War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded. 

I like the word externality. It refers to a cost of a product or a service that isn’t reflected in its price, usually an environmental or human impact of some sort. The legacy of slavery is probably the most onerous externality I can think of. American society still pays for the impact of slave labor, which never figured in the price of, say, cotton.

A few weeks ago, I went hiking with a group who shall remain unnamed because they like it that way. We hiked around the reclaimed and rehabilitated site of the former Weldon Spring Ordnance Works, a TNT (trinitrotoluene) and DNT (dinitrotoluene) producing facility from 1941 to 1944, later converted into a uranium processing facility, making (now made infamous by the Bush administration lies justifying the Iraq War) yellow cake, or uranium ore concentrate, in the 1950s. Later it became a “disposal” and processing site for all manner of bad shit from the army. Today, there is an interpretive center run by DOE, a domed burial facility under which much of the bad shit is “safely contained,” hiking and biking trails, and a conservation area. You’ll find lots of information about this site on-line, official and unofficial. Suffice it to say, it is a place with lots of bad karma, a testament, really, to the externalities of war, the scars on the victims and the victors. Residents of whole towns were forced to move, the first attempts at cleanup and decontamination killed people and probably sent toxic fumes throughout the region, the groundwater became contaminated, cancer rates are thought to be elevated in the area. It just goes on and on.

But when you go off the official trails, like we did, you find relics not part of any official tour, timeline, or “interpretive center.” For example, our destination, thanks to our guide/leader who did the research ahead of time, was a huge in-ground concrete storage pit and pump house. And we found them! Overgrown, yes, but still visible, and you could still enter them. There is still a ladder you could climb to the bottom of the pit, a drainage grating visible at the bottom, and a large pipe feed at the top. Graffiti at the bottom attested to the fact that others were stupider than we were and climbed down there. At the pump house, you could see six concrete pads where the pumps sat, some of the pipe headers, and an electrical cabinet which, astonishingly, still had old relays intact. There was no trail, we were “bushwhacking,” mild as it was, in retrospect, although the first part off the sanctioned trail was probably a former roadway or access way.

While I was elated to “tour” this industrial wasteland, I could not believe the government would leave an open pit of such size. It’s a place screaming for a disaster and more lawsuits. While we passed a few “danger” signs, we were able to get through broken sections of fencing. Nothing said “do not enter” or “enter at own risk.” Just amazing.

The fun continues when you try to figure out what all this stuff was used for. The process engineer in me had to come out. Plus, I’ve loved old industrial contraptions since I was in elementary school traipsing through the woods near Chattanooga, TN, hoping to stumble upon old grain alcohol stills, and later when I worked a summer job loading tires into and out of old abandoned factories serving as temporary storage facilities. After a visit to the “interpretive center” (I hope you love the Orwellian sound of that as much as I do), and some questions asked of the curator/guide there, then considering the topology we trekked through, I speculate that we were looking at a raw water storage pit and associated pump house, which delivered water to an elevated storage tank on site (described as the most visible landmark of the facility). Water from this tank was then gravity distributed to where it was needed in the process. The fact that it was left there and not “remediated” also must be a clue (hopefully) that only benign material was stored/pumped there. One set of pumps probably drew the water from the Missouri River (only a mile or two away) and directed it to the storage pit, and another set drew from the bottom to deliver water to the tank.

Apparently, there are other open-pit lagoons and storage pits in the same general vicinity, but according to the information, one probably was smart to stay the hell away from those.

I downloaded a few of official documents about the site, historical stuff, EPA reports, DOE reports, etc, to see if I could confirm what I speculated about the facilities we viewed. I wish I had found something that added up or estimated the total cost of human and environmental damage incurred at this site, not just the cost of remediation and reclamation.

War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded. Future archeologists will have a field day with this place, and thousands, I am sure, like it around America.