Shannon's letter to Congressional Delegation

An open letter to my Congressional delegation
Aloha Dan, Dan, Mazie, and Neil,
I saw this tiny correction in WHT on 9/24, it said, "Environet Inc. is being paid to remove World War II military ordnance from 2,950 acres near Waimea." The previous article on 9/23 stated, "The total cleanup of the former Waikoloa Maneuver Area to remove what the military calls Munitions and Explosives of Concern (MEC) is expected to cost $680 million more". (Not including the $152 million already spent, for a total of $832 million to clean up Waikoloa)
"Because of the size, complexity and cost of the Waikoloa response, it should be considered a long-term action, potentially spanning more than 50 years," states an April 2008 "information paper" the Corps' Honolulu office supplied.
$70 million to clean up 3,000 acres comes to $23,000 an acre. With $832 million to spend on Waikoloa's 123,000 acres at $6,500 per acre, would total 2.3 billion. The Kaho'olawe per acre price was $18,000, so the clean up costs keeps rising.
Up the mountain, at Pohakuloa, we have potentially 100,000 acres that may be contaminated with conventional weapons, not including the 33,000 acre Parker Ranch acquisition. At that price the possible total to clean up PTA could be well over 2 billion dollars, not counting the extremely expensive, additional costs of radiation clean up - if that's actually possible. I have been told the old Waikoloa training area was only used for three years and the Pohakuloa Training Area has been used for sixty years, which will dramatically increase the final cost.
Dan Inouye said, "I look forward to more announcements of additional cleanup efforts on the Big Island." Mayor Kenoi said, “I am extremely pleased to see this important work move ahead under this contract. It represents a significant investment that will make our island safer for residents and visitors, and will provide good jobs for County of Hawai’i residents who will be employed on the project.”While it would seem more rational to not make such a humongous mess in the first place and save ourselves a bundle, there is opportunity in conflict. I see a win-win here, with a new "clean up" industry being born on Hawaii Island to cash in on some of this free money. Many residents could be trained for long term jobs at a good wage, plus health care benefits, and also sent out to work on other Hawaiian Islands, not to mention good jobs for the folks at the Environmental Protection Agency; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; the Center for Disease Control, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry; the Justice Dept.; the Dept. of Interior; and related services or agencies. That's a lot of hotel rooms to fill up and would be a boon to our economy.
We can learn a lot from our sister island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. All it would take to jump start this new industry is for our congressional delegation to ask President Obama to decommission Pohakuloa rather than having the NRC waste their time and budget on giving the Army a "license to posses" a nuclear waste dump on our island, they could get ahead of the game by decommissioning PTA now. And by the way, you can let the NRC know your thoughts on this if you comment by Oct. 13th, to: john.hayes@nrc.gov Ask for an E.I.S. for Pohakuloa. According to a recent West Hawaii Today poll, 76% of the voters said they wanted independent testing of Pohakuloa, rather than the army doing the radiation monitoring. 58% said they don't believe a word the army says. Since few residents believe them, let's just forget about the Army testing their own hen house and just start cleaning it up; Lord knows we need these new employment opportunities. Our Representatives in D.C. have been strangely silent on the clean up of Pohakuloa, this would be their chance to be heroes, save our economy, and clean up all contamination on our training ranges. This could happen fairly quickly if our Congressional delegation put their powerful heads together to get the ball rolling and called in some favors to make this happen; this is a fantastic, long term employment project and its certainly "shovel ready".
Besides the 25 residents already trained in ammo retrieval, we can begin this fledgling island industry now if our D.C. reps could put up $100,000 for equipment, and begin the training and certification process of residents for radiation monitoring; we would more easily trust our own residents to give us the truth.This is a formal petition and plea to Senators Dan Inouye and Dan Akaka, to Reps. Mazie Hirono, and governor hopeful, Neil Abercrombie, let's decommission, clean up Pohakuloa, and make some big money on this gravy train; its the "sustainable" and "green" solution to our problems.
Shannon Rudolph - Kona