Assurances from the EPA

The EPA is giving us assurances that dumping the residue from the nerve gas VX into the Delaware River is both safe and environmentally sound.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency won't oppose the U.S. Department of Defense and DuPont Co.'s plan to dump a wastewater byproduct of a deadly nerve agent into the Delaware River.

The agency said it's assured of a safe treatment for up to 4 million gallons of caustic wastewater created in the treatment for VX, a chemical weapon with a pinhead-size potency to kill a human. DuPont is treating VX for disposal at its Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana.

The agent, once neutralized, would be shipped to DuPont's Chambers Works plant in Deepwater, N.J., for discharge into the river.

"EPA believes that all of our previously identified ecological concerns have been resolved," said Walter Mugdan, director of the agency's Environmental Planning and Protection division in New York, in a letter released Friday to CNN and obtained by The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.

You know, I really wish I could trust them. Back in the days before the Bush administration made it illegal to actually look at facts, I would have. But, we already know that Christie Whitman and the EPA declared ground zero to be safe, and now the people that worked there on rescue and recovery are dying of complications from their exposure. I simply don't trust the Bush EPA, particularly when a major corporation stands to benefit from their ruling (full disclosure: I own some DuPont common stock). I swim and canoe in the Delaware... or at least I did swim and canoe in the Delaware.