Early Rumblings, 1942-72:  Alvira, The Susquehanna Ordnance Depot, and the Lycoming Landfill

The Battle Against the Burner, 1990-1992: Getting Organized and Discovering the Government Is Not for "All the People"

The Company: Union Pacific and its subsidiary, USPCI

The Opposition: The Newly Re-Incarnated Organizations United for the Environment

The State: The Department of Environmental Resources in Harrisburg

The Burner Battle, Part Two, 1992-94: Victory!

OUE, 1994-1998: The Valley Environmental Watchdog

• Early Rumblings, 1942-72: Alvira, the Susquehanna Ordnance Depot, and the Lycoming Landfill

One of the most compelling aspects of this event, and the  part that still heavily influences local opinion about many matters, is that at the meeting at the Stone Church, federal officials promised the evicted families the option to repurchase their land after the war. However, this opportunity actually never materialized after the war was over, and because most of the farms had been in families for generations, the evictions and the false promises produced an anger particularly difficult to swallow.  Indeed, one family was living on land passed to it by ancestors who were granted it for serving in the Revolutionary War. Without doubt, for people in the area these events produced a stunning combination of government fiat and duplicity that introduced them to another, darker side of the government they had not known. They would find more dark sides as time marched forward.

The TNT plant was a massive operation.  It included over 200 buildings, including its own sewage treatment and power plants, 150 concrete bunkers for storing the TNT, and ultimately employed over 10,000 people.  However, by the time the plant was fully operational in 1944 the need for TNT had so declined that before long its production ceased. Until the end of the war, the site was used for storing munitions on their way from the European campaign to the one still going on in Asia.  Parts of the original site still contain concrete bunkers and other noticeable remnants of the Depot, and some OUE members believe that these remains include toxic pollutants beneath the surface.  In 1950, rather than keeping its promise to sell the land back to Alvira's farmers and shopkeepers, the government ceded 4,200 acres to the the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).  In 1952 the BOP began housing about 150 low security inmates from nearby Lewisburg federal penitentiary, and in 1957 the Allenwood Prison Camp was built to house a larger population of low security prisoners.  Some 3,000 acres were given to the state of Pennsylvania to be used as game lands, and enough acreage was sold to the township of White Deer to build a golf course.  In the early 1990s, the BOP decided to use most of its 4,000 acres to build the nation's largest federal prison facility, a prison that will re-enter our story later.

And, there was one further use to which the land would be put.  In the early 1970s rumors began to swirl around the Valley that the federal government would lease part of its acres to Lycoming County to site a multi-county garbage dump. When local people asked government officials--those from the BOP, from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (DER), and from the counties--about these rumors, all of them denied any knowledge of such a plan.  Too soon, and in rapid succession, these Valley citizens would get a series of bitter civics lesson about the nature of government affairs. For instance, on land adjoining the landfill site, BOP tore down seven of its own staff houses, explaining that they were built for temporary housing and were no longer useful. Yet, at the time the staff and their families who lived in the houses considered them good homes; and two comparable staff houses built then are still being occupied by prison officials. Why the big lie? OUE has the answer in its files in a letter from the director of BOP to the local Congressman stating the staff houses had to come down because they were "dangerously close to the proposed landfill."

Rumors about the landfill aroused growing fears and led, in 1972, to the formation of The White Deer Valley Citizens Committee (WDCC), the seed that would become OUE. One of its organizers, in remembering its formation, stated recently that:

We vowed to keep our land, air and water clean and pure and to protect it from becoming polluted. We believe it was, and is, our sacred duty to be caretakers of the environment we live it, to leave it as good if not better than we found it. This is our legacy to our future generations. We continued to investigate the rumors about the landfill. We were lied to! We inspected "state of the art," "state approved," and "sanitary" landfills. The ones we saw we sure did not want in our community. They definitely were not sanitary. We met weekly at a local Fire Hall. All our meetings were filled to capacity.

Once the secret plan became public, other local organizations began attending WDCC meetings, and some of them expressed a desire to become part of the effort to stop the landfill. And, in April, 1974 Organizations United for Ecology (OUE) was born. In September, 1974 OUE sought an opinion from a geologist at Penn State University, some sixty miles away at State College. The geologist watched OUE members dig holes with a back hoe at the site, analyzed the samples and then wrote a report and an impact statement to be submitted to DER as it considered the county’s proposal. The geologist’s judgment was that the site had several intrinsic limitations for a landfill, and to build a relatively safe one would cost far more money than the county would be willing to spend. Other experts, as well as OUE members who had done their own research, argued against the siting on the grounds there was no guarantee the site would not ultimately drip leachate into the ground water; that it would produce the usual odors, traffic, and other unpleasant aspects of a landfill; and that eventually the site would be used for garbage from outside the counties for which it was designed. Opponents also knew too well that property values for land anywhere close to the site, especially downwind, would fall.

Nevertheless, as these things go, the county had its own experts who convinced the DER of their arguments, and the county got its permit in October, 1974. OUE quickly appealed the decision, and in early 1975 its attorney went before the state's Environmental Hearing Board in Harrisburg, some 70 miles south, for weeks of hearings. OUE members went to the hearings by busloads. They left before daylight, sometimes endured snowstorms, sometimes were forced to stay overnight. All these efforts failed, for the Hearing Board refused to reverse DER's decision. OUE's attorneys then appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which upheld the decision in December, 1976. And, in February, 1977 OUE filed suit in Federal Court against the U.S. Attorney General, BOP, the State, Lycoming County, the EPA, and the DER for various violations in the permitting process. The judge ruled that OUE had delayed too long in bringing a federal suit, turning deaf ears to OUE’s explanation that it had taken that long to raise funds to do so.

In another quite crucial way, OUE's efforts in opposition to the landfill were not in vain. During the many months of hearings, OUE testimony led Lycoming County to redesign its permit so that it would use safer landfill technology than it had intended. Further, OUE’s own experts have over the years successfully urged the landfill managers to adopt new techniques as they became available. OUE also has regularly monitored the operation of the landfill, sending observers there at least monthly, or more frequently as the landfill was built. Presently, at least twice a year OUE members are allowed on the site to monitor various aspects of the landfill’s operations.

Aside from monitoring landfill operations, OUE kept a low profile after the landfill was fully developed. And, perhaps it would have maintained that stance had not another threat to the valley environment lifted its ugly head above the horizon. From the moment this threat became known to valley citizens, OUE was up and running, full tilt in opposition.

 
• The Battle Against the Burner, 1990-1992: Getting Organized and Discovering the Government Is Not for "All the People" (1)

Further, by 1990, production methods generating large-scale hazardous wastes were often unnecessary for a competitive cost structure. There was also much evidence that carefully monitored onset waste disposal could be a safer and healthier alternative to off site incineration.(3) A final matter demanding attention was that in states with incinerator licensing procedures like Pennsylvania's, the loss of democratic rights was a dirty by-product of the spread of incinerator technology, a consequence as threatening as the hazardous wastes themselves. In truth, this struggle in the valley had all the marks of high drama, and dramatic it was. And, who were the principal players?

The Company: Union Pacific and its subsidiary, USPCI

USPCI, Inc. of Pennsylvania was part of a waste treatment company in Houston, Texas that was founded in the 1960s and bought by Union Pacific in 1988. Union Pacific's CEO was until 1997 Drew Lewis, former head of the Transportation Department in the Reagan Administration, and an old political ally of former Pennsylvania Governor and U.S. Attorney General, Richard Thornburg. In 1990 USPCI purchased a company called Environmental Management Services (EMS), hired some of its officers, and essentially transformed EMS into a new entity, USPCI of Pennsylvania (hereafter, USPCI). However, in August, 1990, when USPCI's plans to build its incinerator became public, EMS, with tacit approval by the DER, decided not to divulge names of its original investors. This outraged the opposition against both company and agency because it was already known that some original EMS partners were ex-state officials and that two others were sons of Drew Lewis, Andrew and Russell.

Public anger had already been aroused by suspicions about the methods the company had used to purchase options to buy the land necessary for its incinerator. As reported in OUE's newsletter, and never denied by USPCI:

Throughout 1991, OUE made disclosure of the EMS partners central to its publicity war against USPCI on grounds the company's potential for complying with state laws depended in part on the character and reputation of its officials. After a year of OUE pressure, in December, 1991, the DER forced EMS to make public the names, now down to eleven partners because two had disposed of EMS stock before it was purchased by USPCI. These DER revelations confirmed public suspicions when the "eleven" turned out to include the two Lewis brothers, and the following unusually well placed group of corporate and government officials. Their names and positions are given some detail because of how prominent they were in state government and how ideally located they were to push forward the incinerator scheme.

DER's information about the partners did not surprise OUE leaders, who already knew most of the information. Indeed, its newsletter had already awarded Donatoni its "1990 Corporate Arrogance Award," a scroll with a huge dollar sign and a pig standing in the middle of it. The gaping chasm between company and community had begun to form in August, 1990, when Drew Lewis took the microphone at USPCI's first public information meeting. Lewis made it emphatically clear to the 1,400 OUE members there that regardless of local sentiments, if USPCI were licensed to build the incinerator it would do so. The Lewis family reputation was further tarnished by a press story quoting Andrew Lewis, who shared with his brother almost half the preferred stock of EMS, as saying that it "was purely chance that a subsidiary of [my father's] company bought [our] company. . It was strictly coincidence. . . .Dad had no role. If anything, he discouraged it.'" (8)

Thus, USPCI was perceived from the beginning as an arrogant, insensitive, duplicitous, and greedy company. It did not reduce antipathy to the company when Donatoni swore that the ex-state officials, himself included, had no connections with EMS while they were still in office. OUE claimed that public documents clearly showed that Donatoni was still in the DER when he began to put together EMS. In fact, despite Donatoni's denials, revelations that ex-high officials in state government--even an ex-head of the DER itself--were involved in EMS, then USPCI, led the public increasingly to doubt that the DER could remain neutral during the application process. These doubts about the DER would soon become outright hostility to the agency as it came to be seen as great a threat to the Valley as the company. All these doubts and suspicions made it easy for OUE to organize the local community, as we shall now see.

The Opposition: The Newly Re-Incarnated Organizations United for the Environment

The middle Susquehanna Valley has a largely white (about one tenth as many blacks per whites as the national average), politically conservative, mostly working class/farming population, where Republicans outnumber Democrats in some area counties by as much as two to one. The Union County planning director described the area's people this way:

The OUE leadership, its "Administrative Board," was, and is, comprised of about a dozen citizens from towns and villages within five to ten miles of the incinerator site. Soon after reactivating, OUE was publishing its free newsletter, Environmental Advisor, and was working to encourage and shape the activities of OUE chapters in the neighboring towns. Within six months OUE had 12,000 members; within a year, it had more than 17,000, with the more active members living closest to the site. In its January 1991 newsletter, OUE's membership list included Volunteer Fire Companies, churches, Chambers of Commerce and other business service groups, peace activists, Audubon Societies, student councils, farmer's associations, a few banks, and almost all the area's township and borough councils. Union County's commissioners were developing strategies complementary in every way to those of OUE. A renegade EPA official bolstered the OUE cause by offering his time, his expertise, and the emphatic message gradually accepted by everyone that if OUE didn't fight company and government tooth and nail it would lose the battle, completely and ingloriously.

As is often true in environmental struggles, the earliest arguments against the incinerator were related to health and safety. Greenpeace, and the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Toxic Waste, both provided support in the form of literature, advice, and moral support. In November, 1990, the Union County medical profession added its supporting voice by publishing the following press release:

Because virtually everyone was convinced the incinerator was a nightmare-in-the-making, OUE could rapidly expand its organization by sponsoring, or participating in, highly publicized and well attended meetings at a public school close to the proposed site. At these meetings early in the battle (some of them actually mandated informational meetings of the DER or USPCI), the crowds always exceeded a thousand people. They were loud, often rowdy, and worked collectively to intimidate USPCI and DER officials. The audience would rattle bell ringers, shake wooden hatchets (after the hatchet job being done by DER), and many of them wore gas masks. At OUE rallies "pallbearers" would carry in a wooden casket symbolizing "the death of the valley." The EPA renegade enlivened the meetings when they were attended by company or state officials by subjecting them to a merciless grilling, made effective by virtue of his bullying style and, especially, by the fact he knew much more about the economics and technology of incineration than any of these officials.

At times, the crowd's response to USPCI and/or DER officials seemed close to mayhem. Certainly it must have seemed so to the officials, some of who claimed that OUE members coming in and out of meetings had jostled them. At one DER hearing, an OUE member came to the front of a packed and excited auditorium and flaunted a sign at USPCI officials which read "The Second Amendment/ The Right to Bear Arms." His defiance provoked the entire audience to rise to its feet with cheers.

OUE's fund raising activities ranged from dances (square and ballroom) to pig roasts, from auctions to quilt making and band concerts. Demonstrations were frequently organized, at such places as DER's offices in Harrisburg, at Union Pacific's offices in Bethlehem, and wherever USPCI officials appeared in public. One annual event encouraged people, for $1 per shot, to fire shotguns at a wooden mock-up of the incinerator. Alongside these activities, OUE’s research and information campaign was able, when public hearings demanded it, to produce an endless line of OUE members testifying eloquently and persuasively about every aspect of the incinerator issue.

OUE members also dominated a twenty person, "Host Community Working Committee" (HCWC). The Committee's members, as mandated by DER guidelines, were selected by USPCI with help from local officials. This group was supposed to be funded by a $100,000 USPCI grant in order to gather its own data on the various stages of the licensing process. Within weeks after it had been convened, the HCWC declared its independence because the company refused to meet its demands for at least $177,000 to finance its work and for complete autonomy in hiring its consultants. Without funding and operating almost totally on funds donated by OUE, the HCWC nonetheless played the primary role in providing a systematic, informed challenge to USPCI's application and its public utterings. Indeed, it scored a major publicity victory when one of its paid consultants discovered and publicized substantial differences between the actual compliance history of USPCI and its subsidiaries, and the history the company had reported in its application. This investigator also discovered that an incinerator owned by a USPCI subsidiary in Philadelphia had exploded and blew a hole in the roof, injuring some of its workers. She also prepared an extensive report, published by the HCWC, challenging the data on which DER based its contention that the state actually needed commercial hazardous waste incinerators. (11)

In sum, then, the burner battle transformed OUE into the rarest of birds: a grass roots organization whose membership cuts across all the lines that ordinarily separate Americans politically. It included employers and their workers, union and non-union members, doctors and their patients, pastors and their parishioners, teachers and their students, professionals and their staffs, city folks and their rural neighbors, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, liberals and conservatives, organizations of every stripe. In short, OUE members and sympathizers represented most everyone in the Valley.

The State: The Department of Environmental Resources in Harrisburg

In the early 1990s, Pennsylvania generated about 750,000 tons annually of hazardous waste--less than 5% of which came from the central Susquehanna Valley--and exported parts of it to 25 other states. (12) In recent years, along with other waste exporting states, it came under growing EPA pressure to take care of its own hazardous wastes, or to risk losing Superfund money. In 1986, the DER published a study indicating the state needed additional incinerator capacity to burn up to 70,000 tons of hazardous wastes. Then, in 1988, state legislation gave the DER until 1992 to license commercial hazardous waste incinerators, or to forfeit to another agency the power to license them. Believing it had no alternative to siting commercial hazardous waste incinerators in Pennsylvania, and presumably convinced the technology was not a threat to health and safety, the DER sought applications from private corporations for such projects.

On paper, the procedures stipulated in the legislation provided amply for citizen input, though the decision to license a company resided ultimately with the secretary of the DER (appointed by the governor). Citizen views would come from public DER and company hearings, and from the HCWC, during a two phase certifying process. Phase One concerned primarily the physical characteristics of the site chosen by the applicant company (whether, for example, the incinerator would be too close to certain kinds of waters or wetlands, or would stand atop limestone deposits or prime agricultural soil.) Phase One also took into account how the company and its subsidiaries had complied with health and safety regulations in the past.

Once DER formally accepted USPCI's application, OUE joined with local governments to challenge it in every way possible: it hired lawyers to bring suits in court and hired its own consultants to counter the company's. For example, Gregg Township, where the incinerator was to be built, sued, claiming USPCI's plan would violate local land use ordinances. Union County, in which Gregg Township is located, brought suit against the EPA, contesting its right to empower the DER to regulate hazardous waste incinerators in the state. Union County's planning commission, which denied USPCI a zoning permit, sued the company, alleging it had violated an agreement to allow County officials to study the proposed site. For its part, in addition to ongoing organizing activities, OUE formally requested the U.S. Justice Department to investigate possible criminal violations of securities and conflict of interest laws by USPCI officials.

Statehouse politicians representing the area also joined the legal and political maneuvering. Within weeks all but one or two of them publically opposed the incinerator, and within months all but one of the elected officials representing the area were associated with OUE. The exception was Senator Arlen Specter, whose plans to "study the issue," along with his connection to EMS partner, Pickard, had increasingly brought OUE comment and criticism. Elected state officials introduced a variety of bills to keep USPCI from the area, including legislation that would prohibit hazardous waste incinerators close to prisons, since the nation's largest federal prison was being built across the highway from the proposed incinerator site on part of the original 8,500 acres seized by the government in 1942. The area's Congressperson brought pressure on the EPA and the DER to pay more attention to the voices of the region's citizens.

This battle over Phase One resulted in a temporary victory for OUE when, in August, 1991, the DER rejected USPCI's application because part of its incinerator complex would be sited on twenty acres of "Class 1 Agricultural soils," forbidden territory for a hazardous incinerator. The victory was short-lived: within weeks USPCI filed a new application based on a plan avoiding use of the banned twenty acres. The new application eliminated plans for an on site ash dump and the potential problems of leaching from that dump. By doing so, however, it added the new potential danger of spills from the highly toxic ash wastes that would then be shipped elsewhere for storage. For many, the transportation of hazardous wastes had been the greatest potential danger of the incineration scheme. In its Information Packet, USPCI tried to allay these fears by suggesting the inflow of wastes would represent "no more than fifteen to twenty" truckloads of untreated waste per day. (13) Of course, that many daily loads amounted to between 5,475 to 7,300 truckloads per year of untreated hazardous wastes to be added to the traffic on Route 15, a road that connected the site to Route I-80 and was renowned for its high accident rate. Moreover, these figures did not include the outflow of toxic ash which, under the new plan, would be taken in a yet undetermined number of trucks to an ash dump at a yet unspecified site.

USPCI's new application renewed the fight, and the response in OUE's next newsletter was, "THEY'RE B...A...C...K! Just like a scene from the horror movie 'Poltergeist,' USPCI is once again menacing the Susquehanna Valley with a hazardous waste proposal." More substantively, OUE strongly urged members to testify at the January 1992 open meeting DER sponsored to solicit the public's response to the new Phase One application. These public hearing/rallies became the cohering glue for OUE and always breathed new energy into an organization whose leadership has been under a constant strain for almost two years, and most of whose members were largely inactive. As it turned out, OUE was so successful in bringing testifiers to the DER hearing, it took a full day, with people testifying in two separate rooms, for DER officials to record all the comments.

Of the 169 citizens testifying, all but one, with varying degrees of eloquence, anger, resentment, information, and analysis, spoke against giving the company a permit. (14) A landowner that had sold land to USPCI said that, "The County Planning Director told me I would be a hero. He didn't tell me I would be a heel." A minister said that, "Because of the threat of the incinerator, marriages are on the brink of despair and civic duties in other areas have been left behind because of the time spent on this concern." An officer of the BOP said in part that, "It is not in the best interests of the Bureau of Prisons. . .to locate a hazardous waste incineration facility adjacent to the [federal] prison across the highway." And, officers of the three other large employers in the area, a supermarket chain, a food processor, and a university, all said the presence of an incinerator would spoil the environment for their respective enterprises.

Soon after the hearing, and as the DER deliberated, the head of the "Ban the Burner" campaign published a letter in the local press that well summarized OUE's position:

The DER's decision to permit the company surprised some in the area, but not others. Those who believed that the current DER administration was "in the company's pocket" had always assumed that USPCI would have to be stopped in court, or in some other way. For those who believed the company's compliance history, or the proximity of the site to a huge federal prison complex, were grounds for denial, the decision was grimly surprising. For both groups, the future now promised a continuing, expensive battle against a mammoth company with the unlimited resources necessary to have its way, irrespective of the community's wishes. For OUE, ever more it saw the battle in stark terms, or as OUE's newsletter put it: "Do we allow a bunch of well financed thugs to destroy our valley? Or do we take control of our own destinies and soundly defeat them"?
 

• The Burner Battle, Part Two, 1992-94: Victory!

At this point it seemed to OUE that all that it could do had been done. The membership drives had succeeded and the funds had been raised; the newsletter had educated the public; hired and in-house experts had published the research reports; law suits had been filed against the actions of USPCI and the DER. Virtually everyone and every organization had registered their opposition. Yet the burner permit remained alive, still backed by a huge company with a hard-nosed chief officer who often had made it public he wouldn't back down. What else could OUE do?

The answer was a continuation of all that had gone before, plus a growing intensity to public demonstrations and a broadening scope of issues addressed at these demonstrations. OUE's capacity for imagination and intensity had already been shown at many of its public activities during its first two years. For instance, several dozen OUE members had pulled a toilet seat around the governor’s mansion all one night to symbolize how inviting the state was to the importation of wastes. And, shortly after DER approved USPCI's Phase One application, OUE members shouted down DER officials at two meetings where, on the basis of data all knew were outdated, the officials tried to defend the need for incineration capacity in the state. In the second of these meetings, OUE members, dressed as Indians, whooped, danced, swung hatchets, and tossed tea bags at stony silent DER officials.

Early demonstrations were inspiring models for what would come in 1993 and 1994. In early 1993, and after months of planning, 150 OUE protesters gathered outside the DER offices in Harrisburg. After a press conference in the rotunda of the capitol building, 13 OUE members marched the two blocks to the DER building and were arrested for sitting down and blocking the front doors, symbolically "closing down the agency." Later, a benefit dance raised $5,000, to be used to pay the $3,000 in total fines that had been imposed on the members who had been arrested.

OUE's biggest single fundraisers, aside from its newsletter solicitations, were its annual "Miss USPCI Male Beauty Pageants" where male OUE members would dress, often in drag, to represent the various characters in the battle. (Drew Lewis was once embodied as a maggot, for example). Live music and food would also adorn these Pageants and typically they would raise $10,000, or more. Like the public meetings, the Pageants brought everybody together to enjoy themselves and, most crucially, to reaffirm to each other their willingness never to give in to the company.

In 1993, OUE members also went directly to the principal source of their problems, the stately country home of Drew Lewis, north of Philadelphia. There, nine cars of members several times circled the Lewis compound, then distributed thousands of flyers in neighboring towns with a picture of Lewis at a Union Pacific Board meeting. Over Lewis’s picture was a title that said, "Beware of this Man," and beneath it were carefully researched notes about who he was and how he was using his powerful business and political partners to try to make his cronies and sons richer than they already were. Later that year, a few members also traveled to visit Drew Lewis’s son, Andrew, who also lived in stately conditions outside Philadelphia, and circulated thousands of flyers describing in detail how much he would profit personally from the incinerator his dad’s company wanted to build.

And, in the summer of 1993, and again in the summer of 1994, OUE held large demonstrations alongside, and on, USPCI’s land abutting Route 15, the major north/south highway in the area. Both of these brought attention to the fact that environmental justice was part of the burner issue, since the huge federal prison complex being constructed across from the incinerator site housed over 3,000 inmates, disproportionally black or Hispanic speaking. BOP officials admitted it would take at least three days to evacuate the prison in case of an accident at the incinerator. At the first of these demonstrations, over 100 OUE members trespassed on USPCI’s site by building a mock cemetery on it with gravestones representing all the towns and cities in the nearby area. USPCI officials decided against asking the police to arrest these trespassers for reasons that lie buried in someone’s files, or memory. At these demonstrations, OUE focused attention on the waste industry's obvious tendency to locate facilities in poor and/or minority, or in seemingly apolitical rural neighborhoods. With the demonstrations, OUE set the stage for additional lawsuits to be brought against the BOP, in case all else failed. They also identified ex-Governor Richard Thornburg, the old political crony of the mostly Republican ex-officials who had owned EMS, as a major barrier to exerting pressure on the BOP, because he was at the time the U.S. Attorney General. This meant the head of the BOP answered directly to an old pal of the Lewis boys, their dad, and the other partners.

By 1993 OUE members had gained enough experience to produce their own in-depth research. One member publicized a detailed breakdown of the probable costs and benefits of the incinerator showing its principal beneficiaries of to be the tight little band of favored investors in the project, along with the companies that generated hazardous wastes that needed treatment. The alleged benefits to local communities were $15 million of new income and 195 new jobs during the construction, along with about $2 million annual income and 150 jobs over the 30 years the incinerator was supposed to operate. Added to these were up to $75,000 per year of funds to the host township. These benefits to local people were absurdly small when weighed against the prodigious potential costs to their health and safety from having hundreds of thousands of tons of dangerous wastes annually hauled about the area, and incinerated by a technology that often produced toxic explosions and whose normal operations emitted exceedingly dangerous toxins from its smokestacks. The benefits did not begin to offset the expected loss in the value in homes and businesses (especially farms) near the incinerator, and the loss of jobs that would result from such reduced values. Nor did they offset the expected $1-2 million dollars the local community would spend through government and OUE to fight the permitting process.

Also in 1993, OUE hired its second employee (its office manager being the only other one), a professional fund raiser and newsletter editor. His efforts brought the organization a new, slicker and, in some ways more informative newsletter, and with a new name of "OUE Update." And, the newsletter, mailed out to over 15,000 members between 1990 and 1994, began to raise the large sums of money OUE needed to help pay for the newsletter itself, to fund the HCWC experts, to keep its office opened and its two employees paid.

As all these efforts were being carried out by OUE--fighting on several fronts at once--a crucial change began to occur in the incineration industry: the demand for incinerator capacity in the whole nation began to decline. In part, this was the result of changing technologies of both production and waste management; it was also a result of the success of Greenpeace's national campaign against incineration, of which OUE had become a part. The anti incinerator forces had unsettled an already unsettled industry and the big hazardous waste polluters--like Dupont and firms in the steel industry--faced an increasingly uncertain future. Would there be incineration capacity, or any waste facility capacity, for their hazardous wastes ten years down the road? Or even next year? The polluting firms' response was the one that Greenpeace, and OUE, had wanted all along, to use production technologies that generated less hazardous wastes.

Thus, in 1994, after four years of a battle with OUE, USPCI was still years away from getting a permit whose issuing was increasingly in a doubt. Not only that, OUE had vowed that if construction on the project began there would be ongoing, non-violent obstructions for as long as it stayed alive. Faced with a bleak future of declining demand, and having a bulldog symbolically attached to his bottom, in the summer of 1994 Drew Lewis threw in the towel for Union Pacific and for USPCI. At the time, he made the unusual claim that he had decided to do so a year earlier but had kept the project alive from anger that OUE members had come to his home and circulated petitions to his neighbors. This kind of erratic behavior had  in 1997 brought Lewis to the end of his career at Union Pacific (and, according to recent headlines about the company’s critical organizational problems perhaps also had almost brought Union Pacific to its knees.)

Union Pacific sold the incinerator site to Laidlaw, Inc., a Canadian conglomerate. However, after surveying the political scene, one Laidlaw official said that if the company wanted to build a waste facility on the site it could "see itself ten years down the road still fighting for a permit." This conclusion was an atypically wise and sober one for a big waste management company. Laidlaw sold the land to a consortium put together by Union County officials that is now developing a "non-polluting" industrial park on the site. OUE has one member on the planning board for this site and made it clear that the slightest hint of there being a waste management facility, or any other kind of polluting company, on the site would produce an organized, determined, and experienced opposition.

OUE was not surprised that the incinerator plan failed ultimately because of falling demand, for all along it had mocked the state's demand projections as either bumbling errors or dishonest manipulations. In fact, early on, OUE’s hired experts had shown clearly that the state's demands were based on faulty assumptions concerning available capacity in the state and the need for new capacity. The state's plan, like the entire process, reflected the "urge to burn" more than anything else, pushed forward by the powerful combination of politicians and business interests. In 1997, when a state task force, overseen by DEP (the DER had become the Department of Environmental Protection in 1996), adopted a new plan, it was uncannily close to the estimates made three years earlier by an OUE member who had regularly attended the task force meetings. (17)

OUE considered the retreat of Union Pacific as a great victory as well as a confirmation of the idea that NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) was the only strategy that a local community could reasonably undertake to keep out the big polluters. Its members had learned that big industry and big government, in this case at both the state and federal level, would seek out those communities who didn't fight back for waste facilities sites. OUE arrived at the stance, already maintained by many other grassroots groups who had been there, that those communities that don't fight back would get all the wastes. Unfortunately, in the current political situation, that means poor neighborhoods in the United States and abroad, unless, of course, they can mount their own rough and ready campaigns.

• OUE, 1994-1998: The Valley Environmental Watchdog

The DEP chose Chem Nuclear, Inc., a subsidiary of Waste Management, one of the world's largest waste management companies, to seek a site for the dump, subject to DEP approval. Once the site was chosen and approved, the company and the state would quite simply impose the dump on the chosen community. Chem Nuclear began this anti-democratic process by taking a dog and pony show around the state, trying to convince the public that low level wastes were not dangerous if properly stored, and that the community who took them on would have lower taxes and other benefits.

It didn't take the DEP long to realize that the "imposition" model would not work, so it changed the rules and sent Chem Nuclear scurrying about the state looking for a "volunteer" community to take the dump, promising the recipient a few scholarships, reduced taxes, and the honor of having been "good citizens." Chem Nuclear brought its show to the Central Susquehanna Valley twice, once in 1994 and again the next year. The show included elaborate pictures of the design for the dump with the usual promises that it would use a safe technology that would harm no one, ever. Of course, OUE knew better, and at the first of these meetings its members told Chem Nuclear officials that if the company were to come to the area, it would face a massive struggle; that OUE had learned the ropes in fighting Union Pacific, and that, frankly, Waste Management seemed a less able and less worthy opponent.

OUE members argued emphatically at this meeting that: the technology to be used was untested; some of these "low level" wastes would actually remain actively dangerous for thousands of years; Chem Nuclear's plant in South Carolina had leaked and had reduced the area to a moon-like isolated backwash; and, mostly, that once again we would not have our democratic rights violated without an unrelenting struggle. OUE also argued that because almost all these wastes had been generated by nuclear power plants, who had built their plants knowing they had no way to dispose of their deadly wastes, the plants should take responsibility.

In OUE's newsletter (whose name in 1993 had been changed to "OUE Update"), its editors suggested that the waste dump be located next to the utility stockholders who had made the most money over the years from the plants. At the second Chem Nuclear meeting, OUE held a press conference outside the building explaining why its members would not attend, that its position had been made clear once before: no dump in the Central Susquehanna Valley. OUE also kept in contact with organizations outside the area, offering help to any community whose officials agreed to sit down and talk with Chem Nuclear about the waste dump. Not surprisingly, in the face of organizations all over the state bellowing out "NIMBY" to all who would listen, in June, 1998, the DEP announced that it might call off its attack dog, Chem Nuclear. Citing declining demand for the site (which is unlikely since all the nuclear power plants generating most of the wastes are still operating), sufficient capacity at other dumps, and its inability to find a volunteer community, the DEP began its retreat from the field. If this retreat is a real one, OUE can assume that its activities in opposition to the dump, along with those of many other grassroots organizations in the state, were crucial to such an outcome.

What is OUE doing now, in addition to cheering the possible end to Chem Nuclear's hapless march across the state? OUE's board meets monthly, with its meetings open to the public. It publishes its newsletter three times a year, sending it out to 1,800 people who have, since 1990, donated either time or money to the organization, or expressed interest in its activities. Most importantly, it has put itself forward as the "environmental watch-dog" for the area, a position that seems widely popular in the area. It has generated its detractors, to be sure, including a newspaper editor and a few others who do not like its often aggressive tactics, especially its stridency and/or its demonstrations. Of course, as is always the case with politics, its greatest enemy has not been the occasional explicit foe but the huge indifference most people in the area have for any kind of politics. Nevertheless, OUE is quite confident that, as happened with the burner battle, were a genuine threat to the environment to emerge, it could mount a full-scale and ultimately successful opposition.

In its current "monitoring" form, OUE is involved in a series of issues that will sound familiar to virtually any environmentalist, or anyone worried about the deterioration of democratic rights in America. It is now constructing a strategy to deal with the request to the BOP, by the managers of the Lycoming landfill, for 500 more acres of land. OUE’s assumption is that this will be used for out-of-area wastes, given that existing capacity at the landfill would take care of local needs for the next 10-20 years. Pennsylvania, particularly with its new governor traipsing about the world telling all who will listen that the state is "friendly" to business, has become particularly friendly to imported garbage. The state is now one of the biggest net importers of garbage in the U.S., taking in trash from as far away as Puerto Rico.

OUE has recently been tangentially involved in a dispute between local citizens and a commercial "farmer" who wanted to put 4,000 pigs into the middle of a farming community. Apparently, this farmer, in the face of organized opposition by neighbors, withdrew his application for a hog permit. OUE is involved, to one degree or another, in various related matters, including a possible "cancer cluster" along a highway in the region, and the gradual dying off, from some environmental toxic, of a herd of cattle at a local farm. Also, for the past few years, OUE has provided funds and other kinds of support to a grassroots organization nearby fighting the incineration of toxic soil at an EPA Superfund site. At this writing (summer, 1998), OUE's principal concern is the expansion of the landfill capacity, and along with it the likelihood that the new garbage conglomerate, formed by the merger of USA Waste and Waste Management, is looking to buy the landfill as a source for taking on wastes from outside the area.

Thus, OUE, like it fellow grassroots environmental organizations, is trying to cope with the spoliation of the earth by the human community, doing what it can to keep clean its own small part of the whole. Its members believe its history is one worth knowing, thus this accounting of it, because it demonstrates without question that if you're not ready to fight the polluters and the government officials who inevitably shill for them you're going to end up with all the wastes. And, of course, if you end up with the wastes without a fight, you'll end up having gotten sick, or died, while sitting firmly on your own hands. Some would say that's a person's right. Yet, when grown-ups end with the wastes in their back yards, so do their children, who will suffer the consequences without having had the wherewithal to struggle for their own well-being. What stronger argument for fighting the polluters could there possibly be?
 

2. The literature on incinerators, and health/safety issues, is voluminous and largely twisted. On the positive side, there is EPA, Hazardous Waste Incineration: Questions and Answers, Office of Solid Waste, April, 1988. USPCI also has widely distributed entirely positive information on incinerators. Its Information Packet on Incineration Proposal is available through USPCI, Devon, Pa., 19333. For the other side, Greenpeace, in Washington, D.C. can be contacted for an ongoing, frequently updated critique of incinerator technology and related videotapes, and the Environmental Research Foundation, publishes Rachel's Hazardous Waste News, Box 73700, Washington DC 20056-3700. For a typical report in the press, of the kind that is most likely to be shaping public opinion, see J, Bailey, "Concern Mount Over Operating Methods of Plants that Incinerate Toxic Waste, The Wall Street Journal," March 20, 1992, p. B-1.

3. For a brief overview, from a former assistant administrator for solid waste management at EPA, see J. Porter, "Cutting Pollution at the Source," The Christian Science Monitor," July, 1, 1991, p. 18.

4. OUE, Environmental Advisor, November, 1991.

5.  Union County, Incinerator Review Strategy, undated (circa 1990)

6. USPCI Information Packet on Incineration Proposal, "FACTS ABOUT: The USPCI Project Team."

7. Estimate given OUE by Fred Wilder, Planning Director for Union County.

8. Paul Nussbaum, "In Rural Pa., A War Rages Over Incinerator," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1991, p. B-1.

9. OUE, Environmental Newsletter, December, 1991.

10. Union County Medical Society, "News Release," Evangelical Hospital, Lewisburg, Pa., November 30, 1990.

11. L. Moorer, Analysis of the Need for Additional Hazardous Waste Management Capacity for Incinerable Material Generated in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Associated Agreement States, HCWC, Union County, June, 1991.

12. The information here comes from DER, Fact Sheet, November, 1990; and from USPCI Information Packet for Proposed Incinerator, "FACTS ABOUT: The Need for New Industrial and Hazardous Waste Treatment Capacity."

13. Ibid. "FACTS ABOUT, The Transportation of Hazardous Wastes."

14. All these testimonials are excerpted from OUE, Environmental Newsletter, February, 1992.

15. This letter was published in the Sunbury Daily Item, February 9, 1992.

16.  Both figures are from OUE, Environmental Newsletter, November, 1991, and December, 1991, respectively.

17. G. Black, Analysis of the Pennsylvania Hazardous Waste Facility Plan, (Update, 1992.)