Technical/Financial Assistance & Self Educating on Technical Issues

[Peter Schlesinger <pschles@starband.net>]

In my post of Wednesday, with the Subject RE: EZ/EC Evaluation, under Outreach, I described the technical assistance sought and received by citizens of our MMR Impact Area Review Team, and the difficulty/success we found in finding financial support for that assistance. I was the point person who took on that challenge for the citizens of our EPA Review Team. We needed an ability to meet to talk about our technical needs, we met at each other's houses, and sent email back and forth to put together a list of technical assistance needs. Our citizens are by trade: a chemist, a writer, physics professor, builder, pilot/airplane mechanic, hydrologist, and GIS/remote sensing specialist. While we had become very good at finding online resources to keep up with the needs of our work We found we needed technical support in understanding contaminant breakdown chemistry, knowledge of daughter products of military explosives, and transport mechanisms in soils. We wanted a spatial statistician to assess whether our study had developed a spatially representative sample large enough sample to have come to the military's conclusion that we had looked in all the right places (and they were incorrect). We wanted/still want a thorough understanding of soil and aquifer processes, so that we can assess whether the USGS' particle tracking MODFLOW model (used to backtrack all contaminant findings in groundwater to potential source locations) was working adequately for our needs (we are still learning). We needed access to NTIS documents and inter-library loan materials, yet we as private citizens, having no organizational contract with NTIS, nor funds, couldn't access these materials even though they did exist, many funded by prior government contracts; EPA did eventually make NTIS documents available to us, although it took quite a while. By the time most of the documents had arrived we already had our technical assistance contract in place through TOSC. We learned through our Study that the Massachusetts National Guard stores EPA banned explosives in its Base Ammunition Supply Point located atop our aquifer, and while it has taken more than a year for them to remove all of those explosives, apparently we are getting somewhere; the lastest Lt Colonel in a string of Lt Colonels to be the point person for the Army Guard says he will make this issue one of his first priorities. We still need EPA or other technical assistance to provide a list of the constituents in the remaining munitions contents of the Ammunition Supply Point, but the Commanding General of the Mass. Army National Guard has refused to allow us appropriate information access (indeed even to a list of the chemical constituents, even if not a current inventory list). Based on our experience, EPA could/should develop a list of military munitions, explosives, and their constituents for the other 1500 bases across the US, so that citizens and EPA officials in other regions don't have to go through what we have/and continue to go through here.

    When we citizens asked our Team's stakeholders for leads on financial assistance to pay for the technical assistance, we were first promptly turned down by the Army. Then later they offered us the use of their consultants, Foothills Engineering, which we turned down because we wanted independent access to the technical assistance. We wanted to be able to choose who we would work with, and we did, based somewhat on their expertise and also on their current and previous contractual elationships. We were suggested to apply for State funds through the Massachusetts DEP; DEP officials gave us application materials for $10K annual assistance, but as noted in the earlier post, we citizen members were not an organization, not affiliated even with each other and felt odd about applying for a grant together; no one wanted to take on grant administration and reporting tasks; our reading and commenting activities are substantial as is. Only one of our citizen Team members is on our Review Team as a part of his job; he works for the regional planning agency as a hydrologist. The rest of us have taken on this task outside of our professional responsibilities, and it is very time-consuming. We lack space to store the study materials; we talked among ourselves about how we were each investing personally in filing cabinets to store study materials in our homes. Some of us have begun to divest of these materials since we just can't keep on top of it any more. EPA and the stakeholders have whole units devoted to document management, but we citizens do not. We have been taking time from our vacations and families to learn about, for example, development of upper tolerance limit (UTLs) development for soil background to check stakeholder materials to make sure they are correct. In fact, through our self-education, we found that some proposed UTLs were incorrect and many were suspect, and that the contractor had made some mistakes in math and statistical assumptions. We were not given access to maps or aerial photos, 
and so got them from public archives and other unofficial sources ourselves and began to use them to produce our own images, photos, and  geographic overlays on our own personal computers. We were not given appropriate access to our study site, so clandestine pictures of improperly disposed of munitions, explosives, and debris were acquired, and we gave them to local newspapers, EPA officials, and presented them at meetings, to make sure they became part of the official record. EPA needs to make sure that citizens gain access to sites so they make useful comments, appropriate investigations, and constructive criticism. Our efforts, while continually hampered by lack of assistance, have been extremely useful; the citizens and public of Cape Cod have benefited enormously by our perserverance despite our lack of financial and technical resources.