EARTH DAY AND THE MCL LANDFILL LEGACY

What a nice Earth Day at Lake Cliff Park on Zang Blvd today. The park with its vintage fountain never looked lovelier, and what a joy to see people outside together enjoying gorgeous weather and fine music. (a sax-even!) Interestedly for me-and I hope you-I met an Oak Cliff gentleman who gave me a better picture of the Mountain Creek Lake situation than I got from searching old docs on the Internet. He painted a few words pics like "old batteries dumped in the lake" that helped me think of the lake, not just as a repository for chemical run-off, but actually an underwater landfill for old, throw-away military/airplane equipment. Yes, I had noted on this blog that an entire plane is down in the lake-and has been there for decades. Since half the depth of the lake is silt, the old equipment is embedded in the silt, along with Cesium 137, layers of PCBs, metals, hydrocarbons, etc. A real stinking mess quite hidden from view. Someone driving across the Mt Creek Lake Bridge would have no clue they were on a bridge over psychotic water! Just looks pretty and brown.... My Earth Day gentleman acquaintance also referred to national security aspects relating to the Naval Weapons facility on the lake, and when I threw in references to missile-making at TEMCO, we rather agreed that Mt Creek activities were simply not fully discussed back in the day. That is, the days of our youth when we were forbidden by parents to stick our toes in that water. Thorough records were likely not kept or made available to the public, although today it is possible to see records from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that refer to Vought as being contaminated with a radioactive substance probably buried on site. Not important now, I'm sure, as these things go in Texas. I wonder what the cost would be to truly clean up this lake and its surrounds. A projected two billion dollar cost has likely inflated to ten times that amount-so we do nothing, expect nothing, demand nothing. Fellow citizens, the law of our land says polluters have the obligation to clean up their toxic legacy and return property to the citizenry in a livable condition. Even the military-especially the military! But no-we get the toxic landfill legacy. The taxpayer loses however this deal goes down-and, to me, it just feels like a double or triple loss: of land and enjoyment, of health, of tax money, and of tax money going to pay for further war and contamination of more land.