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Return of the Pothole Killer

Niagara Falls chews up its radioactive roadways and spits them in the air

Last May we wrote about City of Niagara Falls officials and their love affair with the Pothole Killer, a magnificent road repaving machine invented by Scott Klieger of Pennsylvania’s Patch Management Co. The machine grinds up bad pavement and hot-patches the resulting hole with remarkable efficiency—50 potholes in one hour in a demonstration last spring that convinced Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster to hire the machine and Klieger’s crew to tackle some of the most cratered of the city’s long-neglected roadways.

There was one hitch that Dyster and the city’s public works department chose to ignore: Federal studies commissioned in the 1970 and 1980s showed that many roads in Niagara Falls are pocked with radioactive hotspots.

Here’s what we wrote last May:

From Lewiston to Lockport to the Falls, public works projects continue to run into the stubborn legacy of the Manhattan Project and the industries it spawned here. That legacy includes massive quantities of radiological material in a leaky containment structure on the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), persistent radiological contamination issues at landfills throughout the county as well as at undocumented disposal sites no one will ever know about for certain, defunct industrial sites that continue to poison the surrounding neighborhoods decades after their abandonment, and all the attendant effects on human health and the economy.

Another legacy is road materials corrupted by what officials like to call “industrial slag,” but which might be more usefully termed derivative uranium products, the waste cast off in the process of refining uranium for weapons and reactors.

If “derivative uranium products” sounds a little like “depleted uranium,” or DU—the substance whose use by the military for armor-busting, incendiary shells is increasingly controversial, as its deleterious health effects on civilian populations and our own soldiers becomes more evident—that’s because they’re nearly the same thing. Nowadays the term “DU” is used to describe the very specific castoff material used for shell and armor, but that’s an inappropriate narrowing of the terminology. All the unused, waste uranium derived from the processes of refining and enriching uranium is DU.

Today there are industrial and military uses for derivative uranium. Back in the 1940s, when Niagara was the free world’s leading producer of uranium metal (and therefore of toxic derivative uranium wastes), it was a headache. Private industries conspired with each other and with local, state, and federal governments to free themselves of this headache, leading to reckless waste disposal practices that would be criminal today…

Sometimes the waste from Niagara Falls plants (and others around the country) that handled uranium was buried on site. Sometimes it made its way to the federal property at the former LOOW site, where it sat in rotting barrels on train tracks for years before being first gathered into an open silo and finally buried underground. Sometimes it was dumped secretly and illegally in landfills, waterways, and farmers’ fields…

A tremendous amount of that radioactive waste material apparently wound up being used for fill and road projects. The results of that widespread contamination were systematically documented in the wake of the Love Canal disaster, when the Department of Energy commissioned an engineering firm called EG&G, a subsidiary of URS, to do a fly-over survey of the entire county to pinpoint radioactive hotspots. That was between 1978 and 1979. Subsequently, between 1981 and 1986, the Oak Ridge National Laboratories performed a survey that identified more than 100 radioactive hotspots in Niagara Falls, including in its roadways. Much of that contamination has never been remediated or even investigated. It’s rarely even discussed, though occasionally the issue rises to the surface, as it did recently in regard to a bowling alley on Niagara Falls Boulevard and road re-paving projects for Lewiston Road and Buffalo Avenue.

(You can read the whole article here: http://artvoice.com/issues/v7n19/the_road_not_taken.)

We told Patch Management’s Scott Klieger about the issue at the time, and he expressed concern for the health of his crew. We sent those studies to Dyster and to Niagara Falls Councilmember Steve Fournier. Fournier, who grew up in Love Canal, was alarmed and said he’d take up the matter with Dyster, who told Fournier he’d look into it. He didn’t, and last summer the Pothole Killer chewed up the city’s roads and then returned to Pennsylvania.

This year is beginning to look a lot like last year: The Pothole Killer has returned to Niagara Falls to fill potholes that have re-opened due to cold and snow. And once again, no one is talking about what the machine might dig up as it plies the city’s roads.

geoff kelly & louis ricciuti

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