Sue the Feds Over Every Darn One of Them!

I’m proud of Attorney General Hector Balderas and the Lujan Grisham administration for suing and fining the Air Force (and federal government that funds it), accusing it of not moving fast enough to clean up hazardous fire retardant chemicals in the aquifers under Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis and Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. It’s exactly the right thing to do, regardless of what legal sleight of hand the feds might conger up in opposition. The people of New Mexico have everything to gain from such a move.

Ironically, the state is acting in the same spirit against the Air Force as two NGOs are in acting against it. Southwest Research and Information Center (SIRC) and Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) are suing the state Environment Department (NMED) to undo its ruling under the Martinez administration expanding the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad by some 30 percent. That would violate solemn promises made some 20 years ago by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Congress never to increase WIPP’s size or allow high level nuclear waste into the site.

WIPP received last week its first large shipment of low-level nuclear waste since the 2014 explosion of a canister containing plutonium residue that was stored a half-mile underground in the site, according to the Carlsbad Current Argus. Traces of radioactive debris from the explosion were found in Carlsbad some 33 miles away. Twenty-one workers above ground during the explosive release were contaminated.

While both lawsuits are moving in the right direction, it’s about time that New Mexico take on all of the many polluters that are ruining our environment and the health of our children. The governor should ask the legislature to help her build a massive war chest to sue not only corporate entities, but also the federal government for all its unconscionable groundwater pollution at all of its Air Force and Army Bases in New Mexico, as well as the dozens of abandoned private and military airfields in every part of the state. Military sites include Kirtland Air Force Base’s massive jet fuel spill in Albuquerque, the Strategic Air Command’s former bomber base at the decommissioned Walker Air Force Base near Roswell, Cannon and Holloman Air Force Bases, the White Sands Missile Range Army Base and the Los Alamos Demolition Army Base near LANL. Such lawsuits should not be just about fire retardant but address all groundwater pollution including all petroleum fuels, additives and lubricant products, industrial solvents, explosive chemicals and whatever else is endangering the environmental health of our cities and countrysides.

New Mexico should also sue the state’s oil and gas industry to disclose the proprietary chemical mix that is used in fracking processes and to clean up the aquifers it’s polluting. The state should track down the companies that own or sold uranium mines and processing operations and force them, not the American taxpayer, to clean up their hazardous messes.

The Lujan Grisham administration should demand speedier clean up at both Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LANL) and Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) and join NGO lawsuits against them. In 2002, under Gov. Richardson, the NMED issued an administrative order characterizing LANL’s practices of disposing hazardous nuclear waste as being of “imminent and substantial endangerment” to the people of New Mexico. It made a similar finding at SNL. In 2004 and 2005, both labs signed consent decrees in which they agreed to clean up their hazardous and radioactive waste in a safe and timely manner. Both labs were outraged that the state should question their safety procedures, but they signed the decrees without admitting any culpability. Clean up has been agonizingly slow and expensive, and done largely without media oversight. In 2016, the Martinez administration issued another consent decree, which watered down the earlier version, giving LANL a more “flexible” time frame for clean-up. In March of 2019, Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) with support from the New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC) filed a lawsuit charging LANL with repeated violations of the 2005 agreement and urging the removal of the 2016 alternative decree. The state should join that suit.

There’s ample precedence for the state to sue over environmental pollution issues, even where the federal government is concerned. The largest environmental lawsuit in New Mexico’s history was brought by then attorney general Patricia Madrid against General Electric and various petroleum processors. The suit charged that GE, at its factory on Woodward Avenue on the edge of the South Valley’s Mountain View neighborhood, along with the companies that stored petroleum products in storage tanks in the South Valley, had done irreparable harm to the groundwater of the area and should compensate the state and its people to the tune of some $4 billion. (The Orphaned Land, pg. 113). New Mexico lost that suit when a federal judge tossed it out on grounds of insufficient evidence in 2004, even though the GE plant was a Superfund site at the time, and remains so to this day.

With the Democrats controlling both houses of the Legislature, the Governor’s Office, the offices of Land Commissioner, State Auditor and Attorney General, now is the time for New Mexico to become the nation’s leader in demanding the military establishment and private corporations to remediate their toxic waste and restore New Mexico’s groundwater to a healthy and usable condition.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it