Wisconsin Public Television

Transcript: In Wisconsin #926

Air Date: May 19, 2011

Patty Loew:

Welcome to "In Wisconsin," I'm Patty Loew. This week, come along on the Badger Honor Flight to salute these veterans and the greatest generation.

Man:

Thank you so much for everything. We're very, very proud of you guys. Thank you.

Patty Loew:

We'll also take you to Barron County for a groundbreaking idea to turn garbage into energy.

Man:

There are better ways to handle trash, and there are better ways to make electricity.

Patty Loew:

Plus, a young spoken word artist describes the summer swelter in Milwaukee.

Man:

As the temperature rises, we reach boiling points

Attitudes of those around us, rise quicker than mercury

Patty Loew:

Those new reports next on this season's final episode of "In Wisconsin."

Announcer:

Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhood and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web. And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists of Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Minneapolis. A veterinary team working with pet owners and family veterinarians, providing care for oral disease and dental problems of small companion animals.

Patty Loew:

A hero's welcome home for these Wisconsin veterans.

Man:

I was wondering a while ago if I was the only guy that had tears in my eyes.

Patty Loew:

They are all members of the so-called Badger Honor Flight, a chapter of the national program that flies thousands of vets to Washington, DC, free of charge, to see the World War II Memorial and other sites. "In Wisconsin" reporter Frederica Freyberg, along with videographer and veteran Butch Soetenga, take you along for an emotional daylong journey to our nation's capital and back home again.

Man:

Good morning, sir. Thank you for serving.

Frederica Freyberg:

Roll call might be early for this honor flight. But for many of these vets, it was hard to sleep anyway.

Man:

Couldn't even sleep. We got in at 1:00, and he's just been so excited to have this day.

Frederica Freyberg:

Looking forward to a celebration with their name on it.

Man:

Your sacrifice for this country with extraordinary and you are the greatest generation this world has ever seen. Thank you. (Applause)

Man:

Every step of the day is about honoring and thanking them for what they did, and it just keeps building.

Woman:

You betcha! All right!

(Applause)

Man:

Hello, sir, welcome to your nation's capital. We are very, very proud of you guys.

Man:

Thank you so much for everything. We're very, very proud of you guys. Thank you. God bless.

Veteran:

Thank you guys, too!

Frederica Freyberg:

A military receiving line greets members of Wisconsin's greatest generation. One Air Force sergeant visibly moved by the moment.

Woman:

To be able to thank them personally for their service, and for making a way for us and for this generation is just very, very endearing.

Frederica Freyberg:

And it just keeps building.

Woman:

This is all for you!

Veteran:

We never had anything like this before.

Woman:

This is wonderful!

Frederica Freyberg:

Upon arrival, a full lights and siren police escort whisks the 100 or so veterans through Washington, DC, on their way to the sites they came to see. The impressive iconic locations in our nation's capital, and our war memorials erected in their honor.

("Taps" being played on trumpet)

John Kerry:

Never seen this memorial before. It's one of the greatest days to get to see this memorial.

Reinhold Eckelberg:

I was there when the flag was raised. I was on the island for 30 some days. It was probably 35. Our company, the company that I was with, we came off of the front line with seven men out of the whole company that was left. There is stories that I could tell.

Frederica Freyberg:

So many decades later, the memories come flooding back.

Woman:

He's really emotional. He was in Iwojima and wounded.

Woman:

Thank you!

Frederica Freyberg:

Deep emotion overlaid with the deep and vocal appreciation of others. At every stop, citizens turn out to welcome and thank veterans coming in on Honor Flights, like these Wisconsin veterans who come to see the World War II memorial.

Man:

Welcome to DC.

Veteran:

I'm looking for Killroy. He ran off with my wife. I wanted to thank him. (Laughter)

Milo Pinkerton:

For me, it's just an honor to be with him to share this moment.

Woman:

Here we go, guys!

Veteran:

–Forever!

Woman:

And it's very special to be here with him. Hey, dad, I didn't get it yet.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is it emotional?

Hub Pinkerton:

I suppose it is. It's getting to me a little bit.

Mel Jacob:

I think it's beautiful.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is it meaningful to you?

Mel Jacob:

It sure is. Just being right there, and what it represents and so forth, it meant a lot to me.

Frederica Freyberg:

Of course the memorial means a lot to him. Mel Jacob survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, a wartime tragedy that represented the greatest loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. Of the nearly 1200 on board, just 316 survived, after four days offending off shark attacks, exposure and dehydration, waiting for rescue on the high sea.

Veteran:

Got a lot of memories coming back from visiting a place like this.

Veteran:

64 years! Oh, my gosh.

Veteran:

This is my wife, Eileen.

Eileen:

Good to meet you.

Veteran:

Good to meet you.

Eileen:

Thank you.

Veteran:

Gosh, I knew this guy about 100 years ago.

Frederica Freyberg:

For one family, the past bumped into the present. A surprise reunion as Medal of Honor recipient U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye steps out of his sedan to greet an old friend and fellow infantry member from Baraboo, John Geoghegan.

Daniel Inouye:

John's an old buddy of mine. We were in the hospital together in Battle Creek, Michigan, and I wanted the folks to know that he behaved himself. (Laughs)

Patrick Geoghegan:

My father didn't know that the senator was coming. He didn't know that my brother and I were coming, so it's a wonderful day. This is the best day I've had for years and years and years. And he's had a lot of good days.

John Geoghegan:

It's very emotional, and a complete surprise. O course, the whole day has been. It's amazing.

Brian Ziegler:

You can tell by the smile on their faces, and you talk to family members. And this is one of the best days of their life. This is like a finality for a lot of them, as far as closures what they experienced in the war.

Frederica Freyberg:

And it just keeps building as the departure gate at Reagan National turns into a dance floor for the veterans whose wartime tunes tended to big band. And if anyone thought the flight home would result in a letdown, then comes another blast from the past.

(Man reading names of veterans on plane and handing out envelopes)

Frederica Freyberg:

Something remembered by vets as one of the most important parts of any day. Mail call. Two hours in the air means savoring packets of letters and cards from family and friends.

Once wheels down in Madison, trip reviews.

Veteran:

The highlight was everything, wonderful from beginning to end. Terrific.

Veteran:

In Washington, the band and the people. That was terrific.

Frederica Freyberg:

Perhaps the best is still yet to come. As they ride down the airport escalator toward parking and home, the crowd and music erupt. The biggest welcome of the day comes as a welcome home. More than 4,000 people and a 25-piece band packed the airport in one final thank you for these Badger Honor Flight veterans whose smiles, surprise and gratitude say it all.

Patty Loew:

A fitting tribute for their service to our country. There are five hub cities across Wisconsin that host the Honor Flights. The next Badger flight out of Madison is expected this fall, and 300 vets are on the waiting list. The flights cost about $100,00 each are primarily made possible by donations. For more information on the nationwide Honor Flight program and the flights organized in Wisconsin, go to our web page at wpt.org and click on "In Wisconsin."

Just going to the store or running the kids to practice has a lot of people thinking about gasoline prices. With energy costs near record high, a small county in western Wisconsin is doing what it can to help it's residents. 25 years ago, after the last major energy crisis, Barron County decided to turn it's trash into energy. "In Wisconsin" reporter Adam Schrager shows you how they are simultaneously powering the community and trying to save the earth.

Adam Schrager:

Every Tuesday morning.

Man:

This is the way to do it.

Adam Schrager:

Homeowners put out their trash, just like millions of others statewide.

Man:

What we're doing is better than the alternative.

Adam Schrager:

But where it goes is unlike any other place in Wisconsin.

Man:

Unique is the word that is often overused, but this facility in a lot of ways the unique.

Adam Schrager:

Barron county's trash facility leads to 450 degrees of separation from the worst possible environmental impact for garbage.

Man:

Do you want to sit in the landfill forever?

Adam Schrager:

Al Zeltner runs the plant.

Al Zeltner:

This facility was built in 1986. It's basically been in operation for 25 years.

Adam Schrager:

The ash takes about 10% of the space the trash would require in the landfill.

Al Zeltner:

All of this waste would normally get buried in the ground.

Adam Schrager:

At the Barron plant, recycling is separated when it comes in.

Al Zeltner:

Anything and everything that people throw out winds up coming here.

Adam Schrager:

And then a magnet makes sure metal doesn't get into the ash. A lot of money in recycling for sure, but not where Barron County's biggest savings are coming from as it burns it's trash.

Al Zeltner:

We take everything that's leftover and make electricity, basically.

Adam Schrager:

It is technically called a waste to energy plant.

Al Zeltner:

The carbon foot print of a waste to energy facility, it's one of the cleanest forms of electricity there is.

Adam Schrager:

The steam energy generated from the burning goes back into the community.

Al Zeltner:

That electricity that we're not using in house simply goes out onto the electrical lines and is used at the first available energy whether that's the cheese plant across the street or a house up the road.

Adam Schrager:

Where you see negative kilowatts sending energy out to the grid, Barron County sees positive results, as energy prices continues to rise.

Al Zeltner:

If anyone says it's always more expensive than landfilling, that would not be true.

Adam Schrager:

The plant's keeping dumping fees, on average, equal to landfills. And maybe even more timely, it's creating power for roughly half of the price its neighbors are typically paying.

Al Zeltner:

The possibility is there for us to have huge benefits in Barron County because of this project.

Adam Schrager:

In fact, the county just spent $3 million to upgrade the plant and make it more efficient.

Al Zeltner:

We had excess energy that we were unable to use. We were selling as much as we could. We had this excess energy that was sitting there, with basically no use. We've taken that and turned it into electricity.

Adam Schrager:

The technology has gotten better, specifically in containing emissions, since Barron County began this project after the last energy crisis.

Al Zeltner:

It worked here, and I think it can work other places.

Adam Schrager:

The reality Zeltner says, is that the alternate is far less appealing.

Al Zeltner:

The vast material out there is not practical to recycle, so you have to do something with it. You have to either put it in a landfill or you have to convert it into energy.

Adam Schrager:

Barron County has chose to do the latter, a choice different than any other county in Wisconsin.

Al Zeltner:

There are better ways to handle trash, and there are better ways to make electricity. With a waste to energy facility, you take care of both issues. It can be done in a very environmentally friendly way.

Patty Loew:

The French Island plant in La Crosse is the only other facility in Wisconsin to burn garbage. But that treats processed waste, not the raw material burned in Barron County. Efforts to clean up an environmental problem on the other side of the state are underway again. In April, dredging crews got back to work on the Fox River. For years, Wisconsin paper companies and the government have been locked in a legal battle over the cleanup of cancer causing PCBs. "In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett discovered even though the lawsuits remain, but the cleanup is on track in DePere.

Bud Harris:

I've watched the dredging outside of my door down here.

Art Hackett:

Bud Harris lives up the hill from the Fox River. The dredges are part of the effort to rid the Fox of PCBs. Harris has been watching PCBs for most of his professional careers.

Bud Harris:

PCBs, we knew they were there. But the issue was, okay, so what are the real effects?

Art Hackett:

For a 30 year period, beginning around 1954, PCBs were an ingredient a few of the mills used to coat paper. Many other mills recycled scraps of that original paper to make other products. PCBs washed out of the mills, into the water and settled into the sediment. Ten years ago, while attorneys for paper companies over who's responsible for paying the bills, the DNR studied whether it was possible to dredge sediments from the river without making the problem worse. The answer was yes.

The dredging of PCBs from the Fox River has now reached industrial scale. At times the two dredges have operated at the end of pipelines stretching for ten miles.

What is that brown stuff on the top?

Man:

That's the sediment.

Art Hackett:

Just as the paper machines operated continuously, turning fibers into paper, the sediment never stops between the time when the dredge pumps it the pipeline and the time when it drops it into a pile awaiting a truck ride to a landfill.

Ray Mangrum:

It's kind of a unique situation because nobody has ever set a process up like this without some kind of buffer between the dredges and the process unit. It's never been done before. That's something we are very proud of.

Art Hackett:

The material is pumped into huge presses that force out the water leaving dry of contaminated cake. Mangrum says the project will ultimately remove 3.8 million cubic yards of material from the river bed. In addition, 500 acres of contaminated river bottom will be capped with an isolating layer of sand and crushed rock.

Ray Mangrum:

We are on a schedule, seven years for dredging, two additional years for capping. My goal is to complete it at least a year in advance. We are ahead of schedule now, and we project to stay ahead of schedule.

Art Hackett:

The decision to cap areas that were too difficult or expensive to dredge was controversial. But environmental scientist Bud Harris says he accepts it as part of the solution.

Bud Harris:

I was never a proponent of capping, but one of the things we knew early on was that even with dredging, you are going to get residual. You will never get it all. It's not like vacuuming under the rug.

Art Hackett:

So far, Harris says the cleanup process appears to be working. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a review of the first five years of the Fox project. This involved Lake Butte des Morts near Menasha. The EPA's measurements showed remaining PCBs concentrations of .22 parts per million. That is below EPA standards.

Bud Harris:

If, in fact, they get the sediment concentrations and go it to .2, I believe it probably will be protective of most of the wildlife that we are concerned about. My concern is more in terms of the long-term monitoring. Not only monitoring the security of those caps, I think that's terribly important, they need to be monitored. You have to monitor the effectiveness of the whole process.

Jay Grosskopf:

We certainly don't anticipate major disturbance in the caps.

Art Hackett:

Jay Grosskopf is with Boldt Construction. The Wisconsin DNR has contracted with Boldt to monitor the dredging and the effectiveness of the cleanup.

Jay Grosskopf:

We are looking at successive generations of fish and water fowl and other things, in terms of, are the PCBs being eliminated from the parents, it turned out being passed onto the offspring.

Art Hackett:

The question is, for how long?

Jay Grosskopf:

There really is not a defined timetable yet. There's a goal to eliminate the fish and water fowl advisories. We don't know if that's going to take ten or 15 years, 30 years, 50 years. It's a hard thing to present to the public. Unknowns are always hard to present to the public.

Art Hackett:

The cleanup process still has at least seven years to run. And then there will be a wait for the food chain to clear itself.

Bud Harris:

The model suggests there's a half life of five years.

Art Hackett:

Bud Harris ran through a calculation of how long it will take to clear microorganisms, then fish, then birds.

Bud Harris:

You can begin to project that out. What do you have to get to in the water to be protective? About two parts per trillion. That's going to be another four decades.

Art Hackett:

Two parts per trillion of a compound that first entered the Fox River in 1954.

Bud Harris:

By 2054, there shouldn't be fish advisories by that time.

Art Hackett:

That's 100 years?

Bud Harris:

Yes, it's 100 years.

Patty Loew:

Even though the PCB contamination happened years ago, the current cleanup is expected to prevent the remaining PCBs from entering Lake Michigan. The dredging and capping project is expected to be completed by 2017.

Despite our cool spring and notorious winters, did you know extreme heat kills more people in our state than any other kind of severe weather combined? Heat problems can increase with urbanization and poverty. How we design and construct our cities may further fuel the problem. As part of our Quest environmental reporting project, video producer Finn Ryan, one of our partners with the Educational Communications Board shows you the impact of extreme heat through the voice of spoken word artist Elijah Furquan Milwaukee.

Elijah Furquan:

Neighborhoods are ovens with windows. And as the – global warming increases, lives are preheated into soul souffles.

Pancakes that are projects are poured over with the humidity as thick as molasses. Heat and humidity are the perfect appetizer on death's plate. It's an all you can eat buffet from May to October. And senior citizen discount every day.

If thermometers can measure temperatures, they should be able to measure human anxiety. As the temperatures rises, they reach boiling points. Attitudes of those around us rise quicker than mercury. And the pressure of staying cool causes us to explode. Compressed living complex, circulate heat and cause compressed feelings to converge upon our neighbors in the hood.

So that 90% release of excess body heat talked about in science class is contributed to our local temperature rising. We crack open fire hydrants until we hear lights crying, raising taxes by lowering our body temperature. If you couldn't afford the wind replacer, fridges and freezers were propped open until your two brothers' faces were frozen.

Audiences applaud the ice cream man once that familiar jingle mingles with our ears. The sweet release of flooded heat is a godsend. What do you know? The ice cream vendor's name is Noah.

As the temperature rises, so do attitudes, death rates, bills and ice cream stocks. Heat affects the elderly more than us. Their lungs resemble the Dow Exchange. Rises and drops until they crash. Ambulances are summoned, riding down the streets with the contents of the only fire hydrant.

And we have only just begun to fry.

Patty Loew:

According to research, conducted by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, extreme heat events are projected to become more frequent and longer lasting. By the middle of the century, Wisconsin is expected to have an additional four weeks where temperatures soar past 90 degrees.

Finally this week, a closer look at Wisconsin's most popular state park. Devil's Lake sees more than a million visitors a year. Located just two miles south of Baraboo, the state park has a 360-acre spring fed lake and 29 miles of hiking trails with spectacular views in every direction. Described as Wisconsin's Yellowstone, this year Devil's Lake State Park will celebrate its 100th birthday. Enjoy the view and have a great summer "In Wisconsin."

Announcer:

Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhood and life in Wisconsin running smoothly. Alliant Energy, offering energy saving ideas on the web. And Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists of Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Minneapolis. A veterinary team working with pet owners and family veterinarians, providing care for oral disease and dental problems of small companion animals.