In Mid-June I posted four blogs about a meeting at the Mountaineer’s Headquarters building at Magnuson Park in Seattle, Washington. The meeting was called by the U.S. Navy, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the Washington State Department of Health. The purpose of the meeting was a presentation of information about radium contamination in a couple of old Naval buildings and soil around drainage systems left over from World War II aircraft repair activities.
The City of Seattle found reference to radium in blueprints they were reviewing in 2010 in preparation for remodeling of the old buildings. At that time, the Navy boarded up the contaminated sections of the buildings and put up fences around the contaminated soil. Small signs of warning people to keep away were posted but there was no public announcement.
Last winter, when the facts began to become public, the Navy partnered with the Washington State Department of Health to develop a plan for cleaning up the site. The Washington State Department of Ecology which has jurisdiction over the environment in the park was brought in late in the planning process in June. The State Department of Health has standards which allow for a higher level of residual radiation than the State Department of Ecology or the Federal Environmental Protection Agency.
The Navy and the Washington State agencies called the meeting to present their picture of the current situation and to explain their plan to clean up the radioactive contamination. They had a series of stations with posters and they said that they would accept written comments but were not going to accept verbal comments. Their plan called for public comment to end at the end of June and work on the cleanup to begin on July 15th. This schedule implied that they are not really interested in incorporating public input into their cleanup plan.
State Representative Gerry Pollet forcefully argued with the Navy and State presenters, saying that the people needed to have more input into the process. The Navy was utilizing a special fast track procedure that they said was necessary. This appears to be at odds with the fact that they claimed that at no time was there any danger to the public. And now they wanted to rush through a cleanup without allowing public meetings or an environmental impact statement.
After the heated argument at the meeting, the Navy and the State understood that the people of Seattle’s Magnuson Park neighborhood were not about to passively accept the plan to rush through a questionable cleanup of radioactivity in their neighborhood. Public pressure forced the Navy and the State to extend the public comment period to the end of July and to hold additional meetings for public input. Unfortunately, the Navy announced that they were going ahead with “preliminary” work on July 8th.
The Navy says that they want the public to be confident that everything necessary is being done to protect the public and that all relevant documents are available on their website and at Northeast Branch of the Seattle Regional Library at 6801 35th Ave NE. However, Representative Pollet points out that the Navy has not provided the usual reports that should accompany such environmental clean projects.
There will be another public meeting tonight at the Mountaineer’s Headquarters at Magnuson Park tonight from 6 to 10 PM. It will be interesting to see if the Navy and the State of Washington have indeed decided to incorporate public feedback into the cleanup process at Magnuson Park or whether tonight’s meeting is simply for show. It is an open question of whether the Navy is more concerned about insuring the safety of the citizens that use Magnuson Park or forcing the acceptance of a quick fix to the public embarrassment of a contaminated site that they were responsible for.
Mountaineer’s Headquarters at Magnuson Park:
