Well what do you know? The military has said it will delay the shipment of a big load of PCBs to Pell City. The stuff was supposed to arrive on Thursday but it has been put off for two or three weeks. What’s the trouble? Well once people finally found out about the shipment, folks started asking questions and some big guns in Washington started getting pretty angry about the fog of secrecy that has surrounded the shipment.
Our Sen. Richard Shelby jumped all over the issue on Tuesday night after a Sunday story in The Star revealed the military’s plans to fly the stuff from Japan to Maxwell Airforce Base in Montgomery then truck it 100 miles north to Pell City.
Sen. Shelby sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, telling him that to the people in this part of north Alabama it looked like the military was trying to hide something.
No kidding.
After the military failed to get the stuff into Canada and then Washington state, the sly logistics people in the Pentagon figured they could get it into Alabama while no one was looking.
Of course, that’s not the way the military sees it. According to these people, plenty of public notice was given. If you are an avid reader of The Federal Register, where a mention of the shipment was posted, you might agree. But if you are a local, state or federal elected official or a non-Register reading member of the general public in northeast Alabama, you most certainly would not agree.
So here’s to Sen. Shelby for slinging a dart at the secret society in the Pentagon and for most probably putting the brakes on the plan for at least a couple of weeks.
But that shouldn’t be the end of the story.
We are loath to invoke the cliche “in someone else’s back yard,” but we will, for our backyard is pretty darn full at the moment and we figure that since a bunch of the PCB-laden military equipment is on tiny, isolated Wake Island in the central Pacific already, that is where it should stay and eventually be destroyed.
Therefore we encourage Sen. Shelby to keep up the pressure and for the military to start telling us when and how we can expect to be home to more of its pollutants.
