PSoTD

Will the Air Force pay the bill for this problem in Wyoming?

While there is a dispute between the U.S. Air Force and the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities over the amount of contaminated groundwater on the city-owned Belvoir Ranch, who picks up the tab for the cleanup shouldn't be in question.

The area in question is located on the west side of the Belvoir Ranch, southwest of Cheyenne, in a place that was used as a nuclear missile launch site by the Air Force between 1960 and 1964. The military used trichloroethylene to remove oil from metal machinery at the launch site. The estimated hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical used for cleaning seeped into the groundwater, causing potential health problems for city residents.

The city has been able to effectively deal with the chemical by spending $20,000 a year to remove any trace of the chemical from our drinking water. Cheyenne spent about $600,000 for an aeration basin when the chemical was first discovered a decade ago.

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The city gets about 25 percent of its potable water supply from groundwater wells. Add the fact that the Belvoir Ranch will be developed someday with recreation and other opportunities. This all means the water contamination problem needs to go away - and the sooner the better.

The cleanup won't come cheap. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality believes that such a cleanup will costs millions of dollars. That's money the city doesn't have, unless it plans to burden ratepayers with higher water and sewer rates. That wouldn't be fair.

The Air Force is responsible for this water contamination, and it should be the Air Force that foots the bill, not the ratepayers in Cheyenne.

The Air Force has always been a good neighbor to Cheyenne, and we know it will do the right thing by picking up the tab for a problem it created some 45-plus years ago.

BTW, the comments posted there are somewhat dumbfounding.