Nuclear LewPort

Date: Sat Jul 23 5:14 PM, 2005

RE: Nuclear LewPort

Date: Sat Jul 23 5:27 PM, 2005

PDF] The LOOW RAB is:
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
NFSS) site. History of the LOOW site. The former Lake Ontario Ordnance. Works (LOOW)
is located within the. Towns of Lewiston and Porter in. Niagara County. ...
www.niagara.edu/eli/RAB%20brochure2.pdf

Date: Sat Jul 23 5:36 PM, 2005

A BIG THANK YOU to the US Army and Niagara University for posting a direct link to their propoganda. This is the B.S. link. "Beyond Science," or whatever.

That was very nice of those folks to do this. Thanks again to the Army and NU.

Date: Sun Jul 24 11:26 AM, 2005

Life as a wasteland
By Aaron Besecker
Sunday, July 24, 2005

LEWISTON-PORTER — They called it the perfect spot.

When the federal government wanted to bury radioactive waste from the atomic bomb after the second World War, everything seemed right about a rural spot in northwest Niagara County.

The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, in the towns of Lewiston and Porter, once sat on open farmland far from the bustle of an urban populous.

The LOOW site, which the government had already used for short-lived production of explosives for the war, sat atop a thick layer of clay and silt.

Here, the composition of the Earth’s crust represented a geological blessing — a mostly impermeable mass just beneath the surface meant to secure everything above from the precious groundwater below.

But today, many residents and officials are concerned about chemical and radiological contamination and the chances they could be causing long-term health problems for people in the area.

They hope what was buried didn’t get out.

And a problem exists for those investigating the situation today — they might never know the whole story.

The place for waste

“It just seemed like an ideal place to put radiation,” said Sean Q. Kelly, with his feet up on his desk inside his office in Niagara University’s Timon Hall.

Kelly, an NU political science professor and head of the Environmental Learning Institute, chairs the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board, a public body of citizens and local officials whose mission is to follow and direct cleanup efforts at the LOOW.

“In the 1940s, that was the boonies out there,” Kelly said.

More than 60 years later, the public’s proximity to the site by way of possible health effects is a lot closer than some like.

And even for those attempting to uncover the truth, the quest for information has been a challenge.

Just ask NU professor of history Andrew Jenks.

Jenks, now doing research for an upcoming book on American technological utopianism and its connection to Model City, where CWM now sits, has combed through documents accessible from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Jenks, while hailing the Army Corps’ cleanup efforts, believes no one knows for sure what records of the site have been lost or destroyed.

“That’s what we’ll never know,” Jenks said.

Here are some bits and pieces that are known about the site:

n The U.S. Department of Energy cleaned up areas of the LOOW known as “Vicinity Properties” in the early 1980s. All but three of the properties — E, E’ and G — were declared completed remediated and clear of radiological concern. Small, inaccessible portions of these three properties did not allow for total study of the areas.

n The U.S. Army Corps found concentrations of plutonium and strontium in May and September, 2002, while searching for buried waste from University of Rochester experiments on Vicinity Property G. No documentation was available about any radioactive wastes containing those two elements were buried there.

n An earlier excavation of the U of R site in 972 by the Department of Energy removed 512 cubic yards of soil, drums and debris. The on-site destination of the material was unknown, according to the Army Corps.

n The search for the U of R waste involved the digging of several ditches on the site. A small mammal bone as well as some laboratory debris and soil with radiological contamination were found. The radioactive soil was initially not detectable at the surface, according to the Army Corps.

n Officials were alerted to possible radiological contamination of waterways as early as 1949. A Department of the Interior report, uncovered by NU’s Jenks, reveals officials urged investigation of possible radiological contamination of a drainage pathway. The area known as the Central Drainage Ditch, which eventually flows into Four Mile Creek and out to Lake Ontario, sat within 100 feet of the waste disposal area at the LOOW and could have received radioactive liquids. The report recommended semi-annual radioactive analyses.

n According to more documents uncovered by Jenks, a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy intentionally dumped 770,000 gallons of contaminated construction water into the Central Drainage Ditch from 9:30 a.m. on Veteran’s Day, 1982 until 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 17. The move violated New York State Department of Environmental Conservation regulations, and was done to avoid a potentially major overflow from retention ponds thanks to rainstorms, officials said.

Picking up the pieces

While some information on the LOOW may be scattered or incomplete, opinions differ on what conclusions should be drawn from them.

The NU professors acknowledge a significant problem in the past, but believe things have gone better lately.

“This isn’t a Chernobyl,” said Jenks, referring to the 1986 nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union that is considered to have caused around 2,500 deaths and massive environmental destruction.

The situation at LOOW was bad up until the 1970s. Since then, many of the problems have been dealt with reasonably.

Fellow NU professor Kelly agrees.

In terms of threat to the public, the most immediate threats have been taken care of, he said.

“It’s better than it was,” Kelly said.

Problem sticking around

Amy Witryol is co-founder of the Niagara Health Science Report, a group pushing for cleanup at the LOOW.

For her, the lack of readily available information and current operations on the site equal definite problems.

“We’ve got an unquantified risk,” Witryol said.

If we want to have Lewiston and Porter around by the end of this century, locals and officials have to address the waste problem soon or likely face a troubling future, Witryol said.

“Eventually, we’ll have no town,” she said.

Witryol pointed to the fact that radioactive waste brought to the LOOW site is now unaccounted for.

Another critic of just how the LOOW was handled is a Niagara Falls native and researcher, Lou Ricciuti, who believes there are many failures with regards to the LOOW site historically.

“There has been a woeful lack of communication with the public about that site since day one,” Ricciuti said.

Through communication with locals who used to live near the site, as well as internationally known health experts, Ricciuti has spent the past five years trying to put together pieces of the puzzle.

What still bewilders him is the stunning lack of publicly available information.

“There should be records out the wazoo,” Ricciuti said.

Records or not, a lot of work has been done at the site, Kelly said. And although the public perception may not be exact, he warned against drawing any conclusions about what may be lingering dangers.

The question of whether any radiation may be moved around below the ground — possibly by and into the ground water — is a “bigger question” than whether any of the radiation may be moved in other ways.

“It’s not a problem that’s solved by any means,” Kelly said.

Contact Aaron Besecker at (716) 282-2311, Ext. 2263.

Date: Sun Jul 24 1:33 PM, 2005

Lake Ontario Ordinance Works in Oct 6, 1982

Click on photo for larger imageWhat lies beneath
By Rick Forgione and Aaron Besecker
Sunday, July 24, 2005

Almost 3,000 students and adults walk the halls on any given school day in the Lewiston-Porter Central School District on Creek Road.

Less than a mile away sits the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works — one of the most notorious radioactive sites in the country’s history — holding remnants and reminders of the federal government’s atomic weapons.

Farther down the road sits Chemical Waste Management, home to the Northeast’s only hazardous waste storage site.

The proximity to these two sites — and the fear that one accident could prove deadly — is what prompted a group of graduate students and professionals from the University at Buffalo to recommend the school district be moved.

It’s a suggestion that not only has been ignored, but apparently remains unknown to many local and state leaders and Lew-Port school officials.

“It’s very unlikely that I would forget hearing something like that,” said Ed Lilly, who is in his ninth year on the Board of Education.

The school district sits on a 420-acre site off of Creek Road split between the towns of Porter and Lewiston. The property is notoriously known as the buffer zone of LOOW, a site of federal government activity during the 1940s, including the storage of radioactive waste.

Several tests searching for contamination have been conducted on the campus over the last several years. School officials insist students and staff aren’t in danger of becoming sick.

That stance contradicts the “Towards a Smart Growth Comprehensive Plan: Assessment and Recommendations for the Town of Porter” completed by the UB group in 2002. The project’s goal was to develop a list of recommendations of areas Porter can improve upon, such as tourism, waterfront access and economic development.

Under a recommendation labeled “CWM should be encouraged to utilize best management practices,” the group points out the threat the company and LOOW site pose on the school district.

“The Lewiston-Porter school ... must be relocated, because its location and the possible threats that it poses to the students that attend this school,” according to the group’s award-winning report. “Immediate action should be taken concerning the Lewiston-Porter campus. We recommend the relocation of the school.”

Town of Porter officials didn’t take the group’s warning too seriously.

Bernie Carreno, co-chair of the current Porter Master Plan Committee, said the group had no facts to backup the statement.

“In this case, I think they just went off the deep end,” Carreno said. As college students, they saw CWM as a hot issue that was basically thrown in without much consultation, he said.

The group, members of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning under the guidance of Dr. Ute Lehrer, received several accolades for its Porter report, such as the “Best Student Project Award” from the Western New York section of the American Planning Association; “Outstanding Student Project” by the New York Upstate Chapter of the American Planning Association; and “Best Example of the Planning Process” from the American Institute for Certified Planners Student Project Award.

Officials from the Town of Porter used portions of the report to compile its master plan in 2004. The recommendations to move the school district were not carried over.

“They took it upon themselves not to follow this award-winning study,” said local researcher Lou Ricciuti, adding he believes school officials also were fully informed. “Both of them set the recommendation aside.”

Porter Councilman William Choboy, who has been out front during the town’s Master Plan process, said the town wasn’t obligated to accept all of the group’s recommendations. He pointed out the group was not “really a consultant in the normal sense.”

Choboy stressed it was a semester-long project, and that overall the group did a very good job on the Master Plan. The recommendation about moving the schools, however, came from students who were surprised at the existence of waste at CWM and the waste from the LOOW.

“It wasn’t grounded in any research that had been done,” Choboy said, adding that Lehrer called CWM “the big white elephant in the parlor.”

Pat Lynch, the other co-chair of the Master Plan Committee, said she needed to see facts and results from environmental testing before backing a recommendation to move the campus.

“It would be irresponsible for us as a committee to make any decisions at this point,” she said, adding the Master Plan committee is pursuing a more “scientific perspective” on the whole situation, Lynch added.

Even state leaders, like State Sen. George Maziarz, weren’t let in on the group’s warnings to move the school campus. He would, however, like to review them and have Department of Health officials review the information as well.

When asked why the report wouldn’t have crossed his desk, Maziarz responded, “I have no idea.”

Town of Porter Supervisor Merton Wiepert reiterated the point that the recommendation had no data to back it up.

“That’s nothing to do with our Master Plan whatsoever in my opinion,” Wiepert said. “(The schools are) in a different town. Why would that be part of our Master Plan?”

A representative from the school district attended preliminary Master Plan Committee meetings, but that was the extent of their participation, Wiepert said.

Some Lew-Port school officials are baffled about why they were never properly alerted to the report’s findings.

“It never surfaced at the board level,” said Jim Leighton, who was school board president at the time the report was completed. “I don’t know why, I’m quite serious.”

That doesn’t mean the existence of the report was never mentioned, Leighton added, pointing out the school board gets 50 informational packets a year. “I can’t recall, but we may have gotten something that said a report was available in Porter, but it wasn’t anything specific.”

This also isn’t the first time Leighton has heard about possibly moving the schools. In fact, two years ago, while he was still on the board, he and School Superintendent Whitney Vantine discussed relocating the campus to Joseph Davis State Park due to public pressure regarding the environmental concerns.

The district wanted to use the upcoming relicensing of the New York Power Authority to receive enough money to pay for the move. Leighton left the school board a few months later after not being re-elected and discussions seemed to drop off.

“I think it ended up being too grandiose a plan,” Leighton said.

Assistant Superintendent Don Rappold also denies any knowledge of the Porter study. He added the idea of relocating to Joseph Davis was to take advantage of some greenway money through the Power Authority’s relicensing settlement with local school districts and governments. That idea no longer is being tossed around, he added.

“In my mind, it was never because of health concerns,” Rappold said.

While there’s no plans to relocate, Lew-Port officials have spent nearly $50,000 over the past two years searching for contamination on the campus. Last year, a level of arsenic was detected behind the Community Resource Center on the north end, believed to be from the spraying of an old orchard located decades ago at the site.

Pan-American Environmental of Buffalo has recently completed a testing study about the arsenic and the school board is awaiting additional recommendations about possible remediation work on site.

“There have been so many studies and so much information since 1980 that it’s difficult to know what is factual or not,” Lilly said. “The unanswered question now is, what to do about the results of testing? I don’t think anybody knows.”

Contact Rick Forgione at (716) 282-2311, Ext. 2257 or Aaron Besecker at Ext. 2263.

Date: Sun Jul 24 2:41 PM, 2005

This was for the kids of lew-port ,For what ever reason you keep wanting it to be buried!

Why?

Date: Sun Jul 24 3:45 PM, 2005

because you've been a total jerk--whinning, singing, distracting, directing, demanding, demeaning (look it up), without self control, telling lies and more. you're concerned? hardly! If you were, you would have played nice, or according to instruction, advice and request. you asked. you did none of that and only did what you wanted. you took no time to study any of this or read through the threads and then burst in with 'guns-a-blazing' to numerous threads. you posted things you knew nothing about locally and then articles from your region that did not at all apply here and only caused conflict and confusion from a far. enough. want to really help kids? keep them away from ALL finished military products (and their wastes) in ALL countries. Then explain that to everyone you know and love. including relatives that have previously been blown up in military conflict. (BTW--THAT's INTERESTING to find out this late in the game. was it Gulf War 1? Stateside military accident? The Nam? IF THAt had been discussed a little while ago, perhaps some on the board could have better understood what was MotM's motivation and fascinating commentary on global warfare AND wanting to prevent those wastes from hurting American kids.) Hmm. That's why.

Date: Sun Jul 24 3:56 PM, 2005

Keep to the thread,This is for the kids of lew-port.

not you being hitler ! ' according to instruction,"

The kids

not anyone else!

Date: Sun Jul 24 4:02 PM, 2005

hitler? you keep burying it yours will be buried too. madame nazi fer sure !

Date: Sun Jul 24 4:07 PM, 2005

NOT JUSt for the "kids of Lew-Port." There you go again--"It ONLY happened to my family." You should sing, oh, that's right you do...Me, Me, Me..

WHY do you think that it's only about L-P kids? Was that the only place this stuff was left laying around the county? WHO are you to direct attention to ONLY L-P kids? What OTHER schools and children are in danger HERE from what materials? Do you even have a clue? Thought not.

UknowNothingAboutThisFromwhereYouPerch, my old Native American name.

Date: Mon Jul 25 9:09 AM, 2005

Niagara Gazette Online

more news on lput,But looks like you will have to buy a paper,You may still bring up the front page.

Date: Fri Jul 29 7:13 AM, 2005

Exploring the terrain
By Aaron Besecker
Friday, July 29, 2005

PORTER — They have wheels, handles and look like baby buggies.

But instead of drooling children, these pouched vehicles carry sensitive detection equipment designed to collect data about possible radiological contamination.

A fleet of three sets of surveyors and equipment will cover 300 acres of property at CWM Chemical Services over the coming months, and it’s all part of recent activity by officials who ultimately want another hazardous waste landfill built.

CWM officials are still seeking state Department of Health approval for their three-pronged plan, of which the surface scan is one element.

“We should start seeing results over the next couple months,” said CWM District Manager Richard Sturges. He announced last week that initial results covering about one-eighth of the land to be studied have yielded results within acceptable detection standards.

Over the course of two months, the top six inches of soil across will be scanned by sodium iodide detectors linked to a Global Positioning Satellite system. URS Corp. of Buffalo has been hired — at a cost of $330,000 — to complete the work.

Once the study is complete, data will be sent to the state DOH and Department of Environmental Conservation. CWM officials, who were seeking a DOH health order from 1972 to be vacated, have “put that on the back burner,” Sturges said.

The DOH order issued in 1972 and amended in 1974 precluded excavation of soil unless permission from the state was granted.

State health officials did not return calls seeking comment.

CWM, the northeast’s only hazardous waste facility, sits on land once used by the federal government to dump radiological waste.

“We’re going to collect all this data and see where it goes,” Sturges said.

He fully expects all the results to come back within acceptable standards, he added.

Another element of the overall radiological scan includes a two-year study of surface water and air at the CWM site. That portion has also already begun.

Sturges said this action by CWM shows the company’s willingness to be proactive and find out answers for the community.

A local researcher active in efforts to clean up radiological and chemical waste disagrees. Amy Witryol of the Niagara Health Science Report is generally supportive of the CWM’s efforts to test for radiation, including the gamma walkover.

“I wish CWM started it three years ago when the public asked for it,” Witryol said.

Contact Aaron Besecker at (716) 282-2311, Ext. 2263.

Date: Fri Jul 29 8:53 AM, 2005

RE: Lewport won a award

People To Move Lew-Port are having a meeting tonight, Friday, July 29, 2003, at 7:30 p.m. in the Youngstown Fire Hall at 2741 Youngstown-Lockport Road, Youngstown. Be there.

Date: Fri Jul 29 1:12 PM, 2005

Anonymous wrote:

RE: Lewport won a award People To Move Lew-Port are having a meeting tonight, Friday, July 29, 2003, at 7:30 p.m. in the Youngstown Fire Hall at 2741 Youngstown-Lockport Road, Youngstown. Be there.

I would CHECK ON THAT FIRST,sINCE uS wE DID NOT KNOW.PHONE AHEAD