PattyKay, I used to fly in and out of the Ontario Airport back in day and the wind never stopped blowing.
Now, however, I'm wondering if the reason the attendance at Auto Club Speedway gets less and less every year is because the fans are all dying off.
People forget Mr. Penske built his speedway on a Federal SuperFund site.
Read this little excerpt from 1990 where the writer speculates what will become of the piece of property that was the Kaiser Steel Mill. We know... he didn't. Scary thought to think of sitting in the stands on top of all that stuff.
Privatize toxic waste sites?
Article from: Corporate Board | September 1, 1990 | Stroup, Richard L.
After 10 years, the Superfund program has cost $10 billion, yet cleaned up only 50 industrial and toxic waste sites. Does the private sector, through the impetus of profit and responsibility, offer a better solution?
The abandoned Kaiser steel plant in Fontana, California, is an eerie sight - a collection of empty buildings, broken pieces of concrete and steel, hills of slag. But the biggest problem with the Kaiser site is not its visible decay; rather, it is the potential damage from tons of toxic materials such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, and naphthalene that lie underneath it. Cleaning these up will cost millions of dollars, and, because of these chemicals, the Kaiser site has been discussed as a candidate for Superfund, the multi-billion-dollar government program designed to clean up hazardous waste dumps.
What is the future for a place like the Kaiser plant? Since the federal Superfund program designed to clean up such sites has been largely a failure, placing the plant on the Superfund list may doom it forever to its moonscape state. But the site may have a more promising future - and its example offers hope for other hazardous waste sites around the country.
Superfund, a program created by Congress in 1980 and now backed by $10 billion in industry taxes, grew out of the crisis at Love Canal, a hazardous waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York. Hooker Electrochemical Co. began dumping waste into the abandoned canal in the 1940s, but only after seeing that the canal was lined with impermeable clay, which prevented the escape of chemicals. Hooker acted responsibly, undoubtedly warned by its lawyers that it was liable for future damage that the chemicals might cause.
The Love Canal site was well-protected until 1952, when the school board of Niagara Falls forced Hooker to sell the dump and the surrounding land for $1, to provide land for a school. In spite of warnings from Hooker, the school board allowed the clay cap above the chemicals to be scraped off to provide fill dirt for another school site; ultimately, the school board sold the section of land containing most of the chemicals to a developer.
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
