“Is there anything that we can post to get more folks involved? Yes, petitions, a letter campaign… When the EPA was pushed to the wall Louisiana, they stated ‘Uncle. ’ We need you Senator Kaine and you Senator Warner to do just what Senator Vitter failed in Louisiana and write to the EPA and ask them, ‘How is this not a violation of the clean air act? ’”

Devawn Oberlender is seeking to have a pager from the publication of a far away city, where taxpayer protestors succeeded in stopping outside burning explosives of arms and weapons waste in the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant.

“The opportunity that we have right now only comes up very ten decades, because the license is good for ten decades, so what we need to replicate is what they did in north western Louisiana in Camp Minden.

There they formed a”Stop the Burn” movement that ultimately brought together elected officials, state and local authorities and the army for a strategy to give up open burning and utilize a contemporary indoor incinerator to eliminate the toxic substances.

“We haven’t reached any decisions yet but this is something that will be looked at as we proceed. We have requested the Arsenal to come up with alternatives to open burning and we do expect to have some options that go beyond the idea of simply burning it the open”

Brian Salvatore is a professor of Organic chemistry at Louisiana State University who argued for utilizing comprised incineration.

“This is exactly what we fought here in camp Minden. And yes it added another 15million dollars and nearly doubled the price of this contract but that was something that, the EPA was willing to really go to bat for us . So I’m thankful that the people in the EPA and in the country worked together here and they worked together with the Army as well to locate the extra cash. And we’re quite happy here that this alternative — that, in the onset of this we didn’t know all the particulars of exactly what these modern incinerators can do. We are quite confident here that this will do the task and the total amount of material that’s going to be published complete is going to be on the order of tens of thousands of grams rather than heaps of those emissions. ”

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 3, which includes Virginia, stated it could not comment on the chance of incinerators such as that being adopted at the Radford site, but a spokesperson for BAE Systems, the contractor responsible for the arsenal, supported it is”searching for workable alternatives to its existing methods of waste disposal”

The section of Environmental Quality has requested BAE to conduct an environmental impact study on its own present open burning clinic. William Hayden says it is the first time DEQ has requested for you.

“Since we’re getting into a problem that has generated a lot of public attention in the Radford area we understood that the further information we had, the better. Folks from the public have been asking for us info; they have been asking Radford (the arsenal) for advice. ”

And among these is Oberlender who says,”We have been burning waste out there, open it since 1941. You know, it is not going away.”

And neither are the ecological patriots of this river valley. Taking another page from the narrative of Camp Minden Louisiana’s successful effort to get its outside burning moved indoors. They’re scheduling meetings with federal and state officials to keep the strain. The first is this Friday with U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith who sits on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has oversight of the EPA. The team is seeking to generate a national issue out of one that has for so long been so local and among the few areas where open burning of hazardous waste out of explosives is still allowed.

Info from: http://wvtf.org/post/moving-forward-open-burning

The license that enables the Radford Army Ammunitions Plant to burn hazardous waste from guns outdoors is up for renewal. Community activists see a chance to address environmental and health concerns regarding the burning — and say regulators see a chance to explore new technology to fix an old problem.