Cleanup stirs little interest

The conclusion to a quiet, long-term, $128 million cleanup effort at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground is getting closer, and while the effort includes covering or hauling away large amounts of hazardous waste, it hasn't captured much public attention.

"Dugway has accomplished a lot of environmental cleanup, especially over the past five years," said David Larsen, a geologist with the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste.

Public meetings are held several times a year, and one is scheduled for Monday. But people who attend the meetings say few residents of the communities nearest to this remote Army base ever show up. It's apathy that Larsen and others say is rooted in where Dugway is located and the minimal health risk to anyone beyond the base gates.

Over the past 15 years, Larsen said, Dugway has identified about 200 sites that justified an investigation into determining what kinds of waste were there and what to do with those sites.

In recent months, environmental contractors at Dugway have covered about a dozen landfills where removal of waste, which includes old chemical and conventional munitions, was deemed unsafe to workers. The covering of the sites satisfies the requirements of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, enacted by Congress in 1976, Larsen said.

Some of those sites also are fenced in, with signs that warn people to stay out.

"It's a long-term solution," Larsen said about burying the waste, which includes using a special liner.

Dugway's Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) will hold a public meeting Monday, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., at Dugway to hear from contractors whose companies the Army uses to clean or cover up scores of the contaminated sites, some of which have been landfills for decades.

In addition to six state and local government members, and a Dugway official, the board also includes one community member each from Dugway, Stansbury Park, Draper, Salt Lake City, Tooele, Skull Valley and Grantsville. The board was formed in 1999 to provide public oversight of remediation work on the base.

The contractors "are doing just a good job," said Marianne Rutishauser Andrus, the board's community co-chairwoman. "We more often say, 'Why are we here?' We do ask questions, occasionally."

But Dugway critics such as Stephen Erickson, head of the Utah-based Citizens Education Project, are concerned about Dugway's efforts to expand its mission in the areas of chemical- and biological-defense testing. Erickson also points to what he believes are continuing contamination problems, caused long ago by the military, that are just outside of Dugway's boundaries.

Years of contamination

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