Feds give Navajo uranium contract to firm with sketchy past

[TexasTowelie]

In September 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency received a troubling message from the Navy: Tetra Tech EC, the firm tasked with cleaning up the radioactive former naval shipyard Hunters Point in San Francisco, might have manipulated its data.

The Navy’s draft report underscored claims that employees of Tetra Tech EC subcontractors had made in federal court several years earlier: that the company was complicit in the falsification of soil samples to make the Hunters Point site appear ready for development. In 2013, radiation control technicians hired by Tetra Tech EC subcontractors filed a whistleblower lawsuit stating that their supervisors directed them to fake soil samples taken from several sites around the shipyard, bringing in “clean” soil to replace the potentially radioactive samples. In 2016, whistleblowers filed additional lawsuits alleging that Tetra Tech EC supervisors had ordered and overseen this fraud. Last year, two former company supervisors were sentenced to eight months in prison for falsifying records related to the Hunters Point cleanup. Whistleblower litigation is still ongoing, but Tetra Tech EC said in a public statement that it “sought to follow all required standards and protocols and to operate in a thorough, honest, and professional manner to provide testing and cleanup services as required by its contract.” It also said it conducted an investigation into the allegations in 2012, coordinated with the Navy to complete corrective actions, and that there have been no repeat occurrences of falsification.

After employees came forward, the Navy conducted its own assessment of Hunters Point and found evidence of likely fraudulent sampling. The draft report, delivered to the EPA for review, stated that the Navy had seen “evidence of potential data manipulation and falsification” at multiple sites around the shipyard, and recommended that numerous soil samples be retested.

Just a month after receiving the Navy’s report, however, the EPA announced on its website that it had awarded Tetra Tech EC’s parent company a major contract to assess contamination on 30 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Reservation — the first large contract awarded for assessing the contamination of the 520-plus mines since uranium mining began there in 1944. In its press release, the EPA made no mention of Tetra Tech EC’s alleged misconduct at Hunters Point, nor did it give any indication of the reports of fraud had made the agency reconsider the decision to award the contract to Tetra Tech EC’s parent company.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-feds-give-navajo-uranium-clean-up-contract-to-firm-with-sketchy-past
(High Country News)

[mr_lebowski]

1. Sounds sketchy AF, and I also have to wonder ... what's the point of checking contamination

of URANIUM MINES?

Wouldn't that sorta be more or less, like, ya know, a GIVEN ... that Uranium Mines are, indeed, contaminated with f***ing Uranium?

Knowing this EPA, the actual goal is to figure out how much more uranium there might be left to be extracted.

Which actually is possibly more reasonable, come to think of it, than attempting to mitigate contamination in a uranium mine.