Overblown Hazard In one of the few press reports about the EPA actions at the North Hollywood facility, the Associated Press quoted the EPA's On Scene Coordinator as suggesting that the radium in the instruments could be used to make a so-called "dirty bomb" by terrorists. To professionals in the field, the suggestion was ludicrous. The notion terrorists might buy or steal thousands of instruments, scrape the tiny amounts of radium paint off, and put it in a bomb is idiotic. One professional suggests it would be far more convenient -- and scientifically just about as hazardous -- to just buy talcum powder and put that in a bomb instead. Another said -- tongue in cheek -- that a pallet of instruments (with radium or not) falling from a plane would be a much more dangerous event.
It's interesting that the original estimate to identify, carry off and bury the contaminated instruments, and clean up residue on site, was well under $100,000. Jeff tried and tried to have the EPA and the California State folks carry out that plan -- that they themselves originally proposed -- but the bureaucrats kept changing their stories, changing their interpretation of the guidelines and lying to Jeff. The word on the street -- and I don't know if it's true or not -- is that Jeff wouldn't contribute anything to the Poor Bureaucrats' Beer Fund, so any time he agreed to a cleanup procedure, the DHS increased the amount of Jeff's inventory that would be affected until every single one of the thousands of historic artifacts were hauled off and destroyed. Our constitution says that the government may not take private property without compensation. Jeff had figured that Preservation Aviation would take about 20 years to sell off the North Hollywood inventory and that in that time, the total value of those instruments, sold one by one, retail would run about $10 million. I don't know if that is true or not, but even if that estimate is off by three standard deviations (and I saw the staggering magnitude of that inventory) it was still about $200,000 to $500,000 a year in sales. Neither the EPA or DHS paid Preservation Aviation for the inventory that it had purchased in good faith from a man who had bought it in good faith from our government. Nope, the EPA gave Jeff, as a private individual -- not a stockholder of a corporation in good standing -- a bill for $7 million. The Thick Plottens Because Preservation Aviation had some of its inventory in a T-hangar at Chino Airport (mostly new in boxes or in military storage cans), and Jeff had zero political clout, the same folks who had persecuted him in North Hollywood came out to Chino. Except this time it was a raid by more than 30 federal employees, EPA bureaucrats and believe it or not -- FBI agents. As AVweb reported, they sealed off a row of 10 T-hangars. Jeff had instruments in his hangar in that group of 10. The EPA also dragged the County of San Bernadino in because it owns the airport. T! hat eventually proved to be valuable to the hangar tenants because the County had the resources to tell the EPA that it was being stupidly paranoid. Nevertheless, at first -- after testing showed a mere 20 pico-curies per liter of air of radon in the T-hangar containing the instruments -- the EPA declared that everything in all of those 10 T-hangars was "contaminated." They wanted the six airplanes in those hangars, as well as everything else in them -- motorhomes, cars, motorcycles, tools and the hangar buildings themselves destroyed and hauled off to a hazardous-waste disposal area. The EPA had the effrontery to try and use the residential 4 pico-curies per liter guideline for that one hangar and then extrapolate the "contamination" (that was only a product of its fevered imagination) to all 10 hangars.
The County had the clout to compel the EPA to back down and -- to try and keep this recital to a reasonable length -- after a lot of arm waving, the EPA backed down and finally agreed that someone actually determine whether there was actually any contamination in the hangars, rather than just go with the EPA's previously used "we believe" standard for contamination. The County was required by the EPA to hire a company that could evaluate the radioactive hazard in those hangars and clean it up. The County hired a company approved by the EPA. It came in and found no significant contamination. The EPA went ballistic and had the company fired. A second cleanup company was hired. It went through the T-hangars instrument by instrument at a horrendous cost and it, too, confirmed that the EPA's assertion of "widespread contamination" was absolutely bogus. In Jeff Pearson's inventory it found fewer than 2% of the instruments to have radium dials. It found only seven instruments to be "non-intact." On the floor of Jeff's hangar it found 13 spots of "elevated" radioactivity (by the EPA's standard, not any law). Of those, one -- count 'em, one -- had an origin tied to radium. A piece of tape was applied to that spot and the contaminat! he stuck to the tape when it was pulled away from the floor, removing that tiny bit of contamination. Five spots were found to be Potassium 40, a by-product of deicing fluid. The testing equipment then broke, so no one knows what the other spots were. To the EPA's chagrin, no radium or excess Alpha or Beta particles were found in any of the hangars. Several other areas of Potassium 40 contamination were detected in the other hangars. The EPA required no remediation. Double Standards. Three of the six impounded airplanes had radium-dial instruments installed. The EPA took no action beyond noting that they had such instruments. Several radium-dialed instruments were found in other hangars than Jeff's. The EPA's response to this was, "Unless the instruments in question belong to Mr. Pearson, they can be returned to their owners."