2 posts tagged “amarillo”
The water, among other things.
Today's Amarillo Globe-News tells how Pantex is planning to clean up contaminated water wells. How does nuclear weapons manufacturing affect area water? Well, the Pantex plant apparently leaches "volatile organic compounds, semi-volatile compounds, metals and high explosives."
"According to the EPA, 36 percent of Amarillo's water supply comes from a well field four miles from Pantex.
Now, the plant plans to monitor groundwater more closely and is digging 16 wells to penetrate contaminated water sources, test, and treat them. "The treatment system extracts contaminated groundwater to remove chromium, explosives and other contaminants seeping from the southeast corner of the plant."Twenty domestic water wells are located within a mile of the plant.
Pantex was named to the federal government's Superfund list of contaminated sites in 1991.
The designation cited past practices that included burning of chemical wastes in unlined pits, burying wastes in unlined landfills, and discharging wastewater into unlined ditches and surface impoundments on the plant site" (Josh Burton for Amarillo Globe-News).
During the 31 years my family has lived in Amarillo, I have never heard a word spoken against the water, except that the city water doesn't taste as good as our home well water. Now that I know the water contains explosives . . . I suppose I ought to feel glad to hear that Pantex is finally removing them.
It feels, instead, that the report is managing to say almost nothing at all about a set of confounding facts. The article makes no mention of how long the Pantex plant has been contaminating the water, how long Texans have been drinking it, and the damage done. Rather, the writer cites Doris Smith, a neighbor to the plant: "This was most informative," Smith said. "I'm pleased to see the information brought into the public because it is a lot of new information for us."
Somewhere, scattered across collectors' cabinets and musty antique shops, are exactly all of my grandparents' things.
In 1994, when my dad's father died of Alzheimer's, the family faced sorting through Grandpa's Missouri house. Sortings like this are an ordinary part of death. Less ordinary was the fact that Grandpa's house had become a kind of museum over the years. A one-house ghost town.
After Grandma Helen died in 1975, Grandpa went on living in his old Sedalia house just as he always had: leaving all the housework to a woman who no longer lived. He didn't dust. He didn't sweep. He left some styrofoam cups from Sonic stacked in the hutch alongside pieces of china, squeezed between canned goods, all from 1975 or earlier. On one wall was pinned a long, rectangular 1974 cloth calendar from a local business; it hung there every year of my life. By 1994 all the dishes and spoons featured lacework patterns of cracks and grooves. Grandpa never installed plumbing in the kitchen, and he never replaced the curtains that hung instead of kitchen cabinets. The cheap mattresses in the metal bedframes were the same as those that my dad and aunt had slept in as children. By the time I began sleeping in those beds in the 70s, they were already deeply concave from the weight of years of bodies, cavities that grew a little deeper on our semiannual visits. The dresser mirror was so clouded with age that it reflected only mottled blobs. A cheap commercial picture of an anonymous baby, caked with the dust of decades, still hung on the wall. My brother and I played with my dad and aunt's toys, still scattered around the house: wooden milk truck on wheels, metal pop gun, a cracked-face doll.
I had nightmares in that house. Apparently, so had my dad and aunt. My grandparents were not altogether nice people, and my grandmother, in particular, had been mentally ill for years before she died.
When they faced the task of sorting through this stuff, almost all of which dated directly back to their own painful childhoods, my father and aunt balked. And then, they stumbled upon a way out. A buyer for the house approached them, but he only wanted the house if he could have all of its contents, too. All, or nothing. My mother was the only one who harbored any sentiments for the dead (she was not related by blood); she asked if she could take the old treadle sewing machine. "No." My aunt, who had been tormented in that house, only wanted the brand new phone, a recent purchase for grandpa, and asked to take it. Surely it would have no value for the collector. "No." He would only buy the house -- the house without kitchen plumbing, with minimal insulation, with only four creaky rooms but full of "original condition" 50s and 60s-era stuff-- if he could have it ALL.
So, they sold it. Without hesitation and without looking back.
In Where I Was From, Joan Didion explores the tendency in Californian history to "jettison weight"; "keep moving" -- to, among other habits, consign vast populations to insane asylums and prisons rather than to care for them or confront them. She presents this as a trait endemic in Californian history, but perhaps more fundamentally of western migration. Perhaps she's right. Like my grandpa (who jettisoned his own family history), and my father (who sold his as a package deal), that is my own story, too. . . . . And it may be the story of Amarillo, as well--a town that celebrates its ranching history but has sold itself for a stockpile of plutonium.
