I blogged last summer about the cleanup of radioactive materials left in Magnuson Park in Seattle from when the park was a Naval air base in World War II. The Navy turned the park over to the city of Seattle in 1999 with the assurance that any hazardous material had been removed and it was safe for recreational and low-income housing. In 2010, when the Seattle Parks Department was working on renovation of a couple of buildings, old blueprints revealed that one of the buildings had a room dedicated to removed and replacing old radioluminescent paint on the dials in the cockpit of planes based there. Tests showed that there was measurable amounts of radium in the room and drain pipe from the room.
The Seattle Parks Department and the Navy decided that there was no need to alarm the public so they boarded up the radium room and they put up a fence around an outside area that had radium in the soil. Small eight and a half by eleven signs said "Controlled Area." on the fence.
In March of 2013, people started asking questions about the signs and found out about the radioactive contamination. The Navy reached out to the Washington State Department of Health to work on cleaning up the contamination. There were contentious public meeting that summer as the citizens of Seattle demanded to know about the contamination and cleanup plans. One of the big issues was why there was no plan for public input. The Navy did finally allow some public meetings but the Navy already had a cleanup plan in place and were moving forward with it.
Last night I attended a meeting called by the agencies cleaning up Magnuson park which included the U.S. Navy, the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Washington State Department of Health and the Seattle Parks Department. The purpose of the meeting was to explain progress on the cleanup and to take questions from concerned citizens. A representative of each of these agencies was on a panel at the front a room at the Mountaineers Club at the Park. Washington State Representative Gerry Pollet was also on the panel. He has been with Hearts of America Northwest, a watchdog group for Hanford cleanup, for decades.
As usual, there were about eight big display boards with excellent photographs and diagrams covering the history of the base, the location of the contamination, the time line of the cleanup, etc. I remarked to Barbara that if the same level of expertise shown in the display panels had been applied to the cleanup, we would not have to have these meetings. Hearts of American Northwest also had a table with display boards and handouts about the situation. King 5 News attended the meeting with cameras and reporters. Thirty plus people were in attendance.
On tomorrow's post, I will go into detail on some of the discussion, questions and disagreements at the meeting.
(See Part 2 for more details)
Washington State Department of Health radiation survey at Magnuson Park:
