Where the Alligators Roam

The closed chamber burning of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant is weeks away from being completed at Camp Minden. That work, led by the Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden, prevented a potential public health disaster from unfolding in northwest Louisiana. That threat grew out of the U.S. Army’s plan to burn the explosive materials in the open air — 80,000 pounds per day for 200 days.

The burn chamber portion of the closed burn system installed at Camp Minden to dispose of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant.

Camp Minden is east of Shreveport in Webster Parish. Wind would have carried the contaminated fallout from the burning in any direction on any given day. Dr. Brian Salvatore recognized the threat and spoke out. He galvanized the community against the open burn. It sparked a grassroots movement that succeeded in getting the Army to change its plans — and to pay for it.

The notion that an open burn of those materials could be carried out was not new. It had happened in other communities with Army munitions depots over the years. Some communities fought for safer disposal methods and prevailed. The Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden connected into that network of community activists and experts, engaged local and state governmental leaders. They engaged the EPA as well as members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation which, ironically, was home to some of harsh critics of the agency.

The burning method that was selected as the disposal mechanism offered the most reliable, proven method of disposal of the material Dr. Salvatore explains in our conversation. But, it’s not perfect. He points out that the monitoring of the exhaust from the burn process is not highly refined, that there is no analysis of the amount of individual chemicals emitted after the burn. But, he says its a vast improvement over the open burn operation.

Dr. Brian Salvatore

This being Louisiana, a group in the region now sees a business opportunity with the Camp Minden burn unit and wants to make it permanent. That would make Camp Minden a hazardous waste destination, with toxic materials of all kinds being shipped there through the region to be burned.

It is typical for Louisiana which, dating at least as far back as the Mike Foster administration, has had as official state policy to take the wastes that others don’t want for disposal here.

The most glaring early example of this was when an Exxon drilling operation at the mouth of Mobile Bay failed in the mid-1990s. The company had a large amount of hazardous waste on its hands that it needed to eliminate. Alabama officials would not allow the company to dispose of the materials in their state. Instead, the materials were hauled by truck to the Lafourche Parish community of Grand Bois in 1998.

Dr. Mike Robichaux of Raceland was a member of the Louisiana Senate at that time. Grand Bois was in his district. He sought to have the legislature block the importation of hazardous wastes into Louisiana and was roundly defeated with the help of Governor Foster and the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. He succeeded in bringing national attention to the plight of the citizens there, as well as to the misclassification of “normative oilfield wastes” as non-hazardous.

The push to establish Camp Minden as a permanent hazardous waste disposal facility is as short-sighted as burying oilfield wastes in land that is a more membrane than either land or marsh as was the case in Grand Bois. Despite having near state-of-the-art technology in place at Camp Minden, there is little doubt that some toxins (hopefully in safe levels) have been released during the months of burning that will soon end.

Prolonged exposure to toxins and carcinogens over time is the course that sometimes leads to cancer and other diseases. We already have numerous examples of this in Louisiana now. Here’s one. Here’s another. This report is about Calcasieu Parish.

The President as a Distraction from his Administration and the Congress

Ted Harvey has decided to make it his business defending President Donald Trump. He came to the work in an odd way. He explains in our interview that he was a Rand Paul supporter when the GOP primary season began. He shifted to Ted Cruz after Paul abandoned his campaign. He jumped to Trump after the hotelier and reality show star emerged as the Republican nominee.

Former Colorado state Senator Ted Harvey.

Harvey’s embrace of Trump came easily as for two years he’d headed the Stop Hillary PAC. His brother serves in the diplomatic corps and Harvey says the infamous Benghazi incident in which four Americans were killed cut close to home for him. Despite the fact that years of House Republican investigations could prove no lawbreaking on the part of Secretary Clinton’s part, the fact that she had ultimate responsibility for the events in Libya (coupled with what he says are “decades of corruption” involving the Clintons) was enough to set him off on his anti-Clinton quest.

The first tumultuous month of the Trump presidency has seen the presidents Republican allies in the U.S. Senate approve every person he’s nominated for a cabinet post — at least all of those who have stuck around for a Senate vote.

Since the election, a lot of energy and anger have been spent trying to manipulate the Constitutionally established election process to overturn the results. There was a massive march on Washington the day after the inauguration accompanied by many in cities across the country. There have been many new avenues to activism created by veteran activists and those new to it, including the Indivisible movement created by now unemployed congressional staffers.

As the results become evident, all of this has been mostly ineffective. Trump is president. His administration is embarking on policy changes that aim to remake the United States into a safety-net free society that has not existed since the Great Depression. This rush to repeal the 20th Century will shift the fights to the courts. The good news is that the systemic inertia that we found so frustrating in the Obama years might well buy us some time to enable us to survive the blitzkrieg of legislative and policy initiatives coming from the administration and the Republican Congress.

The Democratic Party bears a large share of the responsibility for this mess. Sure, the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign to block Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. But, where have the DNC and the state party organizations been for the past three decades while Republicans and conservatives were gerrymandering the party nearly out of existence in state houses across the country?

The party — at the state and federal levels — has been so busy chasing corporate cash that it forgot that its basic work is politics. They have been asleep at the switch, ignoring fundamentals on the ground (like redistricting) while Republicans boxed them in.

The opportunity to change the election maps and math won’t really happen until after the 2020 Census. The good news is that there’s time to educate ourselves and organize around that issue. The bad news is that non-corporatists start from a stark disadvantage that extends from state houses to the Capitol. Legislatures redistrict themselves and they redraw congressional district maps. Louisiana will elect a new Legislature in 2019 and there will be significant turnover in the Senate due to term limits. But, there is the problem of the maps of those districts which were designed to lock-in conservative majorities.

Don’t expect much change in the 2018 off-year federal elections as the maps of House districts will be the same ones that have locked in Republican majorities in that chamber since 2012. There are few districts that are or can become competitive because of the way in which they were drawn.

My first guest from the new home is Dan Collins, the whistleblower who won his lawsuit in 2015 against the Department of Natural Resources and now faces a date for oral arguments on the department’s appeal of his win.

The podcast of Dan’s progra...