Protests blockade dump site

Thursday, Jan. 30, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

"This is our ground," said Llewellyn Barrackman, vice chairman of the Fort Mojave Tribe. "We're not going to have any kind of a dump put in this area at all."

Surrounded by creosote and sagebrush, about 60 protesters gathered Wednesday on a dirt road leading to the 1,000-acre site about 20 miles east of Needles.

A caravan of technical experts pulled off Interstate 40 and waited for about 45 minutes as Indian singers chanted and small girls in native dress danced to the rhythm of a drum.

"We all have our different viewpoints and theirs are to be respected," said Frank Bordell, a health physicist with U.S. Ecology.

The company, with the support of Gov. Pete Wilson, has been trying to get the federal government to sign over the site to the state so that a dump can be built to contain low-level nuclear waste such as that from medical facilities.

U.S. Ecology has a California license to operate it but federal officials, citing concerns that radioactivity could leak into the water table and into the Colorado River, 18 miles away, have demanded safety assurances and further tests. Millions of Californians depend on the river for drinking and irrigation.

Idaho-based U.S. Ecology plans to put barrels of nuclear garbage in unlined trenches. The company's dump near Beatty, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was twice shut after it was found to have accepted leaking containers and to have illegally buried waste outside of dump boundaries. After a long battle, it was ordered closed for good in 1992 by Gov. Bob Miller after Nevada's nuclear waste dump obligations under a Western states compact expired.

Protesters have camped off and on at the site for the past year in an effort to block the dump.

Members of several Colorado River tribes joined Wednesday's demonstration, along with environmentalists and members of the United Farmworkers Union in Blythe.

After about an hour, members of a technical coordinating committee looking into nuclear dump sites entered the area. They spoke with and were harangued by demonstrators until a U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger showed up and asked the protesters to move aside.

"As God is my witness, I firmly believe I could let my own daughter grow up on that piece of land and she would be perfectly safe," said Jim Shaffner, the local manager for U.S. Ecology.

"The project is over, sir," said Bradley Angel of the environmental group Greenpeace, who helped organize the demonstration. "There are thousands of people who will come to defend this land. Forget it."

The Wilson administration says it is dangerous for companies that generate contaminated garbage to store it themselves. The administration also contends that some medical research in California is threatened because the state has no dump.