time once again for community forman we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning reverend bill hackett reverend reverend bill curran hackett reverend bill curran hackett is director of the interfaith task force on homelessness and we're going to be discussing very issues related to seattle's and king county homeless situation bill thank you very much for coming in spend time with us this morning nice to be with you mike thanks so start out  tell us about the interfaith task force on homelessness and how you got involved in two thousand and one there was a citywide actually countywide event held at st mark's cathedral my predecessor david bloom was among the organizers dean robert taylor three hundred fifty people came tent city had been at st mark's cathedral and so the question was asked what are we doing collectively to end homelessness there was really no answer so this conference was held and one of the outcome of the conference was to create an interfaith taskforce on halmos most another outcome was to begin something that benchley got called the committee to end homelessness in king county which issued into the ten year plan so in two thousand and one we had our first meeting and david bloom was the first director through two thousand into two thousand and four and that's when i took the job and in doing it ever since our byline is creating the political will to end homelessness and it started pretty much education  advocacy because a lot of people didn't understand homelessness i'd say about halfway through or sometime around two thousand and eight we began to see that many of the people who are part of our nation do direct service so we didn't take it on organizationally but we saw an absence of service toward those living in their vehicles absence of a plan on how to address people living in their vehicles and so we began to do that and in two thousand and eleven it sort of hit the fan when the scofflaw ordinance got passed in seattle and there was no mitigation for people living in their vehicles so we formed the scofflaw mitigation project my colleague jean darcy and i are the two principals on that and we've just form relationships with the muni court with the parking enforcement officers the mcginn administration at the time would have meetings every month about how to coordinate this because they knew the ordinance was not taking care of those living in their vehicles the city council has continued to refuse to amend the ordinance to make allowance for those living in their vehicles so we have this giant panda and we continue to do that i mean i have a little flyer that others can't see probably but we have parking enforcement actually leaving these on the vehicles of people who have four or more tickets so that they won't lose their vehicle and get a boot on it and my phone numbers on it and in darcy's phone numbers on it and we end up keeping people from losing their vehicle because of tickets so  that's been the scope and span we don't get any public funding for that per se we've had little bits of it in the past most of it has been privately raised so we're in the kind of weeds of where people actually are homeless and on the pavement where people actually are homeless and trying to draw the system down to see them better and address what is going on for them because the system is usually a little higher level than that you have to kind of we have an image of apple tree you have to grab the low hanging fruit and then you get into the system but most of them shelter people are below the long low hanging fruit so we see a lot of harm we see a lot of great people suffering for hall all kinds of reasons but a lot of it is just the dilemma of having to either if you're in a vehicle having to move every seventy two hours in seattle and other distress so our task force is really we're very mobile and loose we hardly even use the word member we are hosted by a faith community we were started under st mark's cathedral we went to the church council for three years and now we've been at st luke's lutheran and bellevue as our host so that we don't have to spend a lot of time on paperwork and sitting in offices but be out on the streets and in meetings helping others so here we are all right so on september twenty third you began a twelve day campaign on calling on seattle mayor ed murray to declare a state of emergency on unsheltered homelessness and this last monday by coincidence the day before the citywide elections proclamation of civil emergency unsheltered homelessness can you talk about your campaign and the response you've seen so far well number one i'm glad it happened we have a lot i have a lot of colleagues who have mixed feelings about it i think they wanted better emphasis on homelessness they're worried where the powers will go under a state of emergency that's all to be sorted out but i think we needed that recognition this goes back to the mayor's unsheltered task force that he appointed a year ago from now actually a little earlier but they finished their work and report in december of last year and one of the items that  buried in it was declare a state of emergency and the mayor got to pick from the items in that report and we've heard about the tent city in ballard and enter baby and those were items in the report too so just less than a handful of the items in that report are being acted upon one of them was the state of emergency i'd say it probably sat even in my head without thinking it was going to ever be worth  pushing until we watched los angeles and portland and hawaii declare states of emergency homelessness we've known all the west coast cities the numbers have gone up significantly i'm our count was up twenty one percent this year and we know that those are the people we actually count pretty much i mean it's not that perfectly scientific we've got a few things like we count two in a tent and things like that when we don't know for sure there could be three or four so we know the number went up at at least twenty one percent and we know we have more than that because we don't count everybody and we've got a you know really well organized count here but it still can't get to everybody who's who's homeless on the street so and then the total number including those  other transitional and shelter was ten thousand and forty seven and then we know we've got thirty two thousand four hundred seventy four school children k twelve self reporting as homo sometime during the year now you can't murder these numbers and make sense out of them very easily but that's alarming and it alarms a lot of people when they hear how many school children are homeless in their districts so just the i think i'm not sure what actually started me i knew that facebook would be just a medium where the  mayor he uses facebook he's got his own personal page and he's got a mayor page and it just goes by the name mayor ed murray and i think he keeps that so people can he p posts things on it using that and others probably write things to him so i just started murray it i know he's going to see it and i started writing in the first ones i as i look back on them were short messages but it was to do something about homelessness and i don't even think i brought up state of emergency in the first year i'd have to go back and read them but it wasn't long before that's what i saw realized needed to happen and then they got a little longer that's the clergy and me you know the three points became five points or whatever it was but they were still manageable to read they weren't you know facebook won't paste novels on there and you know in part i wanted to address him both as a civic leader that that we have said and i've said a lot that the reason that we have homelessness is because of us all of us and that policy directs why we have homelessness it's hard when you become an elected official walking in to a moving train literally where homelessness has been so rampant you know i he's in a tough position but the point is policy continues homelessness and funding choices continue homelessness and i realize everyone say we don't have enough money fine but we're still making a lot of choices on how we keep homelessness harmful and some of them are just policy changes so as i started writing i for my own well being i should probably go back and read everything i said because you know it's it's sort of even like when i've preached five sermons ago i don't really remember what i said sorry but i have a sense of what i said was all directed toward the state of emergency and that we've got a crisis on our hands and we need to do something so i may have been a surprised as anybody that he actually declared it and dow constantine also declared it you know i had a chance to shake  constance hand sense and mention to him at the time this was just a week ago and mentioned to earlier this week actually and mentioned him that he probably saw what i had been writing to the mayor on facebook and he said oh yes maybe he was happy i wasn't writing him but never and we were countywide and into snohomish county so i knew that that was important to him also that they do something so i'm glad they did it and i think right now we're in that stage i may have said it a few times this week already where everyone who will be involved in it is sort of like a deer caught in the headlights of a vehicle you there's a paralysis it may be behind the scenes they're rushing like crazy to put in place programs and ways to do this and we've got some things in writing that have been issued like the multidisciplinary outreach team and everybody even very much in the know people go i'm not sure what that is so there's a lot to be revealed yet how  reach far enough down to address the unsheltered homeless that we know don't get addressed often enough and that neighbors are upset about and businesses are upset about i mean i don't like halmos folks deaf a catering in the doorway of a business but when they've got no where to you know part of it's on us so i think this will generate a conversation at the same time or one year into the new strategic plan that succeeded the ten year plan it now has a new name it's called all home and it used to be called committee to end homelessness in king county so some people don't know all home what that means it means it's the committee ending homelessness i think i would have liked communities ending homelessness and i was on the communication committee but they had a consultant choose this that's been studied in the marketplace and so that's the new name and it's the new name we're going to use but is the new continuum of care it's where relates to this county get it getting money so it's a significant shift in structure as as well as the name the commitments for four years and that will be renewed i'm sure if it hasn't made progress there's a new action plan it's strategic action plan it's a lot more detail on it that most people would want to read but for those who have to do this that kind of details are important so these things are all and they're all kind of happening adjacent to each other and i think even those in the home structure probably  are grateful that there's a state of emergency but not sure what it means yet because it pretty much means that all the ways we've been doing things and funding things are subject to change there's an old quote i use from writer sam  about the sign on the muddy road in tennessee choose your route carefully you'll be in it for the next ten miles and i kind of choose our right carefully we've been in it for the last ten years about how we go about ending homelessness we've used there's been a lot of new things that have come up like rapidly housing other kinds of programs that that work best with just small select segments of the homeless and then they get applied across all homeless and it just doesn't work so the buzz sometimes kills or deadens our brains to being innovative and coming up with new ideas because we're in a state of emergency and now i think it's the time for innovation so my favorite word lately is an ovation and i smiled when i said that because we haven't innovated yeah we haven't thought enough out of the box and those phrases really matter businesses are always doing that  in this sector of public and private and nonprofit sectors we absolutely need to innovate we can't keep just putting more money into the same players and expecting that somehow they're going to produce better results their work to the bone i mean one of the struggles with the fifteen dollars an hour wage thing is that a lot of people working in the nonprofit agencies at the bottom levels aren't going to weren't getting paid that much and when they start getting paid that much that's going to cut the amount of work the nonprofit agencies can do so you see city council another saying how do we support you know more money toward the agencies to keep the fifteen dollars an hour wage progress viable and not cut services on the human services side because of this other good thing we're doing i mean it's you know one thing affects another so they're  you know i spent a lot of time reading about trauma so a lot of people in the system right now are traumatized the homeless are really traumatized and the people who are trying to help them get traumatized because it's a burden there's a lot of pain that you go through listening to people's stories and hearing what's going on for them and it's hard to go home at night and let go of that they probably listen to k x p music or something right that how they do it i know we have multiple homeless folks that regularly tune into this show and in fact one of them just contacted me a week or two back who was living in a vehicle out oh absolutely i believe the ballard area so so the mayor's plan basically came up with five million dollars and we both have a tentative budget in front of us with somewhat some of the details on that i was surprised  little goes towards the basic concept of bathroom honey buckets it seems like you could spend you know the entire five million just on that alone you know some of us of have noticed things like that and i think that's because of  recent efforts in well north lake was one place and then in ballard area where there's just been an escalation not only of those in vehicles but those who are just popping up tents everywhere and so the chamber of commerce citizens and others have lifted their voices to the city hall and so we've been part of some conversations there and one of the first things that came up was honey buckets are necessary or that we've been talking about using the portland loo model in seattle i the talking about that for two years probably and it's supposedly on the drawing board but i mean i don't see it in the state of emergency to put in some some portland loos which are more permanent bathroom structure but safer than the one that mayor nickels  invested in that i think went to a racetrack somewhere yeah so so yeah five hundred buckets are in the initial plan and five trash dumpsters that's you know just not even the tip of the iceberg it's like seeing the iceberg from space it's that inadequate so i'm grateful they have something in here and they recognize the need and i think we're sometimes looking for squeezing good news out of things that are inadequate and it's good news if they see that need because that is those are the two things that tend to upset most neighbors and neighborhoods and retail businesses is the trash that's left and the fact that people have nowhere to go to the bathroom so they just do it wherever they can and to be honest if i was on the street i mean i probably be a little more discreet i might have a little shovel like i learned in the army to use and bury things someplace but not everybody does that there's a there's a process that work for some on the streets where you kind of just stop caring about your manners and i don't blame them for that i mean it's hard to stay civil good citizen who's going to be respectful of everybody when as i said at the start when it's really everybody who's kind of helping keep you in homelessness despite what personal issues there may be going on we've made it i usually use like a stainless steel drum like you'd see at a winery or someplace and if you're homeless you're kind of like in the bottom of that you don't escape on your own it takes a team of people to get you out of homelessness it's very rare for it to be otherwise and most of the team is working against people well it's either by civility laws or parking laws or other kinds of issues that just make it just surviving an achievement you know and not getting sick or not dying and you know we've had more than sixty deaths on the street this year and every year we're having at least close to that many we don't know how many there are that we just don't but the well being of people who are on the street is not our priority and that's one of the things that i think it has to change with the state of emergency i mean any emergency the first thing we do is we take care of those who are afflicted we get them to a school to sleep we get them food you know we check on their well being are they injured we're not doing that with homelessness even the outreach workers the big thing that that happens too often and with public safety is well you know we've had a report that you're homeless here say you're homeless and they come up to you and sometimes usually well too often i won't i can't categorize how often it's the percent wise but but a lot of times it's your a danger to people around here and we need to move you from here even though we have no right to tell you to go not are you in danger what can i do to help you even if you stay here be safe and stable and have food and that now i know where you are and we're going to continue to talk and work on something well that's a mindset that some in our system have but too many don't and we don't do budget sheets like the one we're looking at with that in mind well being what can i you know there's probably hardly anything on here except that you can now hooper piece someplace five places in the city if you can go find those honey buckets i mean we need g p s locators on them or something so i mean i'm just saying we think about these things from the wrong angle we think about it what's often what's better for us then we're thinking about what's best for those almost exit hole most of us and many of the folks in the system can talk that but when it comes down to actually doing it and putting money beside it it's just not happening that way and so you know good people can not make great choices sometimes that's what i see in the system right now so as the example you just gave is that what happened with the northlake union sweep that occurred well the north like union sweep and i had to do a public records request to kind of really get behind it but it was you know started with citizen complaints there's people living over there on boats there's people businesses that tour people on boats there's other businesses there so their complaints led to what the the the police and the advocates meeting together to help move people to someplace else well we weren't really given the proper information at the start about why it started we just know it came from some more elevated position where people were pretty much in enjoying to go do that we only had like five to eight r v s that came and went some of them were there the whole time the police who who took the lead on that were incredible they were great they were going above and beyond reaching into their own pocket when it the dust finally settled all those folks had been moved it's a city's strip of land they still continue to let everybody who wants to park there as long as they want to park there except for no parking two to five am and i don't think they enforce that either so the city is kind of giving away some free parking on earth like union which was not lost on those who are homeless the city looked at that as a success the advocates didn't look at it as a success the city didn't put any money into it they didn't help with these folks to find housing the advocates are the ones who had to do that and we don't have deep pockets i mean several were part of our task force or other efforts homeless in seattle and some others compass got a little involved with their road to housing program manager but by and large didn't have funds or space for them so a lot of the a and others did great work to help alleviate the harm for the people the area ended up being cleared that was looked at as a success by the city and then we heard that they were going to do the same model in ballard with more than fifty r v s and unincorporated and illegal and encampments and the first message was that they were going to sweep and then it modified it to we just need to help get them moved and i don't think they understood number one it wasn't a success on people just spring up and two three four five tents pop up because they've got nowhere to go so that's why that all factored into a state of emergency for a while i was writing because i was looking at all that and i was thinking somehow city hall you know and i have my own pet peeves you know the mayor was traveling around he was going to israel he was going to ireland he was going a lot of places and i'm thinking all those are things that mayor supposed to do and i think but if i was the mayor and that will never happen i feel a little bad about leaving behind what's going on every day knowing that we see it and you know and i was finally getting to where and i think i'm i don't remember if i put this in my facebook stuff i think it made it its way he was doing find it fix it walks and i wanted to start the other campaign that he actually was doing was avoided a bitit you know not go those places where there's hom and abide it just it's there you know the poor will be with us always which was really bad scriptural interpretation by the way but you know and also i've heard him say he didn't realize how broken everything was well when i see how broken everything is i hacked you know i do something to remedy that or get or rally people like in an emergency you know if someone's house is on fire or whatever it might be you know neighbors rally to help so out that's what i've always been pushing for how to neighbors rally to help end homelessness and i think the strategic plan is to do that and i think a state of emergency needs to do that and i think most people have just been so used to that you're in the red for the next ten miles they're not sure what innovation looks like most funders they fund just part of what you have to do it's like taking a glass and turning it upside down on a table and what's inside the area of that glass on the table is what you can fund everything outside you can't fund well homes people's needs are everything on the table you know depending on what your particular needs are and then so when one funder can't find you and they can't find a partner who can it's like paralysis happens the person doesn't get help they don't get housing the person gets frustrated they maybe go back to bad habits or they move you know that's the other thing  maps were homeless people are and a lot of smart people say well that won't be the map tomorrow because like any american they can move wherever they want you know if you're in a vehicle you have to move every seventy two hours we've made and that's why we're trying to get a mor seventy two hour moves in all zones we should have seventy two hour movie acquired in just certain zones which is whatever it does and then you could be in your vehicle in certain sounds in the city and you could stay there for three weeks to a month as long as you're claiming and not just disturbing your neighbors and or doing anything illegal you could just stay put and it's the first step to at least stabilizing somebody you know then getting them to maybe a safe parking place or there's other tools that could happen but we don't even  the most basic thing which is what i was saying earlier the well being of the person what would have helped their wellbeing more than anything and stop having to move every seventy two hours only three minutes left what other because you were quick to to point out that the parking issues the living in the car issues were not being addressed in any of this what other besides the forcing people to move every seventy two hours would you institute if you were in charge well when we started scofflaw in seattle in two thousand and eleven the first thing they did before the roll law actually took effect was they did an amnesty on parking fines they did it for everybody including you know really wealthy people like you who own a mercedes and you know you probably don't drive a mercedes but but they do that for everybody we would like another amnesty right now for people who can and it's not that hard to prove you live in a vehicle to be honest it's not but for everybody living in a vehicle who's got a parking fine we'd like an amnesty free them up i mean most of them can't pay any way they do community service or they go down and take up the court's time with magistrates and others in the court has been incredible seattle muni court her re but the point is that we're using a lot of their time down there on people who shouldn't after all that's what i mean about policy decisions that are smart and so i just think that that's one other piece we we want more brainstorming on that i i don't have the ring on all of the possible great ideas that are out there but i think people can come up with more than we've got absolutely innovation that's the word for this weekend everybody innovation innovation in terms of solving our solving homelessness exactly and and compassion go say hello a rexx home and says it's just say hello talk to someone who's homeless and more than talking to them listen to someone whose homes give them the regard of being a person and letting them be a person so listening and safety and listening to because things i talk about i didn't mention of it all till the end of the interview today there you go so we are talking with the reverend bill curlin hacket he's director at the interfaith task force on homelessness and how can people find find out more about the task force and good resources locally well give out our web address they can write me and then be on our regular mailing list that i t f h at comcast dot net they can look me up at facebook as bill carroll and hack it or if a task force on homelessness has a page i don't keep it up all that well we have a web page it's i t f h i t f homeless dot org it's kept up a little weekly but and i don't mean weekly with an easy and within a with to e know i mean it with a day i don't do a great job on the web page but they can if they reach out to me we respond pretty fast so right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming as been a time with us this morning time once again for a community forum and we are very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning jerry paulette jerry paulette is co founder and executive director of heart of america northwest and democratic member of the washington house of representatives representing the forty third district and he's in to give us an update on what's been going on out at the hanford nuclear reservation the most toxic site in the western hemisphere gerri thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us again today good morning mike and sorry to be here when it's your last day in this beautiful old facility lots of memories last saturn a for seven forty six district is what i represent the house story so start out tell us for those who aren't familiar tell us about heart of america northwest well where the region's leading hanford citizens watchdog group for the cleanup of the most contaminated area in the western hemisphere the hanford nuclear reservation through which the columbia river flows for fifty miles think about that fifty miles of river a last free flowing stretch of the river flowing past the most contaminated area in not only north america but the western hemisphere where the united states made the plutonium for bombs and left us a legacy for hundreds of years of thousands of years of contamination so part of american northwest has members all across the region you can look at h o a n w dot o r g or simply hanford cleanup dot org and we do turn out for public meetings public education citizens guides for clean up the situations we also work on some other toxic waste sites including here in seattle north end of lake washington where there is deadly dioxin contamination in the sentiments in the kenmore area and secondly the radioactive contamination left by the navy at magn park former sandpoint naval air station all right and your organization has interns that are going to be putting on a workshop today yes not very exciting that we've got a workshop on hanford's leaking high level nuclear waste tanks this morning at ten am at ballard first lutheran church so it's a workshop on the fact that there are leaking high level nuclear waste tanks and research done by u w students and seattle university law students documenting that two to six of the older single shell tanks are leaking right now and why hasn't the state of washington taken any action so from ten to eleven thirty will be having a presentation and discussion about what can be done and how people can help over it ballard first lutheran beginning at ten as i said we'll have coffee and refreshments and what's really important here is it's not just information about the fact to come up a lot is why hasn't the state take any action that seems to be a theme on a on these issues related to hanford so about two weeks ago they i believe it was the department of energy had public hearings that  i know you attended and i didn't see much in the media about it can you talk about that well so the department of energy once again per posed the leading major cleanup schedules for the hanford nuclear reservation this time it's for all the soil sites that are not it doesn't take rocket science to clean these up on what's called the central plateau of hanford this is the area five to ten miles away from the columbia river where plutonium was extracted from nuclear fuel rods and where the high level nuclear waste tanks are and there was a deadline in the hanford cleanup agreement there has been a deadline and still in place that the cleanup of all the contaminated soil sites would be finished by the year twenty twenty four and this was always considered reasonable it's doable this is not rocket science to clean up these sites and what we're talking about are ditches and trenches where the energy department dumped radioactive and chemical wastes without knowing really wants in it and the ditches if you put them end to end would cover forty three miles so i want you to picture from downtown seattle on i five all the way to marysville three lanes of i five now pictured as a whole fifty feet deep filled with radioactive and chemical waste drums and other contaminated liquids boxes literally cardboard boxes from many years and then covered with there to the surface and letting it sit there would you let that happen now anything that gets into the groundwater here flows into the columbia river so is it ok to let that happen in the energy department is saying we're going to delay for decades cleaning up those contaminated soil sites and the state of washington and the u s e p a tentatively said ok that's it we're going to let you do it and we won't even have an in forcible schedule for when you would get back to cleaning this up and that's the most disappointing thing because the state of washington over the huge over budget years cation plants which is the treatment plan for high level nuclear waste state of washington even went to court recently to say you've got to have a firm enforceable schedule for delays in the treatment plant  turned around and said to the energy department but you don't need and forcible schedule for just promising one day you'll get back to cleaning up the contaminated soil sites and replacing the year two thousand and twenty four as a deadline with a date quote to be determined unquote decades from now that's just simply unacceptable and we've been urging people to write the governor as well as the department of ecology and say you represent us we expect you to apply the same principle you said you would apply in any other situation at hanford or any other site that you have to have an in forcible deadline and the sad thing here is we know that congress meant appropriate money for hanford cleanup unless it's for things that aren't forcible that lines schedules so the excuse that there isn't money from congress to do the cleanup is kind of a self's fulfilling prophecy if you remove the deadline because congress has no legal obligation to fun anything in hanford unless it's of an forcible deadline so legally you are an attorney  legally in the tri party agreement had washington state said no would dio he still be bound to meet those original dates absolutely so if the state of washington simply says we're not signing a change order so to speak for him from twenty twenty four then the energy department would have to go to congress and say here's how much it's going to cost to clean up these contaminated soil sites and we better get on it and sensually e p a in the state of washington has been have been letting this slide for the last five years saying you can defer this work because of other budget issues and hanford but now it's time to enforce it and their excuses well we fell behind schedule already so let's let them have a few years of delay is not a few years of the way this is a delay with no end in sight and secondly if you remove the enforceable deadline you'll never get it done thirdly and this is kind of the bizarre thing with even if you keep twenty twenty four and it takes them a couple years longer you find them and you order them to do the work and you put that fine back in to clean up that's important for enforcement you don't just change the enforcement schedule but unfortunately for him for it clean up over and over again washington state has said ok change the schedule so that schedules been changed hundreds of times for all the different sites and hanford people need to know is there are literally thousands of contaminated sites in the schedule for hanford cleanup this is the most complex and largest cleanup in the history of the united states of america so there were three hearings i was at the seattle one as were you not a lot of people show up for these hearings let alone media what's your sense for why that happens this was literally disgusting you know it's the energy department and the regulators say we want public input and we want public comment and then they refuse to schedule the public hearings with thirty days of advance notice says citizen groups like heart of america northwest and columbia river keeper down in portland and hood river where the other two hearings were would have enough time to do any notice and turn out so we had less than two weeks or centrally two weeks notice of the like hearing date and time and then to make things worse the agencies simply refused our request to send out a mailer to their own notice list telling people about the hearing so they put out a notice saying we're looking at changing the dates but they don't tell people that there are forty three miles of on line trenches that will go without any cleanup work they just it's like this gobbledygook message of the two hundred one unit will be delayed that doesn't mean anything to anybody not even to  me so it's up to citizen groups to put out meaningful notice and to do that we need a couple weeks more than a couple weeks of notice and their own public involvement plan for hanford cleanup says that the agencies will give the citizen groups thirty to forty five days of advance notice so we can do our job and tell people about hearing and it wasn't surprising to me that we had about twenty three twenty four people of the public at the hearing that's not bad given h little notice we had heart of american artist had volunteers making phone calls to members to come we put out facebook and e mail messages but we didn't have time to do a mailing and to make things worse partner ecology had recently cut all our public participation grant funding to help us do mailings so it's a perfect storm of the agencies not really wanting the public comment only wanting to appear to want it so getting back to this massive amount of on line trenches forty three miles say fifty feet deep three lanes wide what are they going to do with all that assuming that they could meet the deadlines so this is why it's not rocket science you and the this is where and where the energy department and regulators get credit we also had similar what are called burial grounds large land fill trenches of radioactive and chemical wastes right alongside the columbia river and almost all of those have been successfully cleaned up the last most dangerous ones aren't just now getting under way but we've cleaned up similar trenches where you simply go in and the pending on the risk you are there or not you how much you have on the caterpillar's and other material equipment that goes in and you scoop it up and you have containment around it when you scoop it up and you repackage it and then if it's below a certain level of contamination it goes to a huge new mind landfill in the center of hanford after some characterization if it's got chemical wastes the chemical wastes get treated and stabilised or chemically destroyed even before it gets really buried and if it's got plea tony in waste over certain concentration it gets essential repackaged and one day will go to a deep underground repository so it's not rocket science and it's a matter of how deep do you dig to make sure you get  contamination but again how deep you dig is not an engineering challenge really we know how to do it and we know how to do it pretty well and we've cleaned up literally hundreds of similar sites right alongside the columbia river and we've done it well well i know in the past i've heard you at all though i don't believe it was at this last hearing but questioning the departments of energy's interpretation of how deep do you dig you talk about that so the energy department wants to only clean up the first fifteen feet of contamination in the central area of hanford so if you picture sage up shrub  habitat and then all of a sudden the sagebrush and and you've got a flat area where there's just where there were trenches that were covered over to the surface and pesticides being sprayed and nothing's growing on it right now or barely anything and but the rabbits are free to hop through and the energy department says we'll only clean up to fifteen feet below the bottom of the trench or fifteen feet from the surface if it's surface contamination and we're very concerned because if you picture or perhaps you're the sewer line in your own street you know that it's likely to be more than fifteen feet deep so in the future someone is going to dig deeper than fifteen feet and bring that contamination back to the surface as we saw with the superfund site right here in elliott bay harbor island it took only five years before a similar restriction was violated  and developers who are building on hard rylan forgot that the u s e p a had put a restriction on clean new construction saying that they won't go below fifteen feet of course they were going below fifteen feet to build you know basements and the pilings for new buildings and put in utility lines and the contaminated soil went all over the region you don't want that to ever happen again and that means you should be digging down to the level at which you test the soil and you know you've got all the contamination the other thing is the contamination at hanford will move into the groundwater and the ground water flows to the columbia river the groundwater is also a resource protected by treaty rights and the yak a monument to one nations have rights to live on this land after it's cleaned up and utilise it for  hunting fishing especially living along the columbia river and they will use the ground water and from one of these burial grounds that commercial radioactive waste dump operated by washington state actually the estimate is that the cancer risk from this their proposal is that the adults using the groundwater would have a fatal cancer risk of about one in the thousand just from one waste site when you add up hundreds of waste sites and you realise it's literally a genocidal cancer risk if they exercise their treaty rights hundred years from now and even at this last series of hearings one of the i believe he was a dio a representative but he was asked about the level of contamination at the area the central plateau and i transcribed his words we collected soil samples and things really stopped us from getting to a clean up decision as we've looked at the vailable information it's really hard to characterize some of the sites contamination goes down to ground water table three hundred feet below the surface so potentially you're looking at contamination going down three hundred feet well so we know that waste contamination from  liquid wastes dumped out of the high level nuclear waste tanks and into social ditches has contaminated the groundwater two hundred three hundred feet below the surface and that is flowing towards the columbia river and that's why you have to dig deep and get the contamination up obviously you can't dig a hole three hundred feet deep to get it but you can go fifty to one hundred feet and get the mass of contamination that is so that the worst mass of contamination doesn't continue to slowly move down to the groundwater and flow into the  river where it's already in the groundwater you have a opportunity to continuously pump out groundwater and treat it and reduce the contamination and then there are some other things that can be done for a few of the contaminants where you put things into the deep surface subsurface and essentially help the contamination bind to salt particles so the groundwater doesn't flush it into towards the river but once it's very deep it's really hard to get out but when it's fifty to one hundred feet you can still get it and you know it's done at superfund sites all over the united states and the state of washington and hence the need for the urgency of getting dealing with this or like right away right you don't want to wait decades it's much more effective to do it now and if you wait decades the energy department going to come back and say oh gosh now it's too deep for us to get it out and it's spread out a lot more so you want to do it now while it's easier to do and the fact that we've delayed this long is a tragedy in of itself so inevitably significant amount of this will contaminate the groundwater but you don't want that contamination to grow essentially impulses as it moves down from fifty feet to two hundred fifty and into the ground water three hundred years from now or thousand years from now you want to get it out now and be pumping out the groundwater that's contaminated from what's already reached it and clean that up to drinking water standards today and then again that can be done and the energy department has installed that expanded ground water treatment system the issue is how long are they going to run it they're not going to run that system for hundreds of years obviously so if you're not then you damn well better clean up the contamination in the soil column at smoothing to the ground water instead of saying we'll get to it eventually no eventually the one thing we know is it will get to the columbia river that's  there is one other thing that we've been saying about these forty three miles of trenches and the commercial radioactive waste dump which is an unlined landfill that is leaking huge quantities of very deadly chemicals as well as radioactive contaminants and that is we've been concerned that when you don't know the chemicals that were disposed in these trenches some of them in drums that have long ago disappeared drums corroded those chemicals included chemicals that were explosive ignite a ball and corrosive and we've been concerned that either on exposure to air war just by chemical processes they could self ignite and the last time we had hearings and questions about these burial grounds the energy department state of washington basically poop rude my concerns about this well now if you want to see how frightening this can be you just google radioactive waste landfill explosion comma from october and video and you'll see a radioactive waste landfill operated by the same company that operated operates the one at hanford and you'll see a burial ground trench inexplicably just exploding underground and with the dirt coming up and someone had a cell phone video on when it just happened and there's no monitoring around it they don't know what came out of the trench they don't know what it is that exploded in the trench but we have the same chemicals dumped in the trenches and hanford if you have a chemical reaction that causes an explosion in these trenches you have a catastrophe for downwind you don't know how far away not just the tri cities but you could have airborne contaminants blown to yuma tila or blown toward spokane or blown back up the acma valley and now we know and have visual evidence that this can happen and you don't want to wait twenty plus years to get this stuff out of the ground and that's been one of the concerns raised about the current solution out at hanfor you we only have a few minutes left can you give us an update on what's going on about so this is the decades behind schedule all billions of dollars over budget plant to turn the liquid high level nuclear wastes in leaking tanks into a glass form for permanent underground disposal and the energy department had this ridiculous notion that was going to build the plant as it was designed so it wasn't designed but they were going to start building it and they never tested the chemical processes and the safety processes to make sure that it would be safe and would actually work so now the plant is in on hold and the energy department is saying we're going to resume construction on part of it and we're going to build a pretreatment pretreatment plants for the portions that won't work for the full operational date which had been originally twenty eleven and then got moved to two thousand and twenty one the energy department has recently said we're going to move that fully operational day to the year two thousand and thirty nine and state of washington which went to federal court to stop the energy department from having delay after delay and saying we want and forcible schedule for this responded to the federal court in federal court and said well that twenty thirty nine date is not acceptable here is our date the year two thousand and thirty five i'm just so disappointed in my own state of washington about not saying we know that this plan can be operational in a decade sooner than that and if it means that you have to use as much simpler treatment process than one be contractors want to use because the ones the contractors have designed are basically the ones that are the most complex least reliable untested  processes which make them a lot of money and they're simpler designs that would get the work done their cade's faster and the state of washington is really disappointed and i think thousands of people across the region  saying yeah we fought you over a long delay we want an enforceable schedule for this plant and our idea of a schedule is just five years sooner we're talking with jerry paulette he is the co founder and executive director at heart of america northwest and how can people find out more about your organization these issues and so hanford clean up dot org very simple all right and there's the the workshop happening later this morning ten o'clock at it's going to be on leaking double shell high level nuclear waste tanks and the now so my famous a why i want to and the leaking single shell tanks where no one is taking any action i mean then is the real shame here mike is that for double shell tank where it's not yet getting into the environment we can lot of citizen concern and king television really force the state of washington a caption but you have single shell tanks that when they leak they go straight into the soil they are leaking the law says you have to empty them mediately if they're leaking there's been no action and we're documenting that between two and six of the tanks are leaking as we speak here this morning and have been leaking for several years and no action is being taken about it and we're going to force action all right so that's the one of the subject that's going to be covered at the workshop this morning workshop this morning at ballard first lutheran ten o'clock in the morning northwest sixty fifth and twentieth all right with that we are  time i want to thank you very much for coming in again and spending time with us today thank you might look forward to your new digs look forward to having you there