TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: George Rice (GR)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: February 16, 2206
LOCATION: San Antonio, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Melanie Smith and Denise Williams
REELS: 2336 and 2337

Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise.

DT: My name’s David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and we’re in San Antonio, Texas on February 16th, 2006. We’re at the home of George Rice, who has kindly agreed to talk to us about his experience as a groundwater hydrologist working on, chiefly, contamination problems in the southwest and elsewhere. And I wanted to thank you at this time for spending your morning with us.
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GR: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you.
DT: I thought we might start by talking about your childhood and if there was an experience or maybe a person that inspired you to have an interest in the natural sciences or in the outdoors or conservation.
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GR: Yeah. I was an Army brat. We lived all over.
(misc.)
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GR: Should we just pick up where…?
DT: Sure. If you would, if you could continue with your answer about your childhood.
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GR: Yeah. Well, I was a—an Army brat, so we—we moved around quite a bit and finally settled down in Michigan, which is where the family’s originally from. And about the age—between the ages of ten and twelve or so, I got very interested in geology and I had a rock collection and I went around telling people I was going to be a geologist, you
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know, when I grew up. But, you know, after that, there was a period of maybe eight
years or so where I lost all interest in intellectual pursuits and, well, ended up in the Army because—I—actually I got kicked out of high school and went into the Army and there I heard about the GI Bill. So when I got out of the Army, I decided I wanted to go to college o—on the GI Bill. And, course, took a lot of general classes, but then
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remembered my interest in geology and ended up real lucky. I had some really good teachers in a junior college in Tucson, Arizona. A woman named Liz Peoples who taught geology and she was also a very committed environmentalist. And so she was able to tie geology to the environment. And after going to Pima College for, like, four years, then the GI Bill said we’re not going to pay for you to go to a two-year school anymore. Then
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I went to the University of Arizona and took a groundwater hydrology class and fell in love with it. Had a great teacher there, too, a guy named Stan Davis. And I thought it was the most interesting thing I’d ever run into in my life and I decided I was going to be a groundwater hydrologist. So that’s how my—I got my interest in that.
DT: Was this early in the days for groundwater hydrology?
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GR: Yeah. I got my BS in ‘76 and I think the University of Arizona, at that time, was the only school in the country that actually gave a bachelor’s in hydrology. Until then, it was mostly master’s work and PhD work. And you—you know, you’d tell people you
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were a hydrologist then and they’d say well, what’s that, you know. I think a lot of people thought of plumbing, you know, when you told them you’re hydrologist, so yeah, it wasn’t nearly as—as well known then as it is now.
(misc.)
DT: Can you speculate as to why, considering that many people’s water comes from underground and springs are base flow for many streams, especially in the southwest, that groundwater hydrology took so long to develop as a concentration in science?
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GR: Well, I don’t know that groundwater hydrology took so long to develop, but I think maybe people’s awareness of it has taken a while. And, course, people always depended on wells and that sort of thing, so that’s groundwater hydrology, class (inaudible). But in the last 20 years of so, what’s come to the fore a lot more is the issue of groundwater contamination and so I think that’s where people’s awareness of
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groundwater hydrology has—has in—has increased as they begin to think about where their water’s coming from and what happens to their water and maybe what can be done about it, either to prevent it from being contaminated in the first place or what do you do after it’s contaminated, so.
DT: Would you trace this back to Superfund and CERCLA, some of that early legislation?
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GR: M—m—may—maybe in part—maybe in part, because I think until 20 years ag—or so ago, people had this funny notion that all groundwater was pure, you know. And we didn’t look at groundwater quality a—a lot back then. The assumption was you’re pumping it out of the ground, what could possibly happen to water that’s 50, 100, 200 feet below the surface? Nothing. Well, then, Superfund, CERCLA, RCRA and all those programs kind of, I guess, opened up money to where we—we began looking at these
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issues a lot more closely. And as we looked at them, we found that there were a lot of problems that we weren’t aware of in the past. I know this—I found this true on my first job as a—as a groundwater hydrologist, rather than a surface water hydrologist, was in New Mexico, in the—worked on the Uranium Mill Tailings Project. And back in ‘83, when I first started working, the idea was that of these 20 or so abandoned uranium mill
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tailing sites we were working on, maybe one or two of them had groundwater contamination issues, where the water table was relatively shallow and the contaminants from the tailings pile could easily enter. But most of them was no problem because water was 50 feet below surface, 100 feet or more. Well, as we began investigating, we found that virtually all of these things had contaminated groundwater. And so it’s been a—I
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guess, a lot about learning experience on the part of scientific and technical community
of—of what can actually happen. A lot of our assumptions back then were just wrong and when we began investigating things, we found out what was really going on.
DT: How much of the early interest in groundwater contamination might be traced back to nonprofit groups, like the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste?
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GR: Is—wa—is that the Love Canal?
DT: Yes.
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GR: Yeah. I—I think a lot of it, a lot of it. I know a lot of the groups that I worked with, for example, Kel—I think Kelly Air Force Base is a good example here. When I first got involved with Kelly in ‘94, they realized that there was some groundwater contamination there, mostly on base, they thought but very little out in the neighborhood.
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Well, the problem was they hadn’t really investigated out in the neighborhoods to see what was going on. And it was the citizen’s groups, the people who lived around the base, that really had to fight the Air Force to go investigate what was out there in the neighborhoods. And then when the Air Force finally did that, after years of fighting, they
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found that the contaminate plume emanating from Kelly was huge. It wasn’t just confined around the base, but it extended for miles down gradient of Kelly. And really,
the only thing that stopped the plume was the San Antonio River. It—it ran into the San Antonio River and then kind of dribbled into the river. But if the river wasn’t there, who
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knows how far beyond there it would’ve gone. So citizens’ groups, I think, have played a large part in telling, you know, government agencies and corporations, say hey, you need to look at this issue. You know, don’t come by here and tell us you put in a few wells and your consultant says everything is fine. You know, you got to really go out and look
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and we need to make sure you’ve done a good job at looking before—before we’re going to decide what’s actually going on here.
DT: I was thinking of other origins for groundwater contamination interest and I’m curious if part of the source might be what the source is? That there are these solvents that are long lived and started being used in the postwar era. Is that a fair thing to say?
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GR: Y—y—well, d—do you mean are the solvents long lived or…?
DT: Well, is that part of the problem is that there are many more sources and kinds of contaminants that might show up in groundwater that weren’t common 100 years ago or even 50 years ago?
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GR: Right. I think probably, you know, think in an non-urbanized or non-industrialized area. If you have groundwater contamination, usually talking about things associated with sewage, you know, coliform bacteria and those sorts of things, which can be bad enough. But in industrialized areas, you have all these—the—this host of things that—that—we commonly find things like solvents, like you mentioned. Solvents—solvents, like TCE and PCE, are probably the most common groundwater contaminants in the United States, I would say. Then you also have, course, metals that are associated
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with industrial operations. In some places, you have radioactive materials. So yeah, it’s industrialization and urbanization have caused a lot of problems. And just the availability of the stuff. A lot of things, you know, like these solvents—chlorinated solvents and pesticides—we didn’t have them until, you know, 50, 70 years ago. They didn’t exist.
DT: I guess one other thing that occurs to me is that maybe the development of some of these powerful submersible wells, where you’re drawing maybe much more water from deeper, that you might be picking up more of these contaminants? Is that a possible…?
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GR: I don’t know. Think—thinking around Kelly Air Force Base, where the—where the aquifer’s really very shallow. It’s a shallow aquifer system and a lot of people had shallow wells there going back 50 years. If the water was contaminated then, then they would’ve been drinking it—probably unaware of it, but they would’ve been drinking it.
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The fact that the wells are deeper and more—you know, that—that these newer pumps allow you have to deeper wells, I—I’m not sure that—that that has had much of an effect on our awareness of it.
DT: Maybe something we could talk about is maybe your first instance of working in Texas on a groundwater contamination problem. What was the problem? Who was the client? What did you find?
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GR: Well, yeah. As a—since I’ve been on my own, which I’ve been since ‘93, the first paying client I had, I guess you could say, was folks who were concerned about the expansion of a landfill here in San Antonio, the BFI landfill. There the—the landfill, you know, had contaminated groundwater in the area and people were concerned that with the
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expansion, it would just contaminate more groundwater. I went through a couple of rounds with BFI, a couple of expansions of it, and unfortunately, they—the folks who were opposed to the expansion weren’t able to stop it, but they did get the state to require more safeguards with the landfill than—than had originally been planned.
DT: Well, maybe this is a chance to ask you, when you work for a nonprofit client, do you find that usually what your work product goes towards is just disclosing what’s going on or actually changing the conditions of a permit?
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GR: D—does—you mean, figuring out what’s there?
DT: Right. Are you pretty much determining what the mechanics are of the problem and how bad it is? Or do you feel like there is an effect on the permitting system and that those problems get alleviated?
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GR: I—I think it’s both because often when, say, s—somebody’s asking for a permit to do something like a—a landfill or a sewage treatment plant or a—a hazardous waste facility, the—the consultant’s that they hire will often minimize problems that have already occurred or problems that might occur in the future. So when community groups are able to hire technical people to critically look at what the government agency’s
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consultant have done or a corporation’s consultants have done, that makes a big difference. Because if you don’t have technical people on your side, what a government agency will often do is oh, you people don’t know what you’re talking about. We have experts who say things are like this and if you say it’s any different, you really don’t have any basis for saying that so you all should go away. So when groups are able to bring in technical expertise, it makes a big difference, a huge difference, yeah.
DT: Tell us about the group that was opposed to the BFI landfill?
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GR: Those were people that were living around the landfill and had been living around there for generations, you know, long before the landfill was ever there. A community of Martinez and China Grove. BFI came in and said we’re just going to do this small thing here. Let us in, we’re just going to have this little landfill. And there was some opposition and—but people th—went along with it. Said okay, you can do that. Then
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five years later or so, they say now we want to expand it. We need to do more. And then five years later, they come back, we need to expand it more. So these people were really, you know, they had been snookered I—as—by BFI. I assume BFI knew all along what its long terms plans were, but they lied to the folks that lived there. And I don’t know that they’re—they were as much concerned about water quality, although that was an
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issue. The problem with BFI was just the smell coming off it. Some people lived across the road and they used to tell me that they would have to leave the house sometimes if the—that the smell would be so horrible. And of course, during the hearing, they told their story to the judge. BFI had their folks come in and say I’m there all the time and I never smell a thing. You know, I don’t know what these people are talking about, yeah.
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One interesting thing that happened there was the—the state of Texas sent an investigator down on a complaint of smell, of odors coming off the plant, from Austin. He drove down to Austin. This is the old TNRCC. And that investigator said it was such a horrible smell, I couldn’t hang around. And he was just on the road; he wasn’t in the landfill area. He was on the road with the people. He said that smell was so horrible, I had to leave. And he said when I drove back to Austin, my car stunk so much I had to
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keep the windows down. So he—he submitted a written report to this effect and what the
state—what his bosses said was we really can’t use this account of evidence of odor because this fellow hadn’t been trained in detecting odors. So.
DT: Well, is this the case that often you’re brought in to try to find something that can be quantified? Where there’s something that’s more objective? That it’s so many milligrams per liter of some contaminant rather than a subjective kind of response, like it smells bad?
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GR: Y—yeah, I think that—that’s—most of what I do when I’m called in is I will look at the—well, say, it’s—like Kelly Air Force Base. They say that we have done this work and we know what conditions are there. So I’ll look at the data that they have, the reports that they’ve written and—and come to my own conclusion of have they done the job
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properly and do they, in fact, really know what’s there? Or have they misinterpreted any of their data or have they not collected data that needs to be collected in order to tell the whole story? That’s the—much of what I do, yeah.
DT: Do you often find that you’re brought in on a case where the real objection, for example, in the BFI case is the smell, which is clearly above ground and it’s air related, but the statute only gives you standing or provides injunctions and penalties and so on if it involves groundwater.
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GR: Yeah, I—yeah, I—that—I think that—that sometimes happens. Yeah. That sometimes happens because, you know, in a lot of cases, groundwater’s protected because people depend on it as a source of water. So it’s a—a tool community groups can use to force somebody to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise do. So yeah, that’s—that’s correct.
DT: Something else that comes to mind when you talk about the BFI case is that the nonprofit group were neighbors and did you find that that gave you credibility because they knew it intimately? Or did it make authorities sort of dismiss them as an (?) group?
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GR: Hmm. You know, thinking about the hearing and, you know, you have a—a hearing officer who’s guy who actually can judge. You know, when—when you have people who—who are coming up and testifying under oath about what they saw or what’s happened to them, I—I think that that does give them a lot of credibility. Yeah. I—I think it’s—it—it’s important.
DT: Well, let’s move on. Were there some other early cases that you took on after BFI that involved groundwater contamination in Texas?
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GR: Well, probably, I think be—yeah, before I got involved in BFI, there was the Kelly Air Force Base and there I was just involved as a member of the restoration advisory board that the Air Force had set up. And as—as I mentioned earlier, that was a case where the Air Force had acknowledged some contamination did exist, but in looking
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at the documents they—the work they’d done, you know, it became clear that there was a—a lot of places that might be contaminated, but they hadn’t looked at. And so that—a—a lot of the—the thrust of—you know, I—working with the folks that lived around—Armando Quintanilla, who I think you’ve talked to, or Yolanda Johnson, Southwest Workers Union was involved. What—what our thrust was is saying look, there are things
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that you haven’t looked at that are probably important. Please look at them. Course, there was a lot of resistance to it. No, no, no. This—you know, our ex—you know, once again, our experts have told us what’s going on. You know, we don’t need to listen to what you say, but finally, they did it. Finally, enough pressure was brought to bear to where they went and looked and when they did look, they found that the problem was
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much—probably ten to twenty times larger than they had thought it was. And one—one of the things that bothers me a lot about this, at the time they had representatives from the EPA looking at this, representatives from the state regulators looking at this and they weren’t concerned about this issue. They were just going along with the Air Force, essentially saying well, there’s no big deal here. You know, we a—we know what the problem is and we really don’t have to do anymore work. So there was a case of a
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citizens’ group pounding for years, talking to congressmen, talking to state legislators, talking to city officials, keeping up pressure and not quitting, that forced the Air Force to look and now clean up. Yeah, and that’s what they’re doing now.
DT: Well, do you think that the citizens group’s concern for this mess were discounted somehow because it was a Hispanic community, not Anglo? Or that it was a poorer community and not a richer?
[DW] Or—or perhaps, would it have been different if Kelly Air Force Base had gone to the north side of town?
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GR: Yeah. Yeah. I—I—I—I believe that. You know, I used to tell people if—if these contaminants were present in Myeloma Heights, those guys would be on their knees with straws, sucking it out of the ground. You know, the—the—the—the fact that it—it happened in a—a poor community, a community that’s more than 90 percent Hispanic
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has a lot to do with it. And I’m—and although some people—there is a—a little bit of racism there, but I think that the—the big issue there is the fact that it’s a poor community. They didn’t have the clout. Nobody that lived in that community was on the board of a bank, for example, or was rich enough to bring the—bring resources to put on
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a lot of pressure. I think the fact that they’re poor was more important than the fact that they’re Hispanic.
DT: But how did they collect resources to hire you?
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GR: Most—most of the work I did, that was free. I—I was paid some when there were hearings and I acted as a—as an expert witness in some instances. But—but for the most part, it was an operation that was run without money. It was just run amongst the
community members. Armando happened to know Frank Tejeda, who was Congressman
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from there—that helped—and some of the other politicians. Yolanda Johnson knew some of the politicians so that helped. But there was—it was really done with, I won’t say no money, but with very little money.
DT: Why do you work for little money in a case like that?
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GR: Yeah. Good question. Well, I—I guess there are maybe a couple reasons. First of all, you know, I’m—I’m a—I’m very lucky guy. I went to school, studied groundwater hydrology, very interested in contaminant transport and I love doing it. And so I looked at—when I first got involved in Kelly, I didn’t know Armando, Yolanda, anybody, but I said well, here’s a—here’s a—a—a—something where they do have a
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little groundwater contamination going on and I’m interested in these things, so I’m going to become a member of the restoration advisory board. I got into it like that. So just my interest, I like doing it. Then after I got to know some of the people there and see how they getting just mistreated—they were being mistreated by the government, by the
Air Force, I decided that yeah, I’m going to do what I can to help these folks. And then
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Armando sued the Air Force for contaminating his property and he got a lawyer who would work pro bono. And the lawyer called me and asked if I’d be willing to work as an expert witness—or as an expert, pro bono, and I said sure. You know, I’d be willing to do that. And then—then it went on from there. It—it’s kind of interesting what
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happened there, because Armando, who at that time, lived maybe half a mile west of the
base, you know, in the direction of contaminate plume said I think you contaminated my property. I think you contaminated the groundwater under my house. And the Air Force says number one, no, we didn’t. First of all, we didn’t contaminate the water under your
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house and second, there’s not even any water under your house. And we got these experts that we hired from the East Coast that will tell—that told us there’s no water under your house and even if there was, it wouldn’t be contaminated. So that’s about the point when I got—got involved. And I looked at these experts’ reports and they were nonsense and these are well-known guys. This is the—I can’t think of their names at the moment, but anyway. So I looked at their report and I told Armando’s lawyer, nonsense.
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They have no basis for saying this. And so we went before the judge in a hearing and they got the Air Force saying no contamination and no groundwater and they got me saying there’s groundwater there. There’s no reason for them to say there’s not. And then plus, because there is—there’s a reasonable chance it’s been contaminated because the groundwater’s moving from the base towards Armando’s house and on the base, we
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know there are these contaminants. So the judge is sitting there with one expert saying it’s black and the other expert saying it’s white. So he says drill a well in Armando’s house and tell me what you find. So the Air Force and us, Armando, put a—a few thousand dollars together—we had to pay for half of it—and we drilled a well in Armando’s front yard. We hit groundwater, much to their disappointment, and we sampled it. They took their sample, we took our sample and we both found chlorinated
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solvent, the same stuff coming from—that—that they had on base. And at that point, the Air Force says okay, well, maybe there is groundwater there. But those contaminants, they’re not coming from the base, you know, they—they’re coming from somewhere else. So it’s that sort of thing, you know, you run into all the time. O—often—often somebody who’s contaminated groundwater will say first of all, there are no
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contaminants, you know, coming off our property and even if there was, there’s no usable groundwater there, even though there may be people nearby have wells that depend on it. And then even if—if that’s the case—if we do find contaminants, well, they’re really not in harmful concentrations, you know, and they—they go this whole—the—through this
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whole series of things. First of all, nothing’s happened, but then once something’s happened, well, but it’s not that bad and then well, okay, that happened, but it’s not really like this, you know, and you just go down this track. You know, it’s something that commonly—commonly goes on.
[DW] Do they then counterattack your analysis of it? In other words, that you attacked their experts, do they then launch an attack on the people’s expert?
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GR: Yeah. Yeah, it’s—you know, and it happens in two ways. You know, if a—okay, I had—if—if I look at what they’ve done and decide it’s inadequate, I attack their experts. Say your experts did not do a good job. And then they’ll turn around and say no, our experts did a wonderful job, you’re full of crap. You know, you don’t know what
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you’re talking about. So often these things will go on in the press, you know, back and forth. You know, you’re no good, no, you’re no good, blah, blah, blah. But where it gets a—I guess more focused is when you—there’s a lawsuit involved or a hearing involved and you go through the whole deposition process. And you then—then I’ll say well, these are my reasons for believing this and their experts will say these are my reasons for believing this. And then you actually go try the hearing or the trial and it’s often a battle
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of experts. And that’s—you know, in—in one way, that’s too bad because you would think if you have experts, they would agree, you know, on what’s going—at least on some of the fundamental things. There are some things where interpretation might be involved, but you’d hope they’d agree on fundamental things. The—the thing about community groups, well, they’re at a great disadvantage, of course, with lack of money
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and they don’t have experts. A—and one of the ways it hurts them is if it does come to a hearing, if the other side has all the experts coming up and saying things are such and such, the community group has nobody to counter that. So often, I’ll be in the case—in a situation where, again, maybe they’re saying it’s black and I’m saying it’s white, but at least the judge w—will see there’s both sides and we may cancel each other out. But at
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least the other side has been cancelled out and everything they say doesn’t go in the record undisputed. So I think often that’s the—that’s an important role I can play when I get involved with technical things—or with community groups.
DT: With situations where a citizens group can’t afford to hire an expert, do you ever see much success from things like the bucket brigade, where I think they tried in the Channelview area to try and use citizens to monitor, to do testing, to try and meet expert standards although they’re not experts.
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GR: Ah. That—that can be—that can happen.
(misc.)
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GR: Just to pick up on what you—you just said there, David, you know, what do these things mean? I think when I—when I work for, you know, corporations, you know, there you’re under—there—there the culture is, hey, I’m a technical guy and I’m providing technical expertise and, you know, the—maybe the—the social consequences of what
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I’m doing or have to say, that’s really not my business. Other people take care of that, you know. Now I’ve come to the conclusion that, you know, that’s not right, you know. I think as a technical person—you know, we’re not like lawyers where we’re supposed to take one side and pull out every argument, use every trick you can to say—so that your client wins. That’s—we’re not supposed to be like that, although too many of us act like
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that. I think technical people—scientists, engineers and those things—I think that our real—our first duty is to society. It’s our job to, to the best of our ability, tell people what’s going on and keep in mind how it affects people, how what we do affects people. I think that’s—that’s an obligation we have that in a lot of instances is—is ignored. It’s ignored by too many people in the technical field. I want—that’s how—otherwise
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how do you get people to make nerve gas, you know, for example and things. They have to, I think, sort of ignore that unless they think somehow nerve gas can be good.
DT: Let me ask you, you say you have an obligation to society in general. Do you feel like there are good reasons to have sacrifice zones, so that the vast majority of us will have access to all the good things that solvents, for example, provide and if some would have extra costs, well, that’s just all part of the whole cost benefit ratio. And if on balance, most people have a greater good, then that’s a good balance to strike.
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GR: N—no. I don’t think so. I—I can’t think of any instances right now where I’d agree with that. I think that, especially in this country, you know, we got—we’re rich. We can pretty much do what we want to do and we can use things that, in some cases, are dangerous, like solvents, in a way to where we don’t harm anyone. We can do that if we decide to do it. All we have to do is decide to do it.
DT: Another question that comes to my mind is just comparing the two instances you’ve been talking about, Kelly and BFI. In one case, the defendant, or, you know, the responsible party, is a corporation—BFI. Another instance, it’s the government, or at least the military. Do you think one gets more of a presumption of innocence or one has more authority in the sense that it makes a more difficult opponent?
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GR: I don’t know about a presumption of innocence, especially when you get to the stage where you’re going to a hearing or you’re going to court. I haven’t seen that. But what makes it easier to fight a government agency is that they do have a—a—a corporation doesn’t have any obligation of a public. BFI, you know, they keep
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everything secret, none of your business. At least we can—when you’re dealing with a government agency, you have a right to see a lot of the records that they have. So in that way, it make—it does make it easier to—to—to deal with those folks.
DT: Another aspect about Kelly that occurs to me is that you were on the restoration taskforce committee.
00:36:52
GR: Restoration Advisory Board.
DT: Advisory board. Can you talk a little bit about the technology of trying to clean up an aquifer once it’s contaminated? And then the whole question of how clean is clean?
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GR: Ah, yes. That’s tough. Let’s see, the technology of cleaning up an aquifer. At Kelly, they contaminated many square miles with chlorinated solvents. The most—maybe the most straightforward way to clean that up is simply pump out the contaminated groundwater, treat it and then inject it back into the aquifer. Now th—the problem with things like chlorinated solvents and many contaminants is that you just
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can’t remove water from the aquifer, clean it, put it back and have it be clean because a lot of the contaminants adhere to the solid material in the aquifer. They’re absorbed. So that you may have to flush the aquifer with many volumes of water before you clean it up. And of course, this can be extremely expensive, you know. Talking to—at Kelly, if you wanted to clean up the aquifer, remove all the contaminants, say, so that people could
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drink that water, you’d be talking many, many millions of dollars. A few million dollars would hardly get you started. You’re probably talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Now what the Air Force has done, recognizing how expensive it will be, is they’re promoting an idea that does have some technical merit of natural attenuation. And what they’re saying is if we wait a while, the aquifer will clean itself up. A couple
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things will happen. One is the aquifer—as water moves from the aquifer—through the aquifer, contaminants will get flushed out and they’ll be dispersed and so concentrations will decrease. And also the contaminants themselves will be degraded, primarily through bacterial action so the contaminants will break down. And that—that’s true, all that happens. But then you say well, okay, how long—how long is this going to take to happen? And that’s where we really don’t have a good handle on that because those
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contaminants, some of them have been in the aquifer for decades and they’re still not
broken down. They’re still there in concentrations that are high enough to where you couldn’t drink the water. So does that mean that the folks out there, whose mainly property values are being affected because right now no one is drinking that water, although it does represent a threat to the Edwards, but that’s another issue. But does—so
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does that pe—mean that those people just have to wait for decades until the stuff is gone? I—I don’t—I don’t go along with that. I think that since the Air Force made the mess, the Air Force is obligated to clean it up. And clean it up in a timely fashion, not wait several decades or perhaps even longer for the stuff to disappear on its own.
DT: We’ve been talking about BFI and Kelly Air Force Base and the contamination from those two sites and, as I understand it, most of those were relatively short lived in comparison with radio nuclides and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Pantex and some of the issues you ran into there where there was concern, I assume, about radioactive contamination as well as solvents.
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GR: Yeah, well, at Pantex, I really haven’t been involved with the radio nuclide issue and although there’s some radio nuclide contamination there, it—it’s not nearly as severe as some of the other contaminants that exist. Pa—Pantex was the first place where I ran into a lot of explosives because, you know, they—yeah, at Pantex, they disassemble nuclear weapons and all that stuff. But it’s—in order to set off the nuclear weapon, you
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have to have a conventional explosion first and so they work with these explosives like RDX and HMX and TNT. And that’s what the—a lot of the groundwater contamination of Pantex is—is from those explosives. So yeah, I really haven’t dealt with radio nuclides there.
DT: Did you have any kind of special situation there in it being kind of a national security issue and base there that they wouldn’t allow you to do as much exploration as you might typically be able to do?
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GR: Yeah. I haven’t personally run into that, but I know that some of their contractors, were actually ultimately working for Pantex, weren’t able to go into some areas and do what they want to do because of national security concerns. What—what I have—what—what I’ve dealt with—well, I guess I should back up and say that I’ve been on a couple of tours of Pantex, both outside and inside the facility, and pretty much got to
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see what I wanted to see in terms of contaminant source and those sorts of things. Course, there are these areas at Pantex, I think I mentioned earlier, they look like real high security prisons. Several rows of just concertina barbwire, you know, between
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barbwire fences and then on the other side of the fence, there’s more barbwire. You know, that really high security that, you know, you—I certainly couldn’t get into. You know, I wasn’t given permission to go in there. But as far as the—the groundwater contamination issues that I’m dealing with, that wasn’t that important.
DT: Something else I’ve heard about Pantex is that there’s this interesting relationship between the operator of the site, that I think is BWXT.
00:43:06 – 2336
GR: BWXT, yeah.
DT: And then the ultimate client, which I guess is the federal government.
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GR: Department of Energy, yeah.
DT: Department of Energy. Can you talk about whatever tensions or cooperation you saw between those two?
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GR: Not—not a—not a lot, David. I—as far as I can tell, they work—you know, they work together and BWXT works for DOE. Now as far as dealing with people on Pantex, most of the people I deal with are from the contractor rather than from the DOE. You
know, they’re—they’re the people that do all the fieldwork, install the wells, sample the
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wells, write the reports. So that’s who I deal with and I only d—have dealt with a few DOE people there.
DT: Is it a situation where it’s a lot of self-reporting and do you find that kind of data reliable?
00:44:15 – 2336
GR: Yeah, that’s—that’s an interesting issue that always comes up because, generally, you have self-reporting. What’ll happen when there’s a contamination issue anywhere, the person responsible for the contamination will hire consultants to look at the problem, write a report and then essentially give it to the regulators. Here’s what’s happening.
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Our consultants say this is happening. So tha—tha—that’s self-reporting and I have, off the top of my head—well, I guess I can’t say that. It’s pretty unusual for something that’s written in a report to be an outright lie, for example, at least that I know of—that I have detected. Like if someone said we sampled this well and we found so much tritium in it, you know, generally that’s pretty reliable because, you know, they got a laboratory
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that’s doing it. I mean, in order to tell a lie, you just got to get too many people involved, so I—I don’t run into it that much, but what you do run into is ignoring issues a lot. Like don’t look—I—wh—don’t look at this. You know, yeah, here—here’s the problem we acknowledge, but we really don’t want to get into this. And that’s what happened at Pantex. You know, at Pantex, you have two aquifer systems there. One is relatively shallow; it’s a perched aquifer system, down two to three hundred feet below land
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surface. That’s heavily contaminated and everybody acknowledges that—the DOE, the regulators. This thing’s heavily contaminated. Now that’s used by a few people, but not very many. It’s pretty—it—it—it’s not very extensive. It doesn’t go much beyond Pantex. But then below that, you have the Ogallala, the regional Ogallala, which is an
extremely important aquifer, not only in the country, but there in the Pantex area, in the
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panhandle. That people use it for irrigation, they get their drinking water from. And the DOE’s line and their contractor’s line was yeah, this perched aquifer’s heavily contaminated, but the underlying Ogallala’s fine. And so when I began to work on Pantex, that’s what I started looking at. Well, they say the Ogallala’s fine, is that true? So I went looking at their data and it turns out that in the past, they had found
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contaminants in the Ogallala that were almost certainly associated with Pantex, but they didn’t tell anybody about them. They had them—they had the data in reports, but they—when they—they had the data, but when they wrote up their reports as to what’s going on, they didn’t mention it. So that’s when we started raising questions. Hey, you’re
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actually finding these things in the Ogallala, but you really didn’t tell anybody about it. How come? So then we looked at more—more of their data and we found that they had found quite a few hits—sporadic, maybe not real high concentrations—but hits of things like these funny explosives that wouldn’t be coming from, you know, anywhere else. I mean, who has RDX in their garage? I don’t think anybody has that, you know. Then
00:47:48 – 2336
you’d—solvents that are related to Pantex and that sort of thing. So a lot of the work I’ve done with Pantex is—is working with the folks there to kind of, say, pry open this portion of the problem. Say, yeah, we oh—we all know that this shallow aquifer’s heavily contaminated, but there’s also very good reason to believe that the underlying Ogallala
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has been affected by Pantex, too. A lot of resistance from DOE on that. Finally, they’re beginning to admit, yeah, well, maybe there’s a little bit in the aquifer, but it’s really not a big deal. But maybe a little bit.
DT: What with you starting to find out from your contamination study that the original understanding of the Ogallala is almost a fossil aquifer that doesn’t get any recharge at all is maybe not true?
00:48:41 – 2336
GR: Yeah, yeah. Not only from working at Pantex, but working from a couple other jobs where I’ve been involved with the Ogallala. Certainly if the contaminants can get down there, you know, that’s carried down by water, right? So I don’t know about the Ogallala as a whole, maybe how old that water is, if it is indeed fossil water, but certainly there are plenty of places within the Ogallala where the water’s relatively recent. We
00:49:10 – 2336
know it’s recent because we find manmade contaminants there that haven’t been around but 50, 60 years. So water’s getting down there, at least in a few decades rather than centuries or millennia.
DT: In a place like Pantex or Kelly, for that matter, are you finding that contaminants are coming from practices that were common 40, 50 years ago when folks weren’t aware of groundwater contamination? Or are they contaminants coming from current practices that have continued despite concerns about contamination?
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GR: On these bigger sites, these big government facilities and big, you know, industrial facilities, a lot of the practices that cause contamination in the past have been stopped. So a lot of the contamination we see is a relic. Unfortunately with groundwater, it can stay there for decades or longer after—after the source has been cut off. But there
00:50:12 – 2336
are still a lot of things that happen today that are currently contaminating groundwater.
Something that a lot of attention hasn’t been devoted to, but I think we need to devout—devote more attention to is the operation of sewage treatment plants. Those contaminate groundwater. Non-point source pollution is becoming a bigger issue, especially here in
00:50:36 – 2336
San Antonio where, you know, we have a—we depend on the Edwards aquifer for our water and the northern part of the county is where the Edwards limestone outcrops—that’s where water enters the aquifer. And there’s a lot of development, urbanization going on there. So you have all these non-point sources of pollution—fuels, pesticides, solvents, you know, for household use and industrial use, that are finding their way into
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the aquifer. So maybe we’ve dealt with some of the real big and most obvious sources of groundwater contamination and stopped a lot of them, but there still are plenty of more sources that we’re beginning to find out also affect groundwater—contaminate groundwater.
DT: And I gather that there’s a difference between contaminating, as you say, Edwards aquifer, which is a source of water for many people, or the Ogallala and contaminating a perched aquifer, where people aren’t relying on it for their drinking water. I mean, that is the case, at least, of Mr. Quintanilla. He was probably eventually able to tap into city water supplies that were relatively uncontaminated. But what about a situation like Pantex where you’ve got a rural landowner and he’s got a well and he doesn’t have municipal water service? How do you balance that problem versus, you know, a community where there may be a thousand families that are affected, like in the Kelly Air Force Base. But they have alternatives.
00:52:15 – 2336
GR: Yeah. Well, in cases where you make a rural area where water’s contaminated, what’ll often be done is the person that’s contaminated the groundwater or affected the ground—maybe pumped it. You know, pumped it away or pumped it down below levels where folks’ wells are. They will provide water—water supply to those folks, either pipe it in or truck it in for them, that sort of thing. You—you see that happen pretty
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commonly. That’s hap—I—I believed that’s happened at Pantex, where some people were relying on the perched aquifer, which is now highly contaminated, and Pantex has provided them with an alternate source of water.
DT: And folks that were relying on a contaminated source, have you started to hear of health problems related to the water they drank?
00:53:06 – 2336
GR: Sure. Now this is something that I’m—I’m not an expert in these health issues, but even at Kelly, where very few people—well, people used to drink the water there. They—they no longer do. But there’s a lot of people who live close to that base who are very sick and they believe it’s because of Kelly. Not necessarily because of the
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groundwater contamination but because of the air contamination and soil contamination and surface water contamination that’s occurred in the past. You know, what happened at—you said—you haven’t spoken to Yolanda Johnson, is that correct? Well, her family lives—you can say, throw two stones and hit Kelly’s fence. And they live on the—at—
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just off the runway, where planes land. Here’s Yolanda Johnson’s house and then planes land like this at Kelly. One of the things that would happen to them during the Vietnam War where there was a lot of traffic is they’d be outside and the kids would be outside and this stuff would come down from the sky. And it would get on the kids and get on the laundry and stuff and they figured it was fuel from these planes. And so we, on
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numerous times, brought this up to the Air Force, saying look, what’s happening here is we think that the planes are jettisoning fuel before they land. They were jettisoning fuel and—and this stuff would rain down on the people there. No, no, no. We never did that. Never—they brought in experts from D.C., Air Force never, never did that. Well, it
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wasn’t till after a few years, we found out that we weren’t using the right term. They didn’t call it jettisoning fuel, that was misting fuel. Yes, they misted fuel on their approach and they did that, but they’re sure that it all evaporated before any of it hit the ground, so you know, Mrs. Johnson and her kids wouldn’t have been affected by it, you
00:55:20 – 2336
know. But sometimes—you know, so that they don’t—they don’t outright lie, you know. But if you don’t happen to ask the right question or you don’t know the magic word—misting, not jettisoning—you’ll—you—they won’t tell you what happened. And so, yeah, there’s some problems that Yolanda’s kids had that she believed were caused by
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this. She has a lot of health problems that she thinks are related to the base. And it wasn’t just that misting of fuel. You know, floods would occur and stuff off of some of the landfills they had, water would move into the neighborhood and sit for days sometimes. So, yeah, a—a lot of people think that their health problems have been caused by Kelly and—and other facilities. But how do you prove that in court? You know, what they’ll tell you, oh, you’re sick? Really. You think it came from the base.
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Yeah. You ever—you ever pump gas? You ever put pesticides on your lawn? This, that and the other. Do you smoke? One thing they’ll talk about with all this liver cancer around Kelly—ah, they’re big drinkers. People down there are big drinkers. Sure, they got liver problems, you know. So trying to tie health problems to a—an environmental problem is really difficult. Really difficult to do, at least in court.
DT: I guess another difficulty that a lot of these citizens’ groups face, and I was thinking of Kelly and Pantex, that both Kelly and Pantex are big employers.
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GR: Yeah.
DT: And it takes a lot of courage to say something that might jeopardize your job and I was wondering if you’ve ever found that in the clients that you’ve had in these nonprofit groups? That they had concerns that they really were a little wary about expressing because they were worried about their job or their relative’s job.
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GR: Sure. Yeah. It’s very seldom you’ll get somebody that works at one of these facilities to come out and tell you what they know because they’re worried about their job. And you know, that—that—that’s—that’s a legitimate worry and something that, I think, citizens’ groups worry about sometimes is, especially if they’re—if they’re doing
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something that might result in a facility being shut down, how are they going to affect those people that are working there? The people that are working there, you know, they’re—they’re just normal people like you and me. They’re making a living and you’re out here doing something that might cause them to lose their job. You know, that’s—you—you got to—you—you got to worry about those things. And then, I think
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that’s why it’s very important that you don’t go off making wild claims. You know, that anything—you got to make sure that what you’re talking about is true. I mean, certainly you wouldn’t want to go make a bunch of wild claims and—and then, as a result of that, you know, have a place shut down and people lose their jobs for something that turned out to be not a real problem.
DT: Have you ever found that you’ve been wrong?
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GR: Yeah. I mean, I’m—I’m—I’m wrong a lot.
DT: How do you deal with that? You know, whether it’s an omission or an error?
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GR: Yeah. You—you make mistakes. I’m trying to think of a—of an instance where—where that’s occurred. O—often, you know, there are plenty of them. For some reason, sitting here, I just can’t bring one up now, but there are plenty of them. But I think the im—the important thing is, when you make a mistake, you got to acknowledge it. Oh, I can think of one. This happened at BFI. In—at BFI, we sampled water and we
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found a lot of cadmium in the water. That’s something that you’d expect to see coming off a landfill, you know, and so I wasn’t surprised to see cadmium. And—but it turned out that when I did some other work, I found out that the equipment I was using might’ve been the source of cadmium. So I just had to say, we can’t—okay. We can’t rely on the cadmium data that I got because of this problem. You—you have to be honest, you
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know. And—but when you make a mistake, like you will, and you discover it, you just have to be honest about it, you know, and say okay, I made a mistake. But I said he was wrong.
[End of Reel 2336]
DT: George, when we left off on the last tape, we were talking about mistakes, omissions that sometimes get made. I think another kind of related issue is places where you just don’t know, where you’re operating, it’s a very limited in your detection and the results are uncertain. How do you deal with those areas?
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GR: Yeah. Well, that’s the con—at Pantex, that’s an issue that comes up with the contamination of the Ogallala because what we have are maybe a thousand instances where contaminants have been detected in the Ogallala, but at very low concentrations. So that—that’s a big problem. You know, these are low concentrations. It—it may be a
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real hit, as we—we call them hits. It might not. Of course, Pantex and other folks that are the folk—you know, maybe the responsible party would—that’s in their interest to discount this. Oh, that’s nothing. So small, you know, it’s probably—it’s all probably laboratory error, probably really isn’t there. And in a lot of cases, they’re right. But—but my attitude towards these kind of things is if it’s laboratory, that’s—a—a number of
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things can happen. The lab analysis can be wrong, or when you’re actually collecting the sample, you can inadvertently contaminate the sample. That can happen. So what I ask when—when—when somebody makes that argument, yes, we detected this here, but we don’t think it’s really there, there’s a couple things to do. To ask them—and—and first of all, do you have any documentation to show that this is a wrong analysis. The kind of documentation they might have is in the sampling records, maybe there’s something in
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there that indicates that the sample was contaminated and if so, fine. When you collect samples, you’ll often bring blanks—collect blanks or bring blanks with you. One of the things you do is you collect an equipment blank and—because your sampling equipment could be contaminated. So you’re out there collecting samples, then you use the same equipment that you used to collect a sample to sample a—a—a—a vessel of pure water.
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Laboratory that’s—water that’s been purified in the laboratory and we know there’s nothing in there. So if there’s something on your equipment that introduced contaminants, we’ll pick it up there. There are other blanks you’d bring with you sometimes, especially volatile contaminants can seep into the sample so you’ll being what they call trip blanks. And if they’re a volatile contaminant, they’ll show up in that trip blank. So I look at those records, say, is there anything there? If there’s something
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there, then I’ll say okay, probably a bad analysis. Same thing with the laboratory. The laboratory goes through a lot of QA and QC steps to ensure that its analyses are good.
DT: This is quality assurance and quality control.
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GR: Yeah, yeah. Quality assurance, quality control. So I’ll look at the laboratory records and often the reagents that the laboratory’s using in the analysis will be contaminated. And so if they’re contaminated with the contaminants we’re looking at here, again, okay, you’re probably right. That contaminant probably isn’t there. But if go look through all that stuff and there—you can’t find anything to indicate the analysis
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is bad, then I say it’s a good analysis. You know, so there are good reasons for tossing out analyses, especially at these low concentrations. But unless you have a good reason, you know, you—you got no business throwing it out.
DT: Maybe you’d keep to a precautionary principle, but you’d rather err on the side of protecting health as opposed to sort of…
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GR: Well, no, I would—I would rather look at all the available information and then use that to come up with your answer, you know. Either it—something’s there or it’s not. Look at all the evidence and then make your decision.
DT: I guess another place where you might get some uncertainty is from the numerical model that you use. How confident are you in their prediction?
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GR: Well, it’s kind of like, you know, Winston Churchill said democracy’s a terrible form of government, but it’s the best there is, you know. That’s the same thing with models. Mod—there’s a lot of problems with groundwater models, especially when you’re trying to predict things that are going to happen decades in the future. Yet, they’re the best tools we have, so I think we need to use them. But there’s a lot of gains that a modeler can play with a model. If a modeler wants the model to predict results that lean
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this way rather than this way, there are plenty of things they can do to do that. And that’s what, in my opinion happened at Alcoa, the Alcoa plant in—in Milam County. This gets—this story gets too complicated to explain it all here, but basically what happens is Alcoa’s plant is powered by a smelter. That smelter uses lignite that they mine locally to power the smelter. In order to mine the lignite, they got to dewater—pump the water out. So Alcoa has the idea, well, instead of just disposing of this water, why don’t we sell it?
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And we’ll sell it to San Antonio. It gets more complicated because some of the lignite property is owned by the city of San Antonio and all that. But they decided that they wanted to sell this water to our water utility, SAWS, San Antonio Water System. So they had a—a consultant, HDR, go out there and make predictions of how this was going to affect water levels in the Sims Borough aquifer. Now it turns out that there are a lot of people in the area, it’s a mostly rural area, but a lot of people depend on the Sims
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Borough aquifer for their source of domestic water. They have wells. So SAWS hired HDR to go out and say give us a study that tell us how our pumping would affect water levels. HDR did this study and said oh, it’s going to have very little effect at all. You know, we—we ran this model which shows that water levels are going to drop only this much and it’s going to be very close to where we’re pumping. The cone of decompression’s not going to spread too far. So we’re not going to affect very many people when we do this. I looked at the modeling that they did and there were a lot of things wrong with the model. I think so many things were wrong with that model that I
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don’t think—I think it ought to be just thrown away. You shouldn’t consider those results in making any kind of decisions. Things like this. The amount of recharge or the amount of rainfall that occurs is—in the area is like 20, 30 inches, something like that. In some of the cells of the model that were providing recharge to the aquifer and, of course, would affect how much draw down there is when you’re pumping, they had more recharge on average than rainfall. And generally, you know, when you’re talking about recharging an aquifer, if you got five percent of annual rainfall recharging the aquifer,
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that’s a pretty healthy amount. And in some of the portions of their model, they had more—substantially more than the average annual rainfall recharging the aquifer. Other things—one thing you do when you evaluate a model, especially when you’re trying to predict the future, is say well, how well does it predict the past? We know what happened in the past; can we make it match up with that? No. Where we know on some properties that, say, 100 feet of draw down had occurred, their model predicted 20, 50 feet of draw down occurring. So it was substantially underestimating the amount of draw
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down that would occur. Other goofy results the mine came up with, in some instances where they were pumping from one of the aquifers—because it’s a stacked aquifer situation—Carrizo-Simms, Burrough and some other water bearing units—in other instances, they said we’re going to increase the amount of pumpage from the Carrizo from what it is now to this amount and over the period of the model, water levels actually rose in the Carrizo, according to the model, rather than declined. This is garbage. This is garbage. And in a lot of instances, you know, people make honest mistakes and you got
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to say well, yeah, we all screw up, so this was an error, you ought to redo it. But this is—y—you don’t run into many cases where—I don’t run into many cases where I’m comfortable saying this contractor was told that you’re going to come up with this kind of result and they twisted the knobs and did what they did in the model in order to come up with the results that the client wanted. I’m—to me, this is a pretty clear case of that.
DT: Being such a technical field, from the samplings to the calibration and modeling of predictions, is it sort of a black box, a dark science, where when you go to the court, they don’t understand? They just think it’s—well, it’s two experts that disagree?
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GR: Yes, un—until you get these real obvious things like this. I mean, obvious things were recharge more than rainfall, you know, looking at what happened in the past. But m—modeling’s funny. Modeling’s funny for a number of reasons. Most hydrologists don’t get into modeling because it’s—when you get right down to mod—modeling’s
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really applied mathematics when you get right down to it. But, you know, it’s just like driving a car. You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. You don’t have to understand the model in order to run it, you know. Most people can run these models and that’s where we run into a lot of problems. People who don’t know what they’re doing, running models and coming up with results. Then you go tell com—people that we got this fancy model that said this is what’s going to happen. People don’t understand the model, so even if they really don’t believe the results, how do they attack it, you know?
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How do they say no, your model’s no good? But I think that intelligent laymen can attack the results of a model and this—some of the work I did at Pantex was devoted to sort of writing up a—a list of things that an average person can look at when presented with the results of a model, just to try to judge is this model giving reasonable results or not? And one of the things is to look at the extent of their model. You know, at—at—at that Pantex, you know, you have to draw limits around your model. Say here’s what
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we’re considering, but do they consider everything that’s relevant, you know? Do their boun—do the boundaries go out far enough to where if there’s a source of potential contamination here or a place where there’s a lot of pumpage, is that included in their model? And did—did they take that into account? Another thing is can they predict the past? If they’re saying here’s what going to happen 30 years from now and you know that just happened 10 years ago, ask them to run their model. Can your model reproduce
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these results? See it’s—s o yeah, you know, there’s a lot of this black box aspect to it, but it doesn’t have to be that way, you know. Not only can other hydrologists and judges understand it, but laymen can understand it and laymen can do things with a little bit of hints as to what to look at to determine whether or not the modeling results are reasonable.
DT: We’ve had a chance to talk about BFI and the situation at Kelly Air Force Base and Pantex and Alcoa. Another case you’ve been working on recently is down in Kingsville, where they’ve been doing in situ uranium mining and I was wondering if you could tell about the issues that get raised there?
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GR: Yeah. What they’re doing at Kingsville is they’re—like you said, in situ uranium mining and the uranium ore at Kingsville is four or five hundred feet below land surface. So it’s impractical to excavate it or anything like that. What they do is they install wells—and of course, this is in an aquifer. The ore is in an aquifer. They install wells and they inject what are called solute. In this case, it’s just water mixed with oxygen. The solutes react with the ore in a way that releases the uranium, so the uranium is solubalized and goes into the groundwater. Then over here, you got another well. This well’s injecting the solute and this well’s pumping out water. So the idea is you inject, release the
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uranium in the ore and pump it out from this well and then you, you know, you send it to a plant where you recover the uranium. And you know, it’s a—an interesting idea and it—it works to a certain extent. Certainly they release uranium, they pump it out. But along with the uranium, which is a—of course, a problem in itself—you don’t want groundwater to contain much uranium—it also releases other things in the uranium ore and at li—Kingsville, these are some (?) and selenium and sulfides and sulfate and iron and all sorts of things. Well, at—at Kingsville, they’ve been doing this for a number of
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years, stopping and starting, though, because they’ve had both legal troubles and I—I—I take it, financial troubles. And they are mining in a—a series of things that they call authorization areas—production authorization areas. So they got Area One, Area Two and Area Three, all of which they’ve already done some mining. Now as you can imagine, you’re releasing this uranium and all the other stuff, so when you’re done, the groundwater’s pretty crapped up. It’s contaminated with a bunch of stuff. So the state
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requires the mine to clean that stuff up. And the mine has been trying to clean that stuff up, but not very successfully so what’s happened at Kingsville is the cleanup has been thus far unsuccessful, so they’ve left an area which didn’t have very good groundwater quality to begin with because the—the uranium ore body did naturally leave some things. Now it has even worse water quality than it had. Folks who live around the area are concerned that they may not extract all of the—all of the mining fluids. You know, some of these can get away on excursions and go beyond the mine boundary and affect 00:17:39 – 2337
people’s wells because people have wells in the area. They drink that water. I looked into this issue and although there are high concentrations of contaminants in some people’s wells, I—I don’t think those are due to the mine. I think they’re naturally occurring. At least, in all the cases that I’ve looked at. The main reason for believing that—there are a number of reasons—but the main reason for believing that is the wells that contain high concentrations of contaminants now contained high concentrations of contaminants before mining began. So obviously, before mining began, that wasn’t the
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fault of a mine then and there’s no reason to believe that it’s the fault of a mine now. In the future—in the future, however, after the mining folks go away, they quit pumping, water levels—the natural hydraulic gradient is reestablished, that’s where you could potentially have a great deal of trouble if you don’t clean it all up. If you leave a mess
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there, under the natural—under natural hydraulic—hydrologic conditions, these contaminants can migrate in the groundwater, move beyond the mine boundary and then maybe affect people’s wells in the future. But until now, I haven’t seen any evidence that wells have been affected—or domestic wells have been affected.
DT: Well, you’re talking just now about the cleanup in the Kingsville area and I guess you’re also doing cleanup work at Kelly and Pantex and many other places, but to what extent do you think there’s kind of a shell game, where you pump out the contaminants and then you have contaminants, but you’ve got to find a new place to put them that’s more secure than the last place they were, which was liberating in the aquifer. What do you do then? What’s the next step?
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GR: Yeah, well—there—there are two—two issues there because cleanup is very difficult in—in the three—the three places you just mentioned. Kelly—cleanup’s been going on there for a number of years. Still a great deal of contamination. I’m currently evaluating the effectiveness of Pantex’s cleanup of the perched aquifer. I wrote a preliminary report on that a couple months ago and my preliminary report said it doesn’t look like the cleanup here has been successful at all. In the vast majority of cases where you have contaminant concentrations in wells before cleanup began and then now that
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cleanups been going on several years, concentrations haven’t changed appreciably. And at Kingsville, at the uranium mine, although they have cleaned up a lot of the problem, it almost appears that they’ve reached a level now where it’s going to take a great deal of more work to cleanup what’s left there. So still cleanup has not been successful at—at Kingsville. So when you talk about cleanup, you can’t always assume that we can clean it up, or maybe not—not with the amount of money we have available to clean it up. But
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then what do you do with what’s left over? With a lot of the organic contaminants, you can actually destroy them. You know, you can incinerate organic contaminants that you capture on a activated carbon or something. But the metals are another thing. Like metals in radio nuclide, you can’t destroy them. They last forever. And those you just have to concentrate in some way and ultimately dispose of them in a hazardous waste facility, which may or may not be a hazard—a good facility.
DT: Well, I was thinking about these really long-term problems. Have you dealt with any situations where the responsible party has gone bankrupt or can’t be identified and you’re dealing with kind of a Superfund situation or orphan site? And how is that different from a situation where you’ve got a party to deal with?
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GR: Well, that is sort of the situation at Kingsville, which is kind—although you have an operating mine there, what the mine has told the state—you need to let us continue mining in this area over here in order to get the money to clean up this area over here. If we can’t mine here and get the money, then we can’t clean this area up here. That’s—that’s kind of interesting. At Kelly, they’re—the—the Air Force, it is still awfully reluctant to admit that they’re responsible for a lot of the contamination. Although they’re going out and cleaning it up, you know, they are very reluctant to admit we’re
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cleaning it up because we caused it. They’re cleaning it up because they’re nice guys, you know, but—but there are some—some areas in the northern part of the base, surrounding Yolanda Johnson’s house, where they just flat out say this is not ours and, you know, we’re not responsible for cleaning it up. So there you have these orphan plumes. What’s going to happen there? I’m not sure. The Air Force is cleaning up some
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of it, whether they’ll clean up all of it, I don’t know. You know, Superfund is, what—where is it now? I mean, are funds available to clean these areas up? In a lot of cases, no. So in a—in—in—I—I haven’t—I can’t think of a place where I’ve actually—where I’ve personally worked on one of these. But in some cases, if you can’t identify a responsible party with money that’s not going to go broke, then maybe it just won’t get cleaned up. And what will happen to people who end up having to drink contaminated water? I don’t know. You know, or—they’ll have—I don’t know what will happen.
DT: Maybe this is a good lead in for the situation at Edwards’ aquifer, where there are thousands—hundreds of thousands of responsible parties and you can’t really isolate who is uniquely responsible. And you are now serving on the Edwards Aquifer Authority, so I was curious if you could talk about some of your experiences trying to protect Edwards.
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GR: Yeah, I’ve been involved with trying to protect the Edwards aquifer for ten, twelve years now. But I’ve only been—I was elected to the board of the Edwards Aquifer Authority just a little over three years ago. Now what we’re seeing in the Edwards, here in Baxer County, are the beginnings of a contamination problem. We have urbanized much of the recharge zone, the sensitive portion of the aquifer, where literally tens of thousands of people are there. Contaminants are showing up in the
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aquifer, but where they’re coming from, we can’t identify, well, where they’re coming from. So we cannot point to this person and say you did it, clean it up. And there’s a few instances where we can do that, but they’re very few. So I think the thing you need to do is prevent contamination and that’s really the only way we can do it. Prevent contamination by—not by evacuating and not conduct—not doing anything there, not living there. But we need rules in place that will limit the amount of urbanization that we
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allow over these sensitive parts of the aquifer. Should I try to do something with Leo there?
(misc.)
DT: When we broke off, we were talking about non-points for problems of contamination of the Edwards aquifer and efforts to try to limit, mitigate.
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GR: Yeah. W—the—the nature of non-point source is you generally can’t identify who’s—who’s at fault, who caused it. And what we’re finding in the Edwards now are generally low concentrations of manmade contaminants. It—generally in it—you know, near the more vulnerable portions of the aquifer, you know—right here, we’re living over the Edwards aquifer. It’s five hundred to maybe a thousand feet down. So that even
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though San Antonio’s been here for hundreds of years, it’s only relatively recently that it’s grown out over the more vulnerable portions of the aquifer. And so that’s where we’re beginning to find these manmade contaminants. Almost all cases, real low concentrations of things like pesticides and chlorinated solvents. But because they’re manmade, we know that somehow we put them there. So that’s telling us that we need to be careful with what we do. And—and a lot of it’s a result of this non-point source—the
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non-point sources. So I think that the way to deal with protecting the Edwards is to try to make sure that we don’t do things in the future that will increase the amount of contamination that we’re introducing into it. And I believe that those are basically two things. One is we have to limit the intensity of urbanization, primarily by limiting impervious cover. You know, impervious cover is things like streets, parking lots, rooftops, you know, really any manmade feature that prevents water from soaking into
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the ground like it would under natural conditions. It turns out that there’s a real strong relationship between the amount of impervious cover in an area and the concentration of contaminants in surface water. Now that’s surface water, but on the recharge zone, that surface water goes into the aquifer and becomes part of our drinking water supply. After you get impervious cover more than about ten to fifteen percent in an area, surface water contaminants increase rapidly and on the recharge zone, that becomes—you know, as I
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said earlier, that goes into the aquifer. So we need to limit impervious cover to ten to fifteen percent. That’s one thing we need to do. Another thing we need to do is regulate how people use hazardous materials over these vulnerable portions of the aquifer. Right now, we have no limit on—if somebody wants to build a Lowe’s and—and—or a—a—a Home Depot and store hundreds of thousands of gallons of paints, pesticides, solvents
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and whatever else they got, we—we don’t regulate that. Go ahead, you know. We don’t tell them what they can put there or what kind of precautions they have to take and I think that that’s what we need to do. And that’s what, as a member of the board of the Edwards Aquifer Authority, I’ve been trying to do for three years since I’ve been on the board. Now here’s where, you know, politics really comes into it because there are certain scientific facts, you know, that I—I’m pretty confident about and I think most
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people are pretty confident of, especially this relationship between impervious cover and contamination. But there’s a huge amount of resistance, you know, from real estate interest developers because, of course, they don’t want people telling them what they can do with their property. So that’s where it becomes political. The facts aren’t immaterial. There’s—the facts still mean something, but they’re of secondary importance to political consideration. When I was first elected to the board, one of the older members asked to
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talk to me because he knew—he—he knew of my involvement, you know, ye—for years trying to protect the recharge zone and I—I—I may have had a reputation of being a—someone who was very outspoken about it. Let’s put it that way. And he told me, we got a fifteen-member board, you know, from eight counties and he said George, he says, one thing you got to remember. In order for you to do anything here, you got to get seven other people here to agree with you. That’s probably the best advice I—I ever got, you know, as a member of the board. Because in order to get something done in the political
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arena, it—it’s not enough for you to be right or it’s not enough for your friends to agree with you. You have to get people who are in the position of making decisions to go along with you too. And that is often at least as difficult or me—a lot of times, more difficult than the technical issues, you know, that—that you deal with. Working with people, getting them to trust you. Basically, you got to get other people to trust you and believe what you’re—what you’re saying. And get them to believe that you don’t have a hidden agenda. You know, you’re not trying to get them to do this because really, in
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secret, you want to do this over here. And so that’s been the—that’s been a long process and something I thought that I was going to get done in six months as—as a new board member—oh, yeah. That—we’ll do that. It took me about three years. Finally, finally the eleven members of a fifteen-member board went along with me on one issue. The—that we got to develop rules to regulate hazardous materials. No, excuse me. We got—that we got to develop rules to limit impervious cover. And on the hazardous materials,
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all members went along with me on that vote, saying we got to develop these rules. Okay, now we said we’re going to develop rules. We’re serious about doing it. We’re getting a lot of flak from a lot of people, so the question is the rules we develop; will they really protect the aquifer? Or will they be weak, toothless rules that, you know, people will still continue to do what we’ve been doing and we won’t protect the aquifer? That’s the question now.
DT: And what kind of tools for these rules would you be using? Are you talking about buyouts of conservation easements or market tools? Are you talking to them more about sort of command and control, thou shalt build a certain impervious cover?
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GR: I think three things. One is education and I was surprised when I first realized that educating the public works. Here in San Antonio, where we have a water quantity problem because of the limits on pumping the Edwards, our local water utility, SAWS, which I think that they’re—they got—there’s a lot of things wrong with SAWS, but one thing they’ve done good—good on is a public education campaign to get people to reduce their use of water. And we’ve gone down from using nearly 200 gallons per person per day in San Antonio to where we’re now 130, 140. That’s great. That’s really—that’s
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largely through public education. So I think public education of explaining to people how what they do with their lawns or on their driveway or in their backyards can affect water quality’s good. Then there’s buyouts. We can outright buy property, (?) the property, or conservation easements. A lot better because it’s less expensive and allows people to continue ranching or farming out there, that’s good. But that’s not enough. I think in the end, you have to regulate. You really do need more rules in the end to say this is what you can do and this is what you can’t do. And I think that’s what the
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Edwards Aquifer Authority rule—role is, to develop those rules. I hope reasonable rules that are as least intrusive as we can make them and have the least effect on people’s economic designs as we can make them, but that’s a secondary concern. First of all, we have to protect the aquifer. Second, we have to do it in a way that is the least disruptive to people. But we need to protect it.
DT: In some places—I think in the Austin area, there’s been a lot of developers that have tried to use a sedimentation ponds, infiltration ponds, sort of mechanical, artificial means of increasing the impervious cover, but somehow you can find with the non-point source concerns. Is that an option here?
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GR: Well, it’s something that’s being done here, but there are a lot of problems with it. The two problems are even when they work as they’re intended, they don’t handle a lot of the contaminants that we’re concerned about here. Chlorinated solvents, pesticides, nitrates, those sorts of things aren’t necessarily handled by the systems that are built.
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Then the second issue is that they often don’t work at all. A—a good example of this was at Fiesta, Texas, which has now changed its name, called some—it’s this big amusement park out on the recharge zone, north side of town. They had this huge parking area. They’re on the recharge zone, so they said well, we’ll put in these sedimentation ponds and we will take care of our contamination like that. We looked at their records of how well their sedimentation ponds worked. We found that you couldn’t
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distinguish water coming into the sedimentation ponds, from a water quality point of view, from water that was coming out of them. Apparently they did nothing. Nothing at all. And then they played funny games, too, of when they collected their samples. We found that the majority of their samples were collected during the off-season, when people weren’t using the parking lot. You know, there wasn’t a lot of activity. But even
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then, it showed that their—their systems weren’t working. So I think that in some instances, there—there may be places where we ought to use these things that are called best management practices, like sedimentation ponds, grassy soils and so on. But by and large, they don’t work. There’s—I don’t think that there is a body of technical data out there that says yes, you can increase impervious cover and take care of your problems by building these facilities. I don’t think that’s true.
DT: Have you learned anything that you can apply to these new rules that you’re developing from recent problems and controversies, like the PGA Village?
(misc.)
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GR: Yeah, you know, that—that—that’s—that’s a real big problem for us, grandfathering and vesting. Developers tend to call it grandfathering—or vesting and vet—the environmentalists call it grandfathering. But that—that’s a big issue here in Texas. Even if we do develop rules, you know, good rules that are protective, a lot of
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things in the planning stage won’t be affected by them because once you’ve done a certain amount on a project, you won’t fall under any new rules that are developed. And if—you’ve prob—you talked to Richard Alles and I—he probably—he can tell you a lot more about this than—than I can tell you, but even doing very minor things. Like at PGA Village, one of the things that their vesting claims rest on—that is, where they’re not subject to a lot of the new ordinances we passed—is that they platted part of PGA
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Village. They platted like an eighth of an acre. On a two or three thousand acre project, they platted an eighth of a acre and they said that this grandfathers us from—from the rules. So—matter of fact, today at City Council, City Council is looking at changing the city’s grandfathering rules and—and a—and Alisa and I will be there, asking the City Council to—to support strong—strong grandfathering rules rather than weak rules.
DT: What happens when you develop rules at the Edwards Aquifer Authority level or at the city level and then you’re trumped by the state?
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GR: Yeah, well—yeah, that’s—that’s—that’s a big problem and what we’re finding with both the city and the Edwards Aquifer Authority, now that we’re—we’re—as a community, San Antonio is finally getting serious about protecting the Edwards aquifer, that we’re getting people elected to City Council that are interested in protecting the
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aquifer. Wards like the Edwards Aquifer Authority. So what the development community’s doing now that they’ve lost the battle locally, politically, they’re going to the state and asking them—asking the state legislature to pass laws to prevent the city and the Edwards Aquifer Authority from coming up with rules to protect the aquifer. That’s a big problem. That’s an issue we’ve had in the last two legislative sessions since I’ve
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been on the Edwards Aquifer Authority Board. That certainly will be an issue in the next legislative session in 2007.
DT: This might be a good place to talk about the Green Party and what sort of opportunities you think that might hold the Green Party…
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GR: Here I—I—let’s see.
DT: I mean, it’s intriguing. The Green Party seems to hold a lot of promise in the kind of positions it takes, but it’s so difficult, from what I’ve heard, for an independent candidate to even get on the ballot. That it’s hard to see how some of those ideas can be put into practice and candidates can actually become elected officials. Is that a place to start?
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GR: The—the Green Party—of course, I’m a member of the Green Party and I—I believe in the principles of the Green Party. What’s happened here in Texas, though, is we’re no longer on the ballot, at least statewide. You know, we—we—we went through—for the 2000—for the 2000 election, we went through this huge petition process where we gathered thousands of signatures and got ourselves on the ballot statewide. Unfortunately, none of our candidates got enough votes to keep us on the ballot. We
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were kicked off the ballot. And here in Texas—I guess in a lot of states, but I’m familiar with Texas, the system is really stacked against a third party getting onto the ballot. They make it very difficult. And without access to the ballot, the—the—the Green Party is a—we’re ja—we’re just in an—a extremely weak position, as—as far as our ability to gain office. Where I think the Green Party is in a much stronger position, does a lot of good,
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is working locally. The Green Party’s very active here in helping to try to protect the aquifer and Green Party members work both with City Council—and I’m on the board of the Edwards Aquifer Authority. We advance our issues there. But as far as, say, a Green Party candidate ever getting elected to a legislature or other offices like that, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. To—the barriers are too high for that. And—and—and then also I think that people are too polarized. You know, a—a lot of people in the
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country now, they identify themselves with either Democrats or Republicans and to hell
with everyone else. So, course, the Republicans don’t like us because we got a bunch of ideas that they think are bad ideas to begin with. The Democrats agree with many of our ideas, but they see us as a threat. If somebody votes for a Green Party candidate, well, they’re not voting for the Democrat and so that’s a problem there.
DT: Well, given all these, both technical issues you’ve been dealing with and also these political ones that you’ve been confronting, what’s your advice for younger people that might hear this interview and want to learn from your experience?
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GR: Again, if—if—if—if a young person is interested in trying to make a—make a difference. You know, they—they see something that’s wrong and they want to try to correct it, a couple things I would say. N—none of them real easy, I don’t think. But first of all, get yourself the kind of background, either through formal education or self-study, which gives you some expertise in—in the kinds of problems you’re going to be dealing with. You know, you—you—you need that, first of all, in order to—so that you
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yourself can figure out what the problem really is. You also need it to have credibility with the people that you’re trying to influence. Second is, be prepared for a real long fight. It’s not going to be the kind of deal where in January, you’re going to decide that this thing’s going to fixed and in May it’s going to be fixed, you know. It—things take years and the—the people that are able to make a difference are people that stick to it. And you—sometimes—you know, I have a saying, you—you can’t lose them all. You
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know, you lose—you know, the odds are so stacked against you that you lose most of your battles. You really do. You can make a little bit of difference in many of them, but usually, the other side gets most of the pie, you know. So you can’t allow yourself to be discouraged by losing and discouraged by the fact that it takes a long time. You got to stay in there, plugging away. And I think maybe my third piece of advice would be—and maybe this is most important for, not only for your success, but for you personally—the people that you’re coming up against in the vast majority of—vast majority of the time,
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they’re decent people. They’re out there, they’re doing their job and they don’t think that they’re bad guys. They’re not intentionally trying to be bad. Some—some of them are bad guys, but they’re few and far between. So don’t—don’t think that the people who are on the other side are bad and—and that—because they’re not. They’re people just like you and you should respect them and you should listen to them. They can teach you a lot. Listening to them can teach you a lot and help you a lot in your battle to advance your cause.
DT: Good advice. Do you have any other ideas you’d like to add or memories you’d like to record?
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GR: Well, I don’t know. I’ve said a whole lot. And none off the top of my head, David.
(misc.)
DT: Well, thank you very much.
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GR: Well, I enjoyed it.
DT: Me, too.
(misc.)
End of tape 2337
End of interview with George Rice