In a previous post, I wrote: “On February 14, 1996, Gordon D. Hussey, Chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Branch Engineering Division wrote to Michael Schmoller at DNR. He referred to a 1995 USACE “Draft Final Remedial Investigation Report” on the Darwin burn pit. Oddly, this draft report, and any related final reports, have completely disappeared. They are not in DNR or city or county files. Nobody seems to know where they are. Nobody will answer questions about them.”
I didn’t see this report or the final report in DNR’s very sparse burn pit files so I asked if they could locate them. I received no response. The report was not in county files. So I filed an open records request to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to see if they have them.
Today I got this response from Thomas J. Tracey, District Counsel for USACE:
“This letter is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated September 28, 2022, in regard to a copy of the “September 1995 Draft–Final Remedial Investigation Report on the fire training area” done by EA Engineering. The Omaha District FUDS Office was consulted to collect potentially responsive documents. I have been advised that a search of their hard copy and electronic files did not retrieve any responsive agency records.”
So this report and any final reports subsequent to it have “disappeared” from USACE files too? Yes, documents are misfiled, misplaced, and lost. It happens. Some employees at government agencies are lazy, careless, overworked and/or incompetent.
But how could several agencies not file–and now not be able to locate–the same critical reports?
As I wrote in the previous report, “[i]t’s hard not to conclude that the responsible parties have something to hide.”
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Why do these reports matter now? They matter because whatever contaminants the USACE found in Darwin burn pits soils and groundwater then, outlined in these reports, were never remediated (DNR confirmed this, see previous post), so they are still there now, discharging into Starkweather Creek and continuing to leach into groundwater. [Below, water running off the Darwin burn pit into the creek just off the photo to the right (east)]
