkeepsie urinal , the local congressman Mr Sweeney pulled the funding for the hudson river dredging operation which will be redistributed for local projects at the discression of the local government .      SO THAT MEANs THERE ARE NO PCBs FROM THE HUDSON VALLEY ON THEIR WAY TO ANYWHERE. due to local opposition and opposition from GE      the operation is on hold probobly for ever .

                it was bad for the people that were incinerated by america in august of 1945 - but with the knowledge availible at the time after 4 years of horrific battle with an evil enemy , it is easy to understand the decision making that lead up to that event  -  didja know that the first request for the surrender of the Japanese prior to the use of a "terrible weapon" was  rejected so completly as to piss off our governement was actually a mistranslation - their response was like a snubb , but their intended response was" we need a little time to discuss this among ourselves " .       they really should have hired a better translator ....

   my mom was born 8-9   nagasaki  -  my daughter 8-6   hiroshima  -    different years though ....  if my daughter's son has a daughter .....    watch the date .     of course my daughter's son is only 5 months old now , it might be a few years ...   

 

Don't know how the above applies to topic? is MTBE in Niagara county?

CLOSE THIS SCHOOL! Send your kid