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In April 2020, Concerned Citizens of Allegany County will
celebrate the 30th anniversary of the “Bump the Dump” protest, a multi-year
citizen action that prevented the establishment of a nuclear waste dump. This
extraordinary episode in our history was ultimately argued and won in US
Supreme Court. In taking a stand against the dangers of radioactive
contamination on environmental and human health, thousands of regular folks
have become folk heroes. We invite you to learn more about them.
CCAC: The Beginning (Part1)
By Elaine Hardman
ANGELICA: Can citizen David successfully slay a threatening
corporate giant? If the fight includes someone like Fleurette Pelletier and
some of the stones to sling are information, the help of an environmental
lawyer, and the demands of some dedicated residents, the answer is yes and yes
again.
In the late 1980s, Pelletier and her husband lived on Long
Island when they learned about a plan to build the Shore-Wading River Nuclear
Power Facility. They saw a problem with putting a nuclear power plant on a densely
populated island serviced by only three exit roads. What if something went
wrong?
Pelletier and her neighbors said they had a right to live.
They had a right to an evacuation route. If a giant threat was to be built in
their space, the people already living there had rights that had to be
considered and accommodations had to be granted.
In the end, the courts agreed with the people and a
half-built nuclear power plant was abandoned. Score one for citizen David.
Shortly after that battle the Pelletiers chose to relocate
to a little village for a quiet life running a bed and breakfast. What could go
wrong? Well, the tentacles of industry might choose that same small town.
Industry pollution and the Pelletiers met in Angelica.
Someone knocked on the door of the Victorian home that the
Pelletiers were turning into a bed-and-breakfast and told them there were plans
to put incinerator ash on Peacock Hill. A meeting would be held the next week.
Maybe they'd like to attend.
At that meeting Pelletier heard a presentation filled with
casual lies, big lies, and twisting lies about incinerator waste ash. After the
meeting seven people gathered outside the door and agreed they needed to do
something. There and then they called themselves concerned citizens and that
was the beginning of the future Concerned Citizens of Allegany County (CCAC).
The majority of people who had attended the presentation
were hungry for jobs. They looked at incinerator ash and saw a blessing.
Pelletier and a few other people felt like they were being manipulated, conned
really, so they went in search of information.
There was an environmental meeting in Buffalo on the content
of incinerator ash, so a group went to listen. After the meeting they were able
to talk to some of the presenters and told them their worries about an ash
landfill on Peacock Hill. One presenter told them that the incinerator ash was
toxic, but they were already under environmental assault both from an
incinerator with no scrubbers pouring toxins into the air in Cuba and a foundry
with no scrubbers in Friendship.
People in those towns had been complaining about not being
able to breathe easily. Band kids would go outside to practice their routines
and vomit. Every morning people would clear ash from their cars and porch
steps. Most people were not aware of what was in the air or in the dusty ash
that rained day and night or how bad it was. What they looked at was that they
were getting paychecks.
Pelletier along with Sheila Grastorf and Pat Kaake consulted
an environmental lawyer and went to the courts with the financial backing of
area landowners. They had meetings and suffered death threats, but they kept at
it until the foundry and the incinerator were shut down. The David and Goliath
fight wasn’t going so well for the Goliaths.
Many people worked together to accomplish the win but there
was no formal structure of what we know as CCAC until the long arm of the
nuclear industry rested its eye on Allegany County’s soil.
The state of New York said the soil in Allegany County was
absolutely the perfect soil to store nuclear waste but at the time the state
didn’t know that soil had experienced protectors in town. The state made this
evaluation of the soil from a distance and that wasn’t going to stand with the
folks in Allegany County. The governor’s office (Mario Cuomo at the time) sent
people to check the soil and the local sheriff (Larry Scholes) was to protect
them.
Pelletier remembered waiting in barns and getting calls on
the CB radio to direct protesters to the location of the siting commission so
they could surround the commissioners and keep them out. Local Amish women
would bring food and those standing in the cold knew their backs were covered
by neighbors, especially after 5,000 people showed up in Belfast for a
presentation on the topic.
That meeting and the linked arms of people in the fields
often filled Pelletier with tears of pride. She shared her feelings with
landowners in letters she sent appealing for funds to continue with the court
battles. The work brought her into contact with many wonderful people, and with
the force of the law. She watched people who were running away grabbed by the
backs of their jackets by the State Troopers who arrested them.
She said that there were representatives of the local Health
Department who told her that if there couldn’t be a nuclear waste dump here
that the hospitals would have to stop giving cancer treatments. Armed with an
understanding of nuclear waste, she laughed at them. The state didn’t choose
Allegany County because it had “perfect soil” but it chose the sites because
the state expected obedience and no resistance.
The siting commission was followed by a group of people
carrying a coffin. The governor found protestors outside his fundraising events
where signs surrounded stretch limos and brought visible annoyance. The end of
a long series of efforts involving countless meetings, intense study, acts of art
and courage and county wide coordination. The siting commission was disbanded,
the soil remained untested and the Concerned Citizens of Allegany County linked
arms over their beloved land. Score again for citizen David.
About the Author: The Hardman family left Wellsville to
teach in Malaysia for 15 months returning to Wellsville in 1988 with a strong
appreciation for environmental protection laws. Elaine went to the meeting in
Belfast, attended civil disobedience training, accepted the orange arm band, and
proudly linked arms on roads in Allegany County.
Follow Concerned Citizens’ FB page or join us at our next
meeting. Phone/text 585-466-4474 or
email contactusccac@gmail.com.
