Podcasts about camp minden

PJ Reilly talks with Justin Martin who has been shooting professionally for nine years and just made his first shootdown in the Open Pro division at Camp Minden. We talked with Martin about that experience, how it will motivate him going forward and about how he got started in competitive archery as a bowhunter from Ohio.

In October of 2012 a huge explosion rocked Camp Minden, a little-known government compound located in Louisiana. The explosion shattered windows 4 miles away. A 7,000-foot mushroom cloud contaminated the area and eyewitnesses understandably wondered whether they'd been the victims of a nuclear detonation. So what exactly did happen? Tune in to learn more about the conspiracy afoot at Camp Minden.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

The United States spends more on military arms, equipment and personnel than any other country. More than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and England combined, according to the National Priorities Project. We sell most of the weapons that countries like Saudi Arabia, England and others buy.In no small measure, the business of the United States is war.Between our foreign policy and our defense spending, we create markets for weaponry and wars and then pivot to respond to the siren cries of those markets.And, while the U.S. Defense Department stands resolute in its commitment to respond to climate change to protect its bases and national security interests, the Department is a major source of greenhouse gases as a profligate burner of fossil fuels.The No War 2017 Conference at American University in Washington in September sought to find paths to link the anti-way and peace movements with the climate and environmental movements. That effort naturally puts the U.S. military at the center of the debate.The conference was a project of World Beyond War, an international peace organization.I was invited to speak about the successful fight to prevent the open burning of 16 million pounds of munitions propellant at Camp Minden following an explosion of a small amount of some of the materials in 2012. After a strong grassroots effort that engaged thousands of northwest Louisiana citizens in the fight, the area’s congressman, one Senator, and a dedicated state representative.While at the conference, I conducted several interviews, three of which are included in this podcast.In order of appearance they are:Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright;Alice Slater;and Nick Mottern.They constitute roughly the second have of the program. I talk about the conference and Camp Minden in the first half.President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Joint Allied Commander in Europe in World War II, left office with a nationally televised Farewell Address. In it, he warned Americans to guard against the influence of the Military Industrial Complex. The video of the full 16-minute speech is below.https://youtu.be/OyBNmecVtdU

The closed chamber burning of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant is weeks away from being completed at Camp Minden. That work, led by the Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden, prevented a potential public health disaster from unfolding in northwest Louisiana. That threat grew out of the U.S. Army’s plan to burn the explosive materials in the open air — 80,000 pounds per day for 200 days. The burn chamber portion of the closed burn system installed at Camp Minden to dispose of 16 million pounds of munitions accelerant. Camp Minden is east of Shreveport in Webster Parish. Wind would have carried the contaminated fallout from the burning in any direction on any given day. Dr. Brian Salvatore recognized the threat and spoke out. He galvanized the community against the open burn. It sparked a grassroots movement that succeeded in getting the Army to change its plans — and to pay for it. The notion that an open burn of those materials could be carried out was not new. It had happened in other communities with Army munitions depots over the years. Some communities fought for safer disposal methods and prevailed. The Concerned Citizens of Camp Minden connected into that network of community activists and experts, engaged local and state governmental leaders. They engaged the EPA as well as members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation which, ironically, was home to some of harsh critics of the agency. The burning method that was selected as the disposal mechanism offered the most reliable, proven method of disposal of the material Dr. Salvatore explains in our conversation. But, it’s not perfect. He points out that the monitoring of the exhaust from the burn process is not highly refined, that there is no analysis of the amount of individual chemicals emitted after the burn. But, he says its a vast improvement over the open burn operation. Dr. Brian Salvatore This being Louisiana, a group in the region now sees a business opportunity with the Camp Minden burn unit and wants to make it permanent. That would make Camp Minden a hazardous waste destination, with toxic materials of all kinds being shipped there through the region to be burned. It is typical for Louisiana which, dating at least as far back as the Mike Foster administration, has had as official state policy to take the wastes that others don’t want for disposal here. The most glaring early example of this was when an Exxon drilling operation at the mouth of Mobile Bay failed in the mid-1990s. The company had a large amount of hazardous waste on its hands that it needed to eliminate. Alabama officials would not allow the company to dispose of the materials in their state. Instead, the materials were hauled by truck to the Lafourche Parish community of Grand Bois in 1998. Dr. Mike Robichaux of Raceland was a member of the Louisiana Senate at that time. Grand Bois was in his district. He sought to have the legislature block the importation of hazardous wastes into Louisiana and was roundly defeated with the help of Governor Foster and the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. He succeeded in bringing national attention to the plight of the citizens there, as well as to the misclassification of “normative oilfield wastes” as non-hazardous. The push to establish Camp Minden as a permanent hazardous waste disposal facility is as short-sighted as burying oilfield wastes in land that is a more membrane than either land or marsh as was the case in Grand Bois. Despite having near state-of-the-art technology in place at Camp Minden, there is little doubt that some toxins (hopefully in safe levels) have been released during the months of burning that will soon end. Prolonged exposure to toxins and carcinogens over time is the course that sometimes leads to cancer and other diseases. We already have numerous examples of this in Louisiana now. Here’s one. Here’s another. This report is about Calcasieu Parish. This is about mercury contamination of water here. Where does your electricity come from? What those examples above have in common is that for much of the time the pollution and contamination was taking place, there was little or no public awareness of the processes at work. Anyone who proposes to put a permanent hazardous waste incineration facility in a community under the guise of jobs and community benefits is engaged in a special kind of cynicism. For too long the problem in Louisiana has been that our elected officials and those who claim to regulate industry have been willing to allow the poisoning of some of us as a means of enriching a few of us. If we are going to leave a state that our children and future generations can inhabit, that must stop. A new fight has erupted over Camp Minden. The good news is that the good people who defeated the Army and the EPA should be able to handle this skirmish. ••• Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment. A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

As one of the citizens leading the Stop The Burn movement near Camp Minden and a pastor, environmental activist and community organizer, Colonel Sam Mims is an impressive figure. When he took the All Y'all stage, we had no idea what Col. Mims was going to say. He delivered a fiery call to action fueled by his righteous indignation over what he sees as systemic failures of leadership in Louisiana. In his voice, we hear anger and exasperation, but we also hear love and hope.