Garden of Atoms: Family’s battle against radioactive dump

WINSTED — “It only takes a few people to start something,” began Betsy Myers in her hour-long presentation Aug. 17 at Ralph Nader’s American Museum of Tort Law.

Myers, her husband Stephen Myers, and sons Shepherd and Matthew, who now live in Salisbury, recalled together their epic battle against the siting of a low-level nuclear waste facility (including high-level waste by dilution) by New York state in their rural town of Almond. The New York State Radioactive Waste Siting Commission was under a federal mandate to find a home for nuclear waste.

Allegany County, next to the Pennsylvania border, was one of the possible sites. Almond is an isolated farming community in that county, where the Myers family moved in 1979 with their young sons. They left New York City to have a quieter life. They both taught in the rural central school. When they learned of plans for locating a nuclear waste site 10 miles from their home, they immediately began getting the word out into the community.

Betsy and Stephen started small, sharing the information with the folks that hung out at the local pub, Mulhesian’s Bar. Myers, who resembles artist Georgia O’Keefe, recalled “I worked the crowd in the bar, said we must fight against the dumping of nuclear waste in our county, and they said I was a dreamer.”

Thus began an amazing struggle pitting a rural farm community against the powers of New York State, Governor Mario Cuomo and Congressman Amory Houghton, Jr. Houghton, the wealthiest member of congress at that time, was an heir to the Corning Glass Works fortune. He recognized potential profit for his family business in the siting of the nuclear waste facility. A process called vitrification basically encased the nuclear material in glass (a concept that has since proven flawed), was seen at the time as a means of safely disposing of nuclear waste. If implemented, the process could have meant a fortune to Corning Glass Works, according to Myers.

The Myers duo founded Concerned Citizens of Allegany County (CCAC), a community-based grassroots organization. When the group held their first community meeting in Belfast, New York, on Jan. 26,1989, 5,000 people showed up, out of a population of 16,000 in the county. It was a mixture of hardscrabble farmers and highly educated professors.

Myers explained that it was a complicated group to appeal to. She said, “There were a lot of guns in the county, and some really tough locals. We wanted peaceful protests – no guns, no knives, no violence. It is enduring that everyone bonded against nuclear waste.”

Police inspect farm equipment blocking a bridge in protest of the proposed nuclear waste dump in Allegany County, N.Y. in 1989.Provided

Governor Cuomo, who aspired to become President, came to the area to purportedly to give a grant to the Alfred University’s ceramics school, but his real purpose was to check out the tales of a radical “Bump the Dump” campaign. At that time there were a handful of commercial dump sites proposed for spent reactor fuel up and down both coasts. Congressman Houghton took Steve Myers to Barnwell, South Carolina, to show him a “successful” nuclear site. To Houghton’s chagrin, Myers brought a Geiger counter with him, and came home to Almond stating, “there is no safe storage.” [Note of interest; the current 235-acre low level-radioactive waste disposal site in Barnwell County receives waste from South Carolina, New Jersey, and Connecticut.]

The dire nature of the problem galvanized the people to block all efforts of the State Siting Commission from entering the county. Every vehicle in town — cars, trucks, and farm tractors — parked on both sides of the street blocking access, someone put a dead skunk into the exhaust fan of the Siting Commissioner’s RV. They marched to Albany carrying wooden caskets representing the potential towns under consideration as sites. Two farmers welded shut the bridge to keep them from entering town. Wearing a red arm band meant you were willing to be arrested, a yellow arm band indicated you were a supporter.

Some state official referred to the locals as “people kept in the dark and fed mushrooms.” Thus, was born the paper mushroom masks that all the protestors wore to protect their identity from the recent injunction against them. Anyone recognized by the State Police would receive 30 days in jail and a $1,000. fine.

As the State increased pressure on the people, they began pushing back harder. Men rolled giant snowballs to block the roads, and parked every manner of combine, bailer, and mower across the bridge. During the final site Commission visit, a bunch of elders blocked the Caneadea Camelback Bridge by handcuffing themselves to a chain across the span. They became known as “Grandparents for the Future.”

Some of the protesters had ridden in on their workhorses. An overzealous State Police captain moved in, arrested the men, and ordered his troopers to beat the horses. “We were on our horses and the troopers beat some of our riders into the mud,” recalled Glen Zweygardt. That was the final straw. Myers said to a hushed crowd at the American Tort Museum, “NY State lost, the night they beat the horses.” The next day Cuomo ordered the commission to suspend their surveys.

The activists’ legal challenge questioning the constitutionality of the siting process at the state level, based on the Tenth Amendment concerning state’s rights, moved through the courts, 13,000 residents signed a petition, and their case was eventually heard in 1992 by the Supreme Court, who ruled in favor of the people in New York v. U.S.et al, which determined that “Congress cannot force states to assume ownership and liability of low-level radioactive waste within its borders.” It was a hard-fought victory.

The legal documents, correspondence, newspaper clippings, buttons, posters, tee-shirts, even the mushroom masks, are held in a level II security vault at Cornell University, donated by both Myers’ sons. The Myers Collection is stored alongside a copy of the Gettysburg Address. The legacy of the grassroots movement begun by Stephen and Betsy Myers to protect the safety of their children and their neighbors from nuclear poisoning, still resonates in every small town and city in America.