BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CROSBY TOWNSHIP -- The most recent inch-thick Fernald action plan is not about radioactive contamination, spills or environmental damage.
Community activists and government officials are thinking of wetlands, endangered species, ponds and trees.
Gazing at a computer-altered conceptual slide of what Fernald might look like in the year 2008, they see leafy green and prairie grass.
They know that if the proposed land-use and natural resource-restoration plans are approved at the end of a public comment period next month, then settlement of a $206 million Ohio claim against the Department of Energy (DOE) is sure to follow.
Will anyone come?
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) officials said nearly 50 years of ecological damage done to the uranium processing plant site will be offset by creation of an 884-acre, federally owned natural habitat.
Yet some community members wonder whether that will be enough to overcome the stigma of Fernald. Even if proposals to include an American Indian burial ground, nature walk and history museum succeed, will anyone come to see them?
"Seven or eight years ago, someone said to me, "You all don't even know how to address human health issues. How can you be worried about bugs and bunnies?' " said Pete Yerace, a DOE natural resources trustee. "But we've come a long way."
Lisa Crawford, founder of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health, supports the plan. For years, her group has advocated natural restoration.
But even she admits to some "nagging fears" that will need to be overcome with further scientific proof.
"I don't want people hunting and fishing there," she said. "That is just a little bit of overkill to me."
American Indian groups are eyeing the site for another purpose -- reburial of their dead.
Thousands of remains excavated over the years cannot be identified as belonging to a particular tribe and returned to a reservation -- so they have been warehoused against the day when some other federal land should become available.
"Land is hard to come by, and we don't have the resources to buy it," said Barbara Clandell, a Cherokee descendant who supports a Fernald burial ground.
At another corner of the 1,050-acre Fernald site, the Community Reuse Organization is asking that 23 acres be set aside for industrial development or some other community use.
