It's National Sunshine Week, sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, March 12-18 to support more open government.
I think that more open government is a good idea. I worked in the Foundry Cove of Constitution Island, in Cold Spring, NY and I think it furnishes a good example. The Marathon Battery company produced batteries for the NIKE rockets, used in the defense against ICBMs then thought might be launched at the U.S. There were two stages of battery production, a sealed battery and a serviceable battery, much like the batteries in automobiles have become, sealed from filling, etc. It was told to me, as was most of this I offer, as told, not written, or newspaper clippings, in the museum. The written "Health and Safety" plan was general to cover the requirements of but not specific for this part of the site, which I heard, may have been used in heavy-water production for nuclear science, its last use, a pool chlorine storage warehouse which burned for 24 hours and took over 300 firefighters to control, these in the 20th century.
In the 19th century the West Point Foundry produced ordnance and cannons for the early republic, for the U.S. Navy first, one of the few registered federal armament production centers, (in the American Civil War, it made over 30,000 caissons, over 1 million shells, from small 10 and 20 pounders to 200 and 300 pound shells, for the patented rifled Robert Parker Parrott cannons, some used in the incendiary bombardment by the "Swamp Angel" of Charleston, S.C. in 1863). In the archaeological investigation of the foundry cove marsh-edge where we were confined (in the National Register of Historic Places) we recovered under the remains of the early 20th century company's facility, the wooden and iron "gun platform" prototype of the "Swamp Angel" and perhaps other heavy gun emplacements. Two fairly large shells were found with (?) their "sabots" (a softer metal disk, brass, attached to the shell which spun against the channels of the rifling in the large cannon after the black powder charge ignited, imparting spin to the iron shell, filled with who knows what incendiary charge), after a magnetometer survey which failed to find any significantly large "anomalies". EOD was called twice for the sighted empty shells in the backfill.
The gun platform was found in a combination of computer-aided mapping and from a digitized extension from a photograph of a Civil War era map behind glass in the West Point Foundry School Museum nearby, a museum in the small school once there for the foundry workers children, clandestinely brought to the U.S. under aliases from Great Britain, which had laws against certain workers leaving the country after being employed in this trade, according to the prior research.
Well the point is, the law required the testing in the marsh and the recording of features in this nationally and internationally significant site, which at first sight appears to be a nice little valley in the woods and marsh, which belies the "sea of brick" under the fallen leaves and the water work tunnels running under it, where the United States produced the weapons it needed to stem the tide against its own insurgency in the south and evolved into other uses. No information was provided in detail, i.e., who owned these properties when and what was going on there, a general level of protection was thought all that was required for the nearby warehouse which has been removed and the nickel and cadmium pollution removed from the land site and from the marsh, combined with concrete put on rail on the former rail-bed that had once serviced the West Point Foundry. Out in the Hudson River ran a double rail-line wharf, since burned below the water line, visible one day when a waterspout lowered the river enough to see the barest tops of the former massive works.
I went to work with a reasonable expectation of information to be provided sort of in the public interest (I didn't find out that 1 million shells had been made there till much later, yet we conducted magnetometer surveys from ATV and boat with Tidewater Research. Inc. who I'm not sure knew about it either) and other factors which weren't involved in the obvious "NIKE" cleanup were not considered, (lots of lead paint on bridges) though we had to provide gallons of urine for baseline studies, and before and after blood-testing, chest x-ray, and when asked after leaving the firm I was not provided with the medical data, nor was the Occupational Medicine M.D., Dr. Ehrlich, any longer at Mt. Sinai Hospital, when I checked there my father an experimental subject in a chemotherapy.
More open government and protection for people in its service is a policy worthy to pursue. Look before you leap doesn't work if you can't see or are kept from seeing.
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