Open Burns, Ill Winds
Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica
RADFORD, VIRGINIA — Shortly after dawn most weekdays, a warning siren rips across the flat, swift water of the New River running alongside the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. Red lights warning away boaters and fishermen flash from the plant, the nation’s largest supplier of propellant for artillery and the source of explosives for almost every American bullet fired overseas.
Along the southern Virginia riverbank, piles of discarded contents from bullets, chemical makings from bombs, and raw explosives — all used or left over from the manufacture and testing of weapons ingredients at Radford — are doused with fuel and lit on fire, igniting infernos that can be seen more than a half a mile away. The burning waste is rich in lead, mercury, chromium and compounds like nitroglycerin and perchlorate, all known health hazards. The residue from the burning piles rises in a spindle of hazardous smoke, twists into the wind and, depending on the weather, sweeps toward the tens of thousands of residents in the surrounding towns.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/military-pollution-open-burns-radford-virginia/
And then people wonder why they are sick, and wonder why republicans are trying to take there health insurance away from them, and wonder why we have a EPA chief that is full of sh*t
And why the national media is not reporting on this issue
This is disgusting
