PIKETON — No one should have to live like this.
No
parent should have to send their kids to a school where air monitors
across the street picked up evidence of radioactive materials used to
build nuclear weapons.
No
school building should sit precisely 8,130 feet downwind from where the
United States government will soon start burying radioactive and other
hazardous debris and waste produced during nearly 50 years of enriching
uranium.
No
town of 2,200, located smack-dab in the middle of the state’s poorest
region, should be told it’s no big deal that traces of uranium were
found in that school’s air ducts and ceiling tiles.
News
of the U.S. Department of Energy test findings, reported in 2019, was
the final straw for residents and village leaders who believe they’ve
been deceived by the government for nearly 70 years.
So
at the end of the 2019 school year, they closed Zahn’s Corner Middle
School, built a fence around the place, and crammed students into the
village’s elementary and high school.
There
has long been legitimate scientific debate over the danger to the
community and its kids posed by the radioactive materials found inside
and near the school, as well as the small amounts of radioactive
isotopes found in air, soil and water samples over the years.
What’s
beyond debate is that this wouldn’t happen in most parts of the
country. Try selling the possibility of a radioactive graveyard to the
people of Avon, Solon, Strongsville or Medina. See how they react to the
promise of lots of good jobs in return for maybe just a little poison
floating through the air.
Then watch how fast it takes to run the government’s peddlers of a uranium enrichment business out of town.
“We
could debate the dangers of this forever, but the risk of young
children being exposed to controversial chemicals is very real,” said
Wes Hairston, superintendent of the Scioto Valley Local School District.
“Parents
here want their kids to be educated in a safe environment. But the
government did this to a poor rural community, where people don’t have a
voice. And it’s just not right.”
We’re
sitting in Hairston’s office, housed in part of Piketon High School.
He’s a 64-year-old man with a friendly face and a difficult job, a
40-plus-year educator who came out of retirement in September of last
year to take charge of the cash-strapped school district, a district
where parents feel no one in Washington or Columbus cares about their
kids.
Atop
Hairston’s “to do” list is to convince the U.S. Department of Energy to
pay the $30 million needed to build a new school. School officials also
want the state to pitch in.
So far, governments in Columbus and Washington have turned their backs on these poor people.
“Not our problem,” they seem to say. “Live with it.”
Some
small but determined voices in this community aren’t about to be
silenced by politicians who want them to shut up, breathe whatever’s in
the air, and take their chances.
“Just
hearing the word ‘contamination’ should have led them to build us a new
school,” complained Hairston. “But people here get treated
differently.”
The benign neglect at work down here is as astonishing as it is infuriating.
Harry
Truman was president when the U.S. government began searching for sites
to enrich uranium using an energy-intensive process known as gaseous
diffusion. The end product was used for the country’s nuclear defense
system, and in later years, for nuclear power reactors.
In
return for producing nuclear-weapons-grad¬e material in their
community, the people of Piketon were promised jobs and protection. And
in 1954, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, one of three such
facilities in the country, began operation on a 3,777-acre site at the
south end of town.
Nearly
a half-century later, the Department of Energy decided it no longer
needed to enrich uranium here, and in 2001 began the long process of
winding down operations and deciding what to do with what could
eventually be more than 2 million cubic yards of radioactive debris and
waste and another 3 million cubic yards of other hazardous or partly
contaminated debris and waste.
People
who live here wanted the waste and debris shipped to some unoccupied
territory out west, as has been done with hazardous materials produced
in other towns. But the federal and state government signed off on a
different idea:
That
waste will be buried here, perhaps starting as early as next month.
What the townspeople will never forgive or forget is that the U.S.
Department of Energy knew when they chose the landfill location that
Zahn’s Corner Middle School was directly downwind of it.
Meanwhile,
soon after cleanup of the Department of Energy site started, two
synthetic radioactive elements, Americium in 2018 and Neptunium-237 in
2019, were detected by an air monitor outside the then-still-operating
middle school, the Chillicothe Gazette reported. Yet the Department of
Energy delayed informing the community about those findings, according
to the Gazette.
U.S.
officials may have correctly suspected Piketon couldn’t afford the
millions it would cost to fight the federal government’s decisions and
actions. And some here have sadly surrendered.
Jennifer Chandler isn’t one of them.
This
46-year-old mother of three is many things. She’s an environmental
scientist trained at Ohio University. She’s worked on and off at the
plant, in various administrative positions for 25 years. She’s a popular
village councilwoman.
And
she is the Department of Energy’s worst nightmare, the town’s most
articulate and outspoken critic of burying 47 years worth of radioactive
waste and debris in a village that deserves better.
“I’m going to fight as long as I can,” she said, when I asked if this was a lifetime commitment.
“The
government sees us as not deserving, not worthy. So they marginalize
us. They make promises and then pull the rug out from under us.”
Born
in Portsmouth, 22 miles to the south, Chandler has lived in the area
her whole life. It’s a part of Ohio with enormous problems. As she
explained, “We are a poor place. We have an opioid problem. We had a
mass murder here. Now we have this mess.”
Chandler
took Hairston and I on a tour of the plant’s perimeter, past well-kept
homes on picture-perfect lots and dilapidated ones that appeared on the
verge of collapse.
We
stopped outside the house where Luke Hiett was raised, across the
street from the Department of Energy property. Hiett was Chandler’s
cousin. He died in 1990 at the age of 7, a victim of sporadic
neuroblastoma, a rare cancer sometimes associated with environmental
causes.
Zach
Farmer, a star pitcher on the Piketon High School baseball team, died
six years ago at age 21. Cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia, a
blood disease often linked to exposure to radiation. Farmer attended
Zahn’s Corner Middle School.
Asked
about the community’s relations with the Department of Energy, Chandler
said, “When we began dealing with the future of this dirty site, they
walked us through a process that was fake.” She said the DOE gave the
community inaccurate or incomplete information regarding its plan to
dispose of the plant’s hazardous and radioactive waste nearby.
“They
get their way by making promises they never intend to keep,” she added.
“If this was Shaker Heights, not 24 hours would go by before everyone
in government would be mobilized to fix this. We get crickets, nothing.”
A telephone call made to the Energy Department’s media relations office in Washington was not returned.
In
October 2018, Chandler and Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer wrote a letter
to Gov. John Kasich, urging him to lobby the U.S. Department of Energy
and to get the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency involved on
Piketon’s behalf.
“We
beg you Governor Kasich, to please intervene on behalf of your
constituents, the residents of southern Ohio, and stop this injustice.
Otherwise, the largest nuclear dump east of the Mississippi will be
built on your watch,” the letter read in part.
Chandler
said the letter went unanswered. Meanwhile, the “nuclear dump” is on a
fast track, with no regulatory or legal restrictions preventing burial
of the waste from beginning immediately. Because of the pandemic, the
exact start date remains uncertain.
In
early September, a lawsuit filed by former workers at the uranium plant
and their families accused various contractors who operated the
facility for the Department of Energy (DOE) of “poisoning workers” and
village residents. The lawsuit alleges cancer rates in some areas around
the facility are 700% higher than the national average. The DOE was not
named as a defendant.
“In 10 years, when things are going bad here, I hope people remember this village fought to the bitter end,” Chandler says.
Teresa
Cuckler and her husband live with two of their three children on a
100-acre farm a half mile from the DOE property. Teresa, a teacher
assistant in the high school’s special education department, is a petite
woman of 48 with blond hair and a world of worry.
“My
13-year-old and his friends played on the ground outside the middle
school for two years,” said Cuckler, sitting at a table in Wes
Hairston’s office. “He wants to be a productive citizen. He wants to
work with his dad on the farm. He wants a normal life.”
She
pauses, eyes filled with tears, then finishes. “Around here, your word
means something. But these people have trampled our trust.”
Government has failed the people of Piketon in the worst way imaginable.
Find where this place is on a map, and it’ll help you understand why.
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