I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The jet fuel leak that has been slowly creeping off Kirtland Airforce Base, and contaminating Albuquerque’s water supply while its at it, is “massive.” So massive that it’s in the Exxon Valdez oil spill category, said Albuquerque Journal science writer John Fleck yesterday in a column. And state officials think its a very serious problem.
The numbers are in dispute, Fleck noted, with the air force claiming the spill is between one and two million gallons, but the state environment department claiming its an eight-million gallon spill. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska’s Prince Williams Sound in 1989.
The Kirtland jet fuel leak was discovered in 1999 but the problem began in the 1970s. It was only made public in 2008, when air force officials discovered it had migrated off the base into nearby groundwater. The fuel is sitting on top of groundwater, more than a foot deep in some areas.
Air Force officials downplayed the danger of the spill in 2008, saying that it would be cleaned up before it ever reached a drinking water well. But state environment department officials have a greater sense of urgency apparently.While there are 27 cases of contaminated groundwater in Bernalillo County, nothing comes close to the scale of the Kirtland jet fuel leak, and state officials want it cleaned up, said Fleck:
The urgency with which state regulators view the problem can be seen in an obscure but significant bureaucratic development last month. In an April 2 letter, the Environment Department informed the Air Force that jurisdiction over the fuel spill was being transferred from the state’s Groundwater Quality Bureau to the Hazardous Waste Bureau.
That might sound like boring organization chart stuff, but it has substantive implications. Groundwater regulators had little regulatory muscle to push the Air Force because of restrictions on their ability to tell federal agencies what to do. Not so the Hazardous Waste Bureau, which has broader legal authority to compel federal agencies to act to monitor and clean up spills.
The letter is an attempt to force the Air Force to drill more monitoring wells, to better characterize the extent of the contamination, to get a better handle on what the next steps in cleaning it up need to be.
“We need to know,” Bearzi said in an interview, “and we need to know now.”
