Residents fight potential plans for explosion

Activism by local politicians and community members might have deterred government plans to detonate 700 tons of military explosives in a southern Indiana quarry.\nAfter a Nevada newspaper reported the Department of Defense was considering conducting the largest non-nuclear blast in U.S. history at a site it has tested before, like the quarry in Mitchell, Ind., the word spread and spurred residents to make sure the possibility never becomes reality in Indiana.\nJust 45 minutes south of Bloomington, the Mitchell Crushed Stone quarry was a site of U.S. military testing without public knowledge in 2004 and 2005, The Associated Press reported this month.\nThe explosion under debate, tagged "Divine Strake," would test potential damage to deep-underground targets, a Department of Defense statement said.\nThe Department of Defense pulled its plans to conduct the blast in Nevada earlier this summer.\nIf conducted at the Mitchell quarry, though, the explosion would contaminate groundwater and damage the extensive limestone cave systems in the area, Bloomington resident and part-time scientist for Argonne National Laboratory Russell Boulding said Monday.\n"What's being tried has never been done before," said Boulding, who signed a petition to stop the testing. "Words fail me in saying how insane it is."\nMitchell residents and groups opposed to the explosion — including Bloomington-based "Hoosiers Against Divine Strake" — have spent the last several weeks making phone calls to politicians and organizing their opposition to the explosion. After a press conference Monday in Mitchell, the city's mayor, Butch Chastain, received a letter from the vice president of Rogers Group, Inc., the company that owns and operates the quarry. According to Chastain, the letter said Rogers Group would not allow an explosion of that size in its quarry.\nAn e-mail from Rogers Group spokeswoman Margaret Angell also confirmed that the Department of Defense has no public plans for the quarry.\n"The probability that a large military test blast with 700 tons or more of explosives would ever take place at Mitchell is extremely remote, virtually zero," Angell said. "Rogers Group has not been contacted about the possibility of a 700-ton blast, and we do not expect to be contacted."\nAfter another press conference Wednesday in Mitchell, David Keppel, member of "Hoosiers Against Divine Strake," said Republican Senator Richard Lugar received word from the Department of Defense that there are no plans to use an Indiana location for the test explosion. \nEarlier this week, calls to Lugar were met with replies that the senator had spoken with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the issue and was awaiting a response, according to Timothy Baer, also a member of "Hoosiers Against Divine Strake." \nThe Department of Defense confirmed in an e-mail to the Indiana Daily Student that the agency has no plans to conduct the explosives testing in Indiana.\nThis isn't the end of the story for the Hoosiers that organized opposition to the rumored explosion, though. They want a guarantee for the future — namely, an amendment to the military appropriations bill, H.R. 5631, coming to the U.S. Senate floor Sept. 5, Keppel said. \nIf an amendment prohibiting the explosion is approved by the Senate, the explosion would be prevented from occurring in the U.S. for at least one year, Keppel said. And he's hoping an Indiana senator takes the initiative, he said. \nThe bottom line, Keppel said, is that Rogers Group is a private company dependent on government contracts. \n"I'm not trying to undermine their credibility, but they could be overridden by the federal government," he said.\nFurthermore, he and "Hoosiers Against Divine Strake" aren't just opposing the explosion happening in Indiana. They're opposing the explosion happening anywhere, Keppel and Baer said.\nThe city of Mitchell is also preparing for the future. Community members passed a resolution Monday expressing that the community was opposed to having the explosion in Mitchell, Chastain said. His office will also send a letter and petitions to the governor's office Friday opposing the blast, he said.