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In Our View: Resume the Cleanup

Camp Bonneville offers great potential; county must continue to press Army officials

The Columbian
Published: April 28, 2011, 12:00am

Among the cats to be herded in the Camp Bonneville cleanup project are the U.S. Army, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Ecology and parks, environmental and legal officials with Clark County. Good luck getting that multi-jurisdictional bunch moving in the same direction.

But county officials have not given up on trying to turn the 3,840-acre former artillery range into a park, and we say good for them. Such a conversion makes perfect sense, and the complexity of the challenge only seems to make county folks more determined.

It’s been almost a year since any cleanup progress has been noted at the site in east county, but as a recent Columbian story noted, officials from the county and the Army are still talking about how to get it done. We hope they stay focused on the astoundingly simple concept that must guide this process: The Army contaminated Camp Bonneville, and the Army must clean it up. For eight decades, the artillery range was pounded with assorted ordnance, much of it now beneath the surface and an undetermined amount unexploded. All of it must be removed before any public use can be allowed.

The recent story reported that Army officials vow to meet their obligation to finish the project, and that’s encouraging. But it is tempered by the glacial pace of cleanup efforts to date.

The Army paid $28.6 million to a contractor in 2006 but the extent of the contamination was underestimated, and the work came to a halt. The main lesson learned was that a “fixed-price” contract was the wrong way to go. A better approach now would be a straightforward contract based on time spent and munitions removed.

County officials want to remove all contaminants down to 14 inches in a central area of the site where the first public use could occur. A rough estimate for that work is $12 million, plus about $10 million for other cleanup of the former training ground. But those figures will remain inexact until the Army gets a better handle on how much material needs to be removed.

Here are four other factors to keep in mind:

EPA officials disengaged themselves from this project eight years ago. But there remains the possibility that Camp Bonneville should be declared a Superfund site, and that’s why the EPA must become involved again.

An argument erupted a few years ago over whether Camp Bonneville should be used as a park or as a veterans cemetery. The solution is simple: There’s plenty of room for both.

During last year’s congressional campaign, we challenged all candidates to put the Camp Bonneville cleanup high on the list of prioritized issues. Now it’s up to U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, to lead the effort in her role as new representative of the 3rd Congressional District.

As this project gains new momentum (we all should hope), there likely will arise again the same hackneyed complaints and public safety warnings about ordnance exploding and causing harm. Note, however, that all of the anecdotal examples that will be listed come from areas that were not cleaned up. There is no record of harm to the public (from munitions) on a former military site that has been cleaned up to meet strict federal standards.

The message to county officials is clear: Keep at it. Local citizens deserve safe access to Camp Bonneville, and it’s up to the Army to achieve that goal.

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