Yeah you do: Hondo commits to drain slough

In a victory for the Hondo Empowerment Committee, city officials committed earlier this month to improve drainage in the Elm Slough aka Barrio Dip. The several tens of thousands of dollars will go towards grading and building a concrete canal.

The move comes after HEC members mobilized to City Council and filed complaints over months of standing water in the slough, which children are forced to wade through on their way to school. With the repeated overflow of two sewage manholes in the area this year, the standing water presents a health hazard.

Previous promises to allocate funds for a bridge were never fulfilled.

Charlie says YES to vapor intrusion testing

From New York to North Carolina to Nevada, communities living atop toxic groundwater plumes are testing government testing of the indoor air quality. Many contaminants in the groundwater can become gas (volatilize) and stay trapped in your home. Maybe now, the Kelly AFB community will know the levels of toxics they breathe everyday.

My office welcomes input from various sources, including concerned citizens, on public health hazards that potentially stem from residual pollutants at Kelly Air Force Base.

My office will soon request that the Environmental Protection Agency's 6th Region conduct a comprehensive review of the alleged vapor intrusion reports. I will also request that the EPA allow independent agencies to use available technology, such as the EPA's Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) mobile laboratory, to conduct their own studies that would address these same reports.

These steps are part of an ongoing commitment to ensure that the areas in question are safe from pollutants and potential public health hazards. My office will continue to closely monitor this situation and take into account various opinions as we work to address these concerns."

-Rep. Charles Gonzalez (TX-20)

For more info, contact SWU 210.299.2666

Sierra Club - what about the community and the NUKES?

While leading the San Antonio opposition to investing in more nuclear energy, SWU was pushed to a corner by the local Sierra Club as they represent their ideas a little too late. No rate increases for nuclear.

Thanks to Greg, from the San Antonio Current, for saying it for real...

Sierra Clubbers in San Anto want to recycle City-owned CPS's energy policy and turn it into something that will last. Of course, first they have to get the clunker to the curb. That will take some doing. At a press conference this morning, members distributed reports from the steps of City Hall. The pages said a lot about saving energy and generating the same from sources like wind, solar, and biomass. But nowhere do they say what CPS should do about its recent commitment of $206 million to continue a partnership with NRG for two new nuclear plants in Matagorda County.

Then there was a small matter of another $10 million to explore an ill-defined "other nuclear options."I would suggest that the city's first course of corrective action is to stop payment on that check.Only then can we can get about the business of turning our coal- and nuke-heavy energy policy into something that ushers in the Kingdom of cleanliness and good neighborliness, etc., ad infinitum. No mistake about it, the Sierra Club is right to bring options to the table, options that don't rain fire unto our children's and children's children's cow-licked little heads. Just that we're gonna need that $216 million to clean up after the two plants we have now.

It's going to take a lot more than that — $300 million — just to dispose of the trash from our two existing nuke plants at the South Texas Project, according to CPS's most recent fiscal report. That's if we can find a place to dump it.Already the cost of ultimate disposal of radioactive waste (which just about the entire plants will qualify for) has risen. In 1998, it was expected to cost $311 million. 2004's figure was $397.4.While the Dems are stumbling over themselves (that little place we've spent billions trying to turn into a national high-level radioactive waste dump) the site's future is still in limbo.With Yucca's failing you can bet we would see even more billions needed for decommissioning costs of STP1&2, as rising construction costs tied to a weak dollar and rising crude prices guarantee.It's a perfect time for CPS board members and city leaders to read and reread the Club's concluding paragraphs, which do offer this gem on nuke power:

"Nuclear power produces radioactive wastes that remain deadly for a thousand generations. Until the nuclear waste problem is solved, CPS Energy should avoid this option."It's going to take a lot more political pressure to get that refund (back) in the bank. Sierra Clubbers will need allies from across the city to get there. And that means working out more directly the tangle of half-lies that sold the Board of Trustees and the Citizens Advisory Committee on nukes in the first place.

Charlie -- Test our Air

Roddy Stinson: Decade after Kelly AFB exposé, health questions still being asked

Web Posted: 11/10/2007 10:46 PM CST

Roddy Stinson
San Antonio Express News
Does the plume of groundwater contaminated by decades of chemical spillage at the former Kelly AFB pose a threat to the health of thousands of men, women and children who work, play and go to school 20-30 feet above it?

More specifically, one concerned environmentalist is asking, are vapors from the toxic groundwater migrating through the soil and into homes, businesses, churches and schools above the plume?

Lenny Siegel — director of the California-based Center for Public Environmental Oversight and a nationally recognized expert on the environmental damage left unremedied by the Air Force after base closures — believes that such "vapor intrusion" is possible. And he has urged U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez to formally ask the Environmental Protection Agency "whether under current EPA guidance the experts at EPA headquarters would recommend indoor air testing near Kelly."

Hold that request (and the congressman's response) in abeyance for a couple of minutes, and let me get San Antonio newcomers up to speed on Kelly contamination while noting that November 2007 is the anniversary of an important event in the public exposure of the contamination.

Ten years ago this month, information provided by a prominent San Antonio businessman (who to this day wishes to remain anonymous) led to an Express-News investigation that over a period of months determined:

Toxic chemicals used for decades at Kelly AFB contaminated a plume of groundwater that extended three miles south/southeast of the base — more than a mile and a half from the point of contamination publicly acknowledged by Air Force officials.

Samples of the off-base groundwater taken from Air Force monitoring wells found that the chemicals (actually, degreasers) in question — trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchloroethylene, or PCE) and dichloroethylene (DCE) — were in some cases more than 100 times greater than the maximum contaminant level for drinking water allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Air Force officials believed that all private wells into the groundwater had been closed, and since there was no "pathway" from the toxic stew to the surface, no mega-costly effort to clean the groundwater to a drinking level standard was needed.

Mother Nature would eventually take care of the problem, Air Force officials contended, through "natural attenuation."

A decade later, the natural attenuation plan still is in place. And the Air Force believes that it is working well, that the plume, which regularly is monitored, is losing its toxicity and that over a period of decades the TCE, PCE and DCE will completely degrade.

Back to Lenny Siegel, ... who on the basis of personal Kelly-document research believes that natural attenuation may not be working fast enough and, as he said in his letter to Gonzalez, "that the groundwater and soil gas contamination levels of TCE and particularly PCE" are high enough to justify concentrated indoor air testing "to determine whether contamination is rising into people's homes at unsafe levels."

Responding to Siegel's request to take some initiative in resolving the question of vapor intrusion, Gonzalez issued a statement last week that said, in part:

"My office will soon request that the Environmental Protection Agency's 6th Region conduct a comprehensive review of the alleged vapor intrusion reports.

"I will also request that the EPA allow independent agencies to use available technology ... to conduct studies that would address these same reports."

He promised:

"My office will continue to closely monitor this situation."

As will I.

Youth Videos by YLO (from Powershift)

Amazing work by Michael Vargas, Charlene Ramos, Sandra Garcia & Diana Lopez.