Management is changing at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda. Defense officials say the new structure will improve transparency and the cleanup of toxic "forever chemicals."
WCMU' All Things Considered host David Nicholas spoke with reporter Teresa Homsi, about how community members are reacting to the change.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. You can hear the conversation by clicking the LISTEN button above.
David Nicholas: So what are these changes and how will affect the cleanup there?
Teresa Homsi: There were some new faces in Oscoda this week. The Air Force is reorganizing management at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. The Air Force has a pretty complicated chain of command, so I'm not going to get too in-depth with it.
But at the latest Wurtsmith public meeting on Nov. 20, Brenda Roesch addressed the crowd. She heads the installation department out of the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, which is primarily focused on real estate transferring properties. So Wurtsmith was under that department.
Now, Wurtsmith is essentially being transferred to a new department. Kenny Johnson, who heads the environmental section of the Engineer Center, will be the top lead of the cleanup.
He currently oversees roughly 195 military sites with PFAS contamination, and he said under his department, Wurtsmith is going to have more access to technical expertise and environmnetal cleanup resources.
"My business is just environmental, so why not work together and, you know, put it together?" Johnson said. "... If we don't do things differently and more efficiently, then we can't keep up."
The existing team under Roesch's purview from the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program will still be involved with cleanup.
But Roesch described the reorganization as a "fresh start" at Wurtsmith, and she promised that things will "not be business as usual."
"There are three primary concerns we’ve heard from you: that’s the timeliness of our interim actions ... our transparency with our data and the way we're going about cleaning up those sites" she said, "and we’ve also heard (the community) would like more design collaboration early on to ensure you are all on board.”
DN: How are the community members reacting to this?
TH: At the meeting there, I got the chance to talk to a few different people, and overall, the vibe is pretty hopeful.
A lot of the community members have already worked with remediation specialists from the environmental team under Kenny Johnson's lead, and they trust them, which is a huge thing in Wurtsmith.
I spoke with Mark Henry, who is the community co-chair of the Wurtsmith Restoration Advisory Board. He told me that he doesn't see this as a fresh start — this cleanup has been going on for a long time — but he is excited to have more oversight.
"It's certainly a shot in the arm," Henry said. "... There's a lot of work that's been done on Wurtsmith without oversight that has not performed and met expectations.
"The Air Force has lied to us on so many occasions that I don't have a lot of faith, but I am forever the optimist, so we'll see what happens," he said.
DN: This announcement is coming on the heels of an independent review that the Air Force was conducting in Oscoda. Can you give us some background on that and how it impacts or lines up with where we are now?
TH: Johnson and Greg Ganguss from BRAC told me that the reorganization is not related to the independent review of a cleanup system at Wurtsmith that I reported on last week.
That system (the Alert Aircraft Area) is already under construction, and it's supposed to capture PFAS chemicals that are flowing off the base into Van Etten Lake. But when it was initially proposed, residents had raised several design concerns with it.
The Air Force went ahead, approved it, started building it, and the review was prompted by residents who went higher up the chain. An independent team of technical experts from the Air Force ended up stepping in. They reviewed the system, and they found that it does not fully capture contamination in the target area. It captures some chemicals, but there are some gaps in it.
They said that this system is still going to be built as planned, but there may be some expansion in the future and there will be more testing once it's operational to see how effective it actually is.
It's important to note that the team of experts who reviewed the system independently, which include John Gillespie from the Air Force and Noblis specialist Mark Stapleton, are basically going to now be more available at Wurtsmith as well.
And like I said, there's a lot of trust between this team and the community members. So residents are hopeful that now they're on board and they have access to them, other cleanup systems are going to be designed to the standards community members want. They say they want it to be "done right the first time" and also in a timely manner.
Gillespie, senior Air Force environmental engineer, told me he is looking forward to working more on Wurtsmith remediation and is "very optimistic" that cleanup timelines can be shortened.
The Air Force also promised on Wednesday that they're going to look into their schedules and expedite and accelerate cleanup wherever they can because some systems on the docket are not going to be operational until 2029 on the current schedule. For a lot of residents, that's just a no-go.
A couple of those systems are on the south side of the base, and they are supposed to stop chemicals from migrating into the Au Sable River, which if you're familiar with Oscoda, the river goes directly into Lake Huron and the outlet is right in Oscoda.
