Buried Secrets Revisited: What is the EPA Hiding at the Landfill in Uniontown, OH?
Evidence suggests crooked science has been used to hide the secret dumping of Cold War nuclear weapons waste that threatens the water supply of up to 600,000 Ohioans
A 1987 Akron Beacon Journal story depicts citizen protesters wearing gas masks calling for gas testing and core sampling that they never got at the Industrial Excess Landfill in Uniontown, Ohio.
It’s been more than six months since my last investigative story was published, but I’ve been working on a doozy. Published July 14 at Counterpunch+, it’s a story about a huge EPA cover-up of secretly dumped Cold War nuclear weapons waste at the Industrial Excess Landfill in Northeast Ohio. This story is a sequel to the “Buried Secrets” cover story that I reported for the Cleveland Free Times in 2006, when I was just out of the graduate journalism school at Kent State.
This new story also follows the series I reported for the San Francisco Bay View in 2020, titled “2020 Hindsight Brings Corrupted Radiation Testing into Focus at the EPA”. The 4-part series was a deep dive into the cover-up at the IEL and had a 5th part follow up that connected dots to the massive eco-fraud scandal at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard site in San Francisco. How did I wind up going back to the IEL story so many years later and connecting it to another controversial EPA Superfund site in San Francisco? That is an interesting story in itself.
I spent more than a year working with activist Chris Borello when I was at Kent State, on what became the 2006 “Buried Secrets” story. Other reporters had been describing her as “the Erin Brockovich of Ohio” and with her as my guide down the rabbit hole, I was able to dig deeper than many years of regional reporting to discover that the majority of the Science Advisory Board which the EPA had convened to rule on radiation issues at the IEL weren’t even qualified to do so (by their own admission!) But after “Buried Secrets” was published, I felt that I’d taken the story as far as I could.
Chris Borello, co-founder of Concerned Citizen of Lake Township, has been fighting for truth and environmental justice at the IEL for 40 years.
Borello and I stayed in touch though and every now and then she would call me to catch up on where I was at in my journalism career and personal life. She’d also usually relate some of her ongoing research into the IEL cover-up and then she’d say, “Greg, I know you’re going to come back to this story some day.” And I’d always respond skeptically with something like, “I don’t know Chris, I feel like we took it as far as we could and I don’t know where else I’d go with that story?”
This went on for more than a decade until one fateful day in 2018 when Borello dug up a 20-year-old press release from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) — a nonprofit government watchdog in D.C. — that questioned why the EPA was rehiring a contractor at the IEL named as “PRC/Tetra Tech” when that contractor had already been found to have made numerous “mistakes” in groundwater sampling protocols at the site. A light bulb went on in my mind as I was reading the list of mistakes, since they were similar to what whistleblowers had reported about Tetra Tech EC at Hunters Point in San Francisco.
Having returned to the Bay Area in 2016 (where I’d previously lived in multiple stints for about a decade), I’d become familiar with the Hunters Point scandal since it had been a frequent item in the local news. Tetra Tech claimed that the two supervisors who were convicted of the fraud at Hunters Point and sent to prison were “rogue employees” acting on their own. The NRC apparently concurred, but Tetra Tech whistleblower attorney David Anton told me the NRC investigation didn’t dig too deep when I asked him about it after Tetra Tech’s lawyers insisted I add the NRC exoneration to my 2022 story for Earth Island Journal titled, “The Elusive Quest for Environmental Justice at Hunters Point”.
Tetra Tech’s lawyers also wanted the entire paragraph about how they’d had another subsidiary in the middle of similar radiological sampling controversy at another EPA Superfund site in Ohio years earlier to be deleted. They claimed that any controversy preceded their 1995 acquisition of PRC and that the two cleanups were entirely unrelated. But I produced further receipts on subsequent controversies in 1998 and 2001, involving that same subsidiary that had been renamed Tetra Tech EM. Tetra Tech’s lawyers were forced to back down again.
It was in fact the second time that Tetra Tech had threatened to sue for defamation over my reporting that connected the dots between their role in the cover-up at the IEL and the eco-fraud they didn’t get away with at Hunters Point. They had earlier threatened to sue the San Francisco Bay View over my 2020 series. SF Bay View publisher Mary Ratcliff had a heartwarming response at the time:
“I always say that you can measure your effectiveness by the virulence of the opposition. Tetra Tech threatening to sue is pretty virulent,” Ratcliff wrote me that day in 2020, going on to insist they were bluffing and had no intention of suing this small community newspaper. We consulted with some media law experts and eventually decided to stand pat on the basis of the reporting in the series… and Tetra Tech backed down.
This new story isn’t really even about Tetra Tech. It has just three paragraphs on them, recapping their role at the end of the story. The reality is that they were just one of a handful of contractors involved in the crooked science & data manipulation at the IEL that seemed to come from an EPA playbook (some of which was eerily repeated in East Palestine, Ohio last year. )
The new story details some more recent events surrounding the IEL that have put pressure on the EPA to answer for their actions, or rather their inaction at the site. But what really catalyzed the new story was when the EPA response to a critical letter from a former agency employee cited some of the same crooked science & data manipulation that I’d previously reported on as foundations in their house of cards at the site.
“It’s all crooked as shit. They’ll say ‘So what, it’s just global fallout,” DOE radiochemist Dave Sill lamented to me in a 2019 interview after viewing contractor lab records that he said used a suspiciously short count time on groundwater samples in the lab to avoid detecting a statistically positive hit for Plutonium.
Check out the story for yourself and let me know what you think. Better yet, if you find the story disturbing, also let the EPA know what you think…
JULY 14, 2024
What is the EPA Hiding at the Landfill in Uniontown, Ohio?
Buried Secrets Revisited
BY GREG M. SCHWARTZ
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/24/demanding-transparency-in-east-palestine-ohio/