July 12, 2001 Avondale, Colorado
In the United States, rural areas are becoming a front line for the conflicts of economic liberalization, democracy, and limiting unaccountable private or public power. Southern Colorado is a prime example of this conflict with the emergence of a number of polluting industries and prisons along the Arkansas Valley. Below is an interview that I recently had with one of the activists in the area trying to organize in resistance to these exploitive policies.
Dan Hobbs operates an organic farm on the river bluffs of the Arkansas River just south of the town of Avondale. Across the river valley, on the opposite bluffs, sits the Pueblo Chemical Depot, a constant visual reminder to Mr. Hobbs and all residents of the area of the economic and environmental challenges that face them in upcoming years.
RM: When was the Boone-Avondale Citizen's Alliance (BACA) formed and by whom?
DH: Just the briefest bit of background. Avondale's water had been tested for contaminants from the old TNT washout facility (on the Pueblo Chemical Weapons depot) for a year and they finally found contamination that was over Colorado health department limits on December 6th, 2000. We suspected that the water was contaminated throughout the summer, but they continued to tell us that it was clean. There was no local effort to address the grim realities of living near the depot, so I decided to form a group to work on the water issues and the impending disposal of the chemical weapons stockpile. The fact that they were going to destroy this mustard gas somehow, sometime soon, five miles from my home, led me to think about tying the issues together and approaching other community leaders that I knew were concerned about the same stuff. So I sought out Ruby Martinez, a woman who is a long-time water activist, and her daughter Mitzy Martinez. They were good friends with a fellow named Steve Csogi who worked at the depot for thirty years and provides us with tremendous amounts of information about what he and others did and what's up there. I also invited Doug Wiley, a fourth generation farmer/rancher down the road and Sister Nancy Crafton who works with the migrant farm workers. So basically I wanted to assemble a diversity of people who represented different facets of the Avondale-Boone area -- farming and ranching, depot workers, water activists, migrant worker advocates. I think it was early January that we actually pulled the group together. We pretty quickly issued our first statement and mailed it all around the countryside and we have been running ever since.
RM: How many people do you represent or claim to represent?
DH: There are about 3500 residents in the area. Then there are 750 migrants, plus about 3000 dependents. So we're talking about 6000 people, more or less, some of them on a seasonal basis. Our approach is a tight working group with different aspects of the community represented. We're not a membership organization and we're not doing petition work. We're striving to voice the concerns that we hear in the community and to try and to advance actions to resolve the concerns. RM: To destroy the chemical weapons stockpile at the Pueblo Chemical Weapons Depot (PCD) incineration and two alternative technologies based on water treatment have been proposed. BACA supports the alternatives to incineration.
DH: Yeah, but we're not all that excited about the alternatives either, but the weapons have to be destroyed. The possibility of having them transported was politically killed a number of years ago. The alternatives appear to mitigate the potential damages to our enterprises both in terms of less likelihood of chemical releases and in decreasing the possible public perception that our agricultural products might be unsafe due to the effect of emmissions on the livestock, plant tissue, soil and water. And so we're a hundred percent behind the alternatives in that context, but we're not jumping up and down to have a state-of-the-art toxic waste disposal facility over the hillside.
RM: What other local organizations support BACA's position and are there any groups that support the possibility of an incinerator?
DH: Nobody has specifically opposed anything that we've tried to advance. In fact, I've never heard anybody endorse incineration except for the Army. So it seems that the overwhelming consensus both from elected officials, community groups, and citizen's of Pueblo are for the alternative technologies. It is probably about as close to a consensus as we are going to get in Pueblo for the alternatives. The groups that we have been working with specifically are the Catholic Diocese, Steelworkers local, Transportation Workers, the Sierra Club chapter , Citizens for Clean Air in Pueblo, a number of individuals, and the Rocky Mountain Farmer's Union. Those are the main players. BACA works in a coalition with these other groups known as Better Pueblo, which is a non-formal association. It is an incredible force for bringing and coordinating important activities with no money--there's no overhead-- it is just people meeting for early breakfast meetings. It's really good work. So that's our main support system. The EPA has been mildly helpful. The health department and the depot have not been very forthcoming with inormation. It is hard to get information of all sorts, and I guess that that's just the nature of some of these government entities.
RM: What's your understanding of the pilot plant for baseline incineration on the Johnston Atoll ? A modification of that facility is proposed for PCD. What information do you have about Johnston Atoll?
DH: We had a family friend who worked out there and he said it was broken down all the time, very messy. There were chemical releases. They did destroy the stockpile and then they turned it into a wildlife refuge which is what they have proposed for the Pueblo Chemical Weapons depot as well. The Colonel whose replacing Megnia here at the Pueblo Chemical Depot is from Johnston Atoll. I don't know if he oversaw the project, but he was involved there. His name is Driftmeir.
RM: I'm not sure if this is completely true statement so any clarification on your part would be welcome. It has recently come out that the Neutralization Bio-treatment process, the alternative method that appears to have garnered most of the public support, emits equal or greater amounts of dioxin than incineration.
DH: Yes, I'm not sure if that statement is accurate. The important thing there is that there are dioxins that come out of the Neutralization technology. We spoke with one of the industry guys who said that it is fairly straight forward to engineer the dioxin emissions out of the system through enhanced filtering or something of the sort. That's heartening. but that was a big red flag for us.
RM: Does that complicate the issue?
DH: Well, yeah, if they can't engineer it out. Certainly. Dioxins are just as bad as the heavy metals.
RM: Do you know of any military, political, or corporate interest that would benefit the choice of an incinerator rather than the alternative technologies? Do you know what interest support incineration?
DH: The action right now is in Anniston, Alabama where they are ninety percent finished with an incinerator and the community is flipping out. People are leaving. It's the only county in Alabama where population is dropping. Every other county has shown growth. 75,000 people live there. Here is just a side note on that: I haven't shared this with too many people, but when I was in D.C. this spring for a hearing on the chemical demilitarization program, I met one of the guys from this community in Alabama and he pulled out a box. He said that this was the emergency kit that the Department of Emergency Management and the depot at Anniston distribute to the community. The box contained scissors, a roll of duct tape, and a roll of plastic so you can tape over all the openings on your windows and doors in the event of a chemical release. (It's) called a Shelter In Place Kit. The recommendation is that locals shelter at home, while everybody outside the Immediate Response Zone is told to evacuate. Unbelievable. And it costs some $36 million for this program. Okay, so back to your question. Who would benefit from incineration? There are a lot of careers on the line. They have been promoting incineration for many, many years. Yet at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the Army selected neutralization methods for disposal of the chemical agents there. In terms of buy-offs and pay-offs, I don’t know. The contractors are going to build whatever the Army wants them to build. These guys are basically neutral. The same guys who would build incinerators would build the alternatives.
RM: Do you have any names of the different contractors?
DH: Honeywell and General Atomics are the two primary ones.
RM: How was the presence of PCD effected you personally?
DH: Oh, that's a big question. I farm organically. If there was incineration going on over there it would very likely undermine my livelihood. In the worst case scenarios I would have to find another place to farm. I would have to leave the area which is not desirable because this is some of the finest farmland in Colorado with the best water, the greatest growing climate,great soil. I mean everything is here for great agriculture and that's why agriculture has been here for one hundred and fifty years. And when other agricultural communities are in decline this community, in particular, has chances of survival. That's worst-case scenario. Another scenario is that I'd have decreased ability to market my product, and perhaps actual contamination which could potentially decertify my farm. Then there is also the permanent worry about my kids and our family's health. Do we have to run inside every time the wind is coming from the north?... The fact that you cannot necessarily leave your windows open on a summer night. There is enough material up there to annihilate everybody within a ten mile radius. The worst case scenario they (the Army) predicted was if an airplane smashed into the depot full of fuel and burned for fourteen hours, while the wind was blowing two miles an hour, it would kill 6900 people. I guess that's also in there somewhere, the annihilation factor. But the kids, and the agricultural livelihood, are primary things.
RM: In BACA's letter to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army you stated that already buyers for agricultural products have voiced their concerns over buying from an area that would be in such proximity to an incinerator. Is the image, and more importantly, the reality of the quality of local produce at stake? DH: It's a lose lose situation. Either we lose by the sheer public perception and/or their is actually a chemical release. What are mechanisms that are going to be in place? How can you compensate a farmer, how do value four generations farming a piece of land if a person cannot farm that land anymore, cannot sell his or her product? And how can they get a handle on that perception? There's no meaningful way that they can study that or incorporate that into any of these studies or projections. We all know from the apple scare and, here locally, the melon scare, the salmonella thing a few years ago when these farmers are out at the state fair peddling their melons, trying to tell the public one by one that there product was safe to eat. That's crazy. So we need to do some research into what kind of mechanisms we have to compensate farmers if something did happen-- with incineration or the alternatives-- to make them accountable, but, yeah, it's potentially really scary.
RM: I've heard from residents in the area as well as seen a press release from the state health department that blames elevated cancer rates in the area on certain behaviors -- smoking, drinking -- and I was kind of wondering if there had been any independent assessment of that issue? How has racism based on the large percentage of Hispanic residents effected these assesments?
DH: It's just very controversial. The Health Department study was flawed, it was limited in terms of scope and depth. One prominent thing was that they didn't look at anyone who had grown up here but left the community. None of those people were included. So the statistics by design were exclusive and skewed and so what can you say? Yes, it's insulting that they intimate that those poor Chicanos in the barrio smoke and drink too much and they don't eat right and that that's a probable cause for elevated cancer. It's just inconclusive by design. It's hard to comment on. We hoped that study might be helpful, but it was really disappointing.
RM: I was wondering what your impressions of the local development policy for Southern Colorado, and particular this area are? What do you believe it's outcome will be for the people who live here? There is a controversial cement factory coming in, possibly there is also an incinerator coming in. There are already a number cement factories in the area and it is common in the industry to have the factories double as incinerators, which is very profitable.
DH: Right, right. I've learned that, too.
RM: Also , there are all the prisons being built up and down the Arkansas River Valley.
DH: Well, it's pretty classic stuff. It's not surprising that your rural, marginal areas, particularly those that are on major highways -- I mean that when you talk about a place with cheap land, resources, on I-25 (a major interstate highway running north and south through Colorado crossed by Highway 50 at Pueblo, a major regional highway), it's just prime for industrial development, which is really unfortunate. I guess we really haven't had the state and perhaps county leadership in some of these areas in Southern Colorado to put forward any sort of development agenda other than the classic extraction industries. I increasingly hear news about the prisons, more power plants pumping energy over to California, toxic waste dumps. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and unfortunately you don't hear anything about farming the wind or using some of these other resources that don't impact our health and our other natural resources. So, it's really a slippery slope and I hope that we will get some leaders some day who can advance some more modern development. In the meantime it appears to me that private groups working through strategic partnerships is the most viable and only foreseeable way to effect development positively in Southern Colorado.
RM: What other impacts on agriculture are there that are not as visible as the perception issue or contamination? Would there be effects in terms of insurance, rents, and so on?
DH: Tough to say. One distinct possibility, which is actually pretty direct, is land values. They supposedly have already started dropping in Avondale, in the village there, and I knew that some people were scrambling around trying to submit claims to the government. So that could really hurt a lot of people, especially these guys who have been farming all their lives and don't have a retirement fund. The farm itself is the retirement. So that could be a big problem real soon. We have a lot of producers approaching retirement.
RM: If people were interested in more information where they could go?
DH: The best place to get any information about these chemical weapons stockpiles is the Chemical Weapons Working Group. Their director, Craig Williams, works on these issues nationally. We've got him coming to Pueblo on July 30th and he's an incredible resource. (The website for the Working Group is http://www.cwwg.org/newslinks.html .
For more information contact:
Dan Hobbs (719) 947 0491
Mitzy Martinez (719) 947 9832
Margaret Barber (719) 545 3284
(Contact your local community radio station, independent radio program, website, or independent weekly and ask them to look into the story. The ACWA program is the program in the Army established to develop and implement alternative destruction technologies. The public comment period for PCD was initially to end on June 25th. It has, however, been extended an additional 45 days. You can email a comment to the ACWA program at acwacomments@anl.gov or through their website at http://www.pmacwa.org/. If you live in a community already effected by incineration, please email ACWA with your support of alternative disposal methods, your and your community’s experiences with incineration, and demand that incinerators both public and private be phased out and be replaced.
