The Sun Herald | 04/13/2006 | Katrina moved dioxin-tainted soil near base

The Sun Herald | 04/13/2006 | Katrina moved dioxin-tainted soil near base: "GULFPORT - Hurricane Katrina pushed a small amount of dioxin-contaminated soil into areas around Gulfport's Seabee base, a company representative monitoring the site said at a base advisory board meeting this week.

'We will work to move the sediment back to a containment area,' said Bob Fisher, a hydrologist with Tetra Tech, the company contracted by the U.S. Navy to analyze environmental contamination of the cancer-causing chemical. 'We have already taken action on the base and we are getting ready to do it off-base. The good news is that while it did move in some locations, it did not move more than 100 feet.'"

UPDATE!!!

I didn't expect this when I read the local news tonight as I had just posted an archived WLOX news article commenting on the meeting they had on 8-24-05 discussing the remaining clean up of Dioxin contamination at the Gulfport SeeBee Base and surrounding neighborhoods.

WLOX-TV - The News for South Mississippi: West Gulfport Residents Get Update on Dioxin Clean UP

WLOX-TV - The News for South Mississippi: West Gulfport Residents Get Update on Dioxin Clean UP: "'We're not so much concerned about the clean up, as we are past exposure of what was actually in the air here for all the years the barrels were sitting here leaking from 1968 to 1977,' Hansen said."

The above article is an archive dated 8-24-05, five days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. As you know Agent Orange was used prolifically during the Vietnam War. Perhaps you didn't know that 15,480 drums were stockpiled at the SeeBee Base in Gulfport, Mississippi from 1968 to 1977. In that period of time the drums were leaking and dioxin was contaminating the soil not only at the base but also surrounding neighborhoods.

If you didn't know that's okay because you were further away but, you see, we didn't know and we were only one block away. The office where my husband worked was built in late 1968, he became owner in 1974. I worked there as did all of our children at one time or the other. He became seriously ill in late 1990 and diagnosed with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma. In 1995, MDA in Texas pronounced a probable cure as he was in complete remission.

In 1996, I established a website at GeoCities and maintained a page on his particular illness. Many lymphoma patients would get in touch with me telling me about themselves. Most were Vietnam veterans and they had the same illness. They were in search of hope that they may possibly survive the disease.

I suppose that sometimes ignorance can be bliss. If we had known what was happening we wouldn't have lived the life we did. The drums were transferred to the Dutch owned ship, Vulcanus, and destroyed between 15-24 of July 1977. The soil in the area is still contaminated as the above article verifies and I wonder, since the terrible disaster befell us, is the clean up continuing.