ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: Blow the Lid Off Defective Lab Dump

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Blow the Lid Off Defective Lab Dump

By David B. Mccoy
Executive Director, Citizen Action New Mexico
          In 2005, the New Mexico Environment Department issued a wrong decision to leave radioactive and hazardous wastes buried under a dirt cover in shallow unlined pits and trenches at Sandia Lab's mixed-waste dump.
        An April 14, 2009, a federal Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General report costing $273,000 revealed the scheme of NMED and EPA Region 6 to hide the real facts about groundwater contamination from the dump's inventory of highly toxic wastes.
        In the 2004 public hearings on the dirt cover, the staff of NMED and Sandia National Laboratories knowingly misinformed the administrative hearing officer that extensive data showed that the dump was "well behaved." The Sandia and NMED staffs did not inform the hearing officer and scientific experts of the prestigious WERC group that the groundwater monitoring at the dump was an overall failure.
        I spent my first day in July 2006 as the new director for Citizen Action at the NMED listening to a presentation by whistleblower hydrogeologist Robert Gilkeson.
        He told the Hazardous Waste Bureau chief James Bearzi that the monitoring wells at the Sandia dump were in the wrong location, drilled with Bentonite clay, with well screens installed in the wrong aquifer zones — all of which would hide knowledge of contamination beneath the dump.
        Bearzi said he "agreed with 95 percent of Gilkeson's presentation." However, Bearzi ordered the dirt cover to be installed despite his knowledge that the monitoring data was not usable.
        Gilkeson and I reviewed over 20,000 pages of administrative records for the Sandia dump. Surprise! — beginning in 1991, the EPA, the Department of Energy and NMED all knew about the defective monitoring wells. In 1998, the NMED sent Sandia a deficiency notice for the "inadequate" monitoring well network. But in 1999, new bureau chief Bearzi didn't pursue the violations. He didn't inform the hearing officer, the public, or the WERC expert panel about the false monitoring well data.
        The NMED refused to meet or speak with Citizen Action. But when Citizen Action and Gilkeson made a presentation about the Sandia dump to the Albuquerque Groundwater Protection Advisory Board, Bearzi showed up and told the board the groundwater issue was "a dead horse" implying further that Gilkeson was a "crackpot."
        In early 2007, we began months of consulting with technical staff at EPA Region 6; the result was the EPA staff informed us they wrote a report that agreed with most of our concerns. A year later, we received a two-page whitewash letter from EPA lawyers that no groundwater monitoring problems existed and that the NMED decided to put in some new monitoring wells. Our review is that all of the new monitoring wells are defective.
        We next filed a complaint with the EPA Office of Inspector General alleging: 1) lack of oversight by EPA Region 6 for the NMED; and 2) that false data was used to make the decision to leave the dump's dangerous wastes below a dirt cover. We met in October 2008 for a week with a three-person Inspector General team. The investigators agreed that a bogus NMED report written to dismiss concerns about the monitoring wells' reliability should be reviewed by the EPA Kerr Laboratory.
        We called Ed Baldinger, a member of the Inspector General team about the long delay in receiving their report. Mr. Baldinger informed us that he was ordered by the IG assistant director, Wade Najjum, not to talk to Citizen Action.
        Three months later, Baldinger called us, said he retired and told us that Najjum blocked the original report. In addition, Najjum denied the team's recommendation to send the bogus NMED report to the EPA Kerr Laboratory.
        Now, Najjum refuses Citizen Action's Freedom of Information request to provide the original investigation report written by the three-person team.
        Until November 2009, Citizen Action didn't know that a secret 2006 TechLaw report rejected the Sandia computer model as a "black box."
        TechLaw described design mistakes in the dirt cover and that it would not provide the necessary long-term protection. NMED kept the TechLaw report hidden during meetings with the public about NMED's decision to install the dirt cover.
        Now an unprotective dirt cover is in place above the 720,000 cubic feet of buried wastes, and a new defective monitoring network is installed for "long-term protection."
        The Sandia mixed-waste dump matter should be excavated.
        As for Bearzi, he should resign or be fired for deliberate secrecy and knowing approval of defective data for remedies at both Los Alamos and Sandia Labs. This has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
        Recent testimony by Bearzi at the public hearing for the Los Alamos hazardous waste permit is that the Los Alamos Lab well monitoring network is still defective after 10 years of his direct oversight and approval of well construction.

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