Disappeared News: Remember the VOG? Oahu can’t escape Big Island depleted uranium dust

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Remember the VOG? Oahu can’t escape Big Island depleted uranium dust

by Larry Geller

The battle over the use and removal of depleted uranium has been largely fought on the Big Island. That’s not to say all of it is there, but just that they have been quite active and I think the issue might be better known there than on Oahu. We need to pay more attention to it here.

This weekend the trades have returned and the Vog has finally lifted. But don’t forget it. If depleted uranium dust is stirred up on the Big Island, or during live munitions training there or on Oahu at Makua, at Schofield Barracks, or elsewhere, it will blow into your windows just like the Vog did. Vog makes you cough, DU in the air makes you die.

The state ought to consider the presence of depleted uranium as a major public health threat instead of leaving it only to advocates to protect us. When the rats were discovered in Chinatown, the state was forced to act, however feebly. DU is far worse, if you breathe or eat it, you’re doomed. So could your children and unborn children be affected. Unlike rats, the solution to the problem is not simple, nor is it contained within the walls of a market building.

When Vog returns to Oahu next time, imagine that it is harmful. It can’t be escaped. If we don’t treat the DU threat seriously, the problem could blow into all of our windows and under our doors.

Please see the comments attached to my earlier article. I’d like to snip from one of them, referring to last week’s testimony:

…Waianae has about a 1,000 young women that will have a child within the next five years. Should the army resume bombing in Makua we should see a high rate of birth defects. I am already experiencing the Squid Sucking babies in Waianae and the early deaths of young adults and mid 40s.

I did not do as good a job that I wanted to do, but we only had a few minutes. Kilauea eruptions fan's across Hawaii's achipelago and that's as visible as I could get.

I am not for License to posses DU, nor am I for permit to cleanup. In additions to, I am not for the NRC to use an enforcment on the idea of removing the contaminates.

Here is someone taking a strong stand, and paying his own way to go to Hilo to give the allowed four minutes of testimony.

Shouldn’t we all take this problem more seriously?