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By William M. Hartnett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

FLORIDA, USA 28 September 2001 --A 3,000-ton load of globe-trotting ash that for the past 17 months has been "temporarily" stored in a barge on the St. Lucie Canal won't be going to an Oklahoma landfill owned by the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation had been in contact with Waste Management Inc. and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection over the possibility of disposing of the ash in the tribe's landfill in northeastern Oklahoma, according to DEP officials. The plan was to combine the ash, which was produced in a Philadelphia garbage incinerator in 1986, in equal parts with soil and use the resulting mixture as landfill cover. The federal Environmental Protection Agency had already approved the plan, and EPA inspectors were scheduled to visit the Oklahoma landfill on Thursday, according to a DEP official. But following an uproar spearheaded by a former Greenpeace employee who lives near the Tahlequah, Okla., headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, the tribe said on Wednesday that accepting the ash would violate its environmental policies. "The Cherokee Nation is not going to accept this material," said Mike Miller, tribal spokesman. "This is not a change in our position. Our policy all along has been to not accept material that is dangerous or toxic or a pollutant."

DEP and Waste Management officials said on Thursday that the Cherokee Nation plan was simply one of several disposal options under consideration, albeit a particularly promising one. "We're still continuing to look for disposal options for the ash," Waste Management spokesman Don Payne said from the company's Houston headquarters. In January a plan to haul the ash to a Pompano Beach landfill was scrapped due to the heated objections of Broward County commissioners. The controversy over the ash is centered on the environmental threat some fear it poses. DEP officials insist tests of the ash have consistently proved it free of hazardous chemicals and heavy metals. Yet rumors over its content persist, fueled largely by the lengthy history of failure that has greeted every attempt to dispose of it.

After being turned away from several countries during the late 1980s, part of the original 14,000 tons of ash was abandoned on a beach in Haiti, where it remained for more than a decade. That portion of the ash was brought back to the United States in March 2000 and found its way to Martin County a month later. Since then, the ash has rested in a large hopper barge tied up at Maritime Tug & Barge, in the canal west of Palm City. This past weekend DEP officials pumped out hundreds of gallons of water that had collected in the open barge over the past year and a half. Copyright 2001 The Associated Press contributed to this story.

william_hartnett@pbpost.com