Cleaning up the nation’s cold war legacy sites—-it’s what Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Inhofe and others on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will explore during a hearing on Wednesday.
The full committee will hear testimony from five witnesses including Alexandra K. Smith who is the Nuclear Waste Program Manager at Washington State Department of Ecology. Lt. General Todd t,. Semonite, Commanding General and Chief of Engineers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will offer testimony too.
Barry Breen, acting Assistant Administrator of the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management will appear. So will Kevin Frederick, Water Quality Administrator of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality. The final panelist will be Sarah L. Lufkin, board of Directors of the Afognak Native Corporation in Anchorage, Alaska.
Cold war legacy sites include the intercontinetal ballistic missile silos built in Oklahoma, Kansas, California, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Texas, Washington State and Wyoming.
Most were located at Air Force bases including Altus Air Base in Oklahoma. A spokesman at Altus Air Base told OK Energy Today there were at least a dozen such silos located in southwest Oklahoma and all are empty. But there are other cold war legacy sites too such as in Colorado where the 10th Mountain Division trained during World War II and later the camp was used to train fighters in the Cold War, according to a 2015 article in USA Today.