How 6,000 Tons of Radioactive Sand from Kuwait Ended Up in Idaho

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted September 17, 2008.

Questions remain about how depleted uranium waste from the first Gulf
War was transfered, and whether health risks were posed.

On April 26, 2008, the BBC Alabama arrived in Longview, Washington
carrying 6700 tons of Kuwaiti sand. The sand had become contaminated
with depleted uranium when U.S. military vehicles and munitions caught
fire at Doha Army base in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. The
depleted uranium was being repatriated. The sand was a gift of the
Kuwaiti government.

So was the cost of repatriation. Neither government will discuss just
how much the tab was.

Mike Wilcox, vice president of the International Longshoremen's and
Warehousemen's Union local 21, told the Longview Daily News that
initially he had been "concerned about the safety of longshoremen and
the entire community when he heard a shipment of depleted uranium was
coming into Longview."

But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that the sand
contained "unimportant quantities" of radioactive material, and
officials from the Department of Health would be available to test
radiation levels--just in case any of the sand spilled.

At the last minute, the Army notified port authorities that tests had
revealed that the sand was also contaminated with lead--in fact 4
times more lead than EPA's limit for hazardous materials.
Transshipment was delayed for a few days awaiting a green light from
the EPA.

Mike Wilcox told the Daily News he hoped it would be a one-time thing.

Over the next month, longshoremen loaded 160 containers onto rail cars
bound for an Idaho-based waste disposal site owned by a company called
American Ecology. When the sand arrived at the Idaho site, the company
did its own tests and, as Chad Hyslop, project director for American
Ecology, told the Daily News, "found no hazardous levels of lead."

Doug Rokke, who quit his job directing the clean-up of radioactive
battlefields for the Army, contacted American Ecology and discovered
"that they had absolutely no knowledge of U.S. Army Regulation 700-48,
U.S. Army PAM 700-48, U.S. Army Technical Bulletin 9-1300-278, and all
of the medical orders dealing with depleted uranium contamination,
environmental remediation procedures, safety, and medical care."

Hazardous materials storage has become a lucrative and growing
business, especially since Donald Rumsfeld began implementing his
plans for a sleek new "global cavalry" capable of swift and lethal
response from strategically placed "frontier stockades" to punish bad
guys whenever and wherever they have been bad. According to the
Pentagon's annual "Base Structure Report,” which itemizes its foreign
and domestic military real estate, DoD currently operates over 800
such bases around the world; 5311 if you count the ones in American
territories and on the U.S. mainland; probably well over 6000 if you
count the ones, like Doha in Kuwait, that for some reason didn't make
the list. (Similarly omitted are all US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan.)

Rumsfeld, coyly switching metaphors, referred to them as "lily pads,"
which is about as convincing a euphemism as "American Ecology." Lily
pads may sound greener and friendlier than, say, "footprint," which
makes one at least think of boot heels, but it is safe to
assume--because there has never been an exception--that every one of
those bases is an environmental disaster area. The American military
is the most profligate polluter on the planet.

The Thule base in Greenland, for example, was sort of a pioneer lily
pad. In the 40's, it was a convenient hop, skip and a bomber run to
Berlin, and later it was part of the cold-war surveillance network. In
1953, the US Navy sailed into Thule Harbor and informed the local
Inughuit community that they had 48 hours to leave. Sorry for the
inconvenience, folks, but there are houses 100 miles north of here
with your names on them. We promise.

"Everyone packed what they could on their dogsleds and set off north
across the ice," remembers Aron Qaavigaq, who was 12 at the time.
"After a while, my father stopped and looked back. He and my mother
were crying... We were young and very excited to be going somewhere
new. But they kept crying, so we knew there was something wrong."

There were no houses. Qaavigaq and his family spent the winter in
tents 695 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The hunting and fishing
was lousy and now the ice is melting. After 55 years, Qaavigaq and the
rest of the Inughuit still want to go home. But first they want the US
to clean up the mess they have made: thousands of barrels of toxic
chemistry, rubbish heaps, electrical equipment contaminated with PCBs,
and one whole hydrogen bomb -- serial number 78252 -- which was never
recovered when a B-52 crashed on landing in 1968.

Unfortunately, unlike the Emir of Kuwait, the Inughuits are poor and
not very many of them survived the transplant. In a deal struck with
the Danish government in 2003, the Bush Administration agreed to
return the original Inughuit community land in return for continued
use of the base.

But they insist they are not responsible for any clean up. "They said
if they were to clean up after themselves at Thule, then they would be
met by similar demands in the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere in the
world," Svend Auken, Denmark's former minister of the environment,
told the Christian Science Monitor in August. "They didn't want to set
that precedent." CSM also quotes Cheryl Irwin, a spokeswoman for the
Secretary of Defense, opining that clean-up costs "reflected a shared
burden with our host nation for our contribution for defense of the
free world." The United States has, however, agreed to forego "any
claims for residual value of improvements made while there."

There is a growing resistance to the omnipresence of US military
installations around the world. The coalition, though practically
invisible in the US, is very evident elsewhere. NOBASES seeks "an end
to military domination and intimidation and an end to the social,
environmental and economic consequences of these bases in the host
countries." The coalition has recently organized massive
demonstrations in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, and
though few have ultimately been successful, they have made acquiescing
to American military expansion an increasingly expensive political
choice for foreign leaders.

Here at home in Idaho, however, raping the land is cheap. American
Ecology supplies the lubricant and Idaho's Republican officials bend
over. Senators Crapo and Craig, Reps Simpson and Sali, Governor Butch
Otter and Lt. Governor Jim Risch have all benefited from American
Ecology's generosity.

In the first quarter of 2008, American Ecology reported a record
disposal volume and a $13.4 million profit, a 17%% increase over the
same quarter last year.

Asked if the sand was dangerous, Hyslop said, "It's not something you
want laying around in Kuwait." So, send it to Idaho instead!

If American Ecology was really thinking outside the litter box, they'd
be supporting the NOBASES effort to repatriate all our militaryÂ’s
leavings.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life
after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial
Day, 2006. Her website is Flashback.