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For Immediate Release
January, 20 2011, 01:00pm EDT
Contact:
Kirsten Stade (202) 265-7337
Chemical Caused Nerve Damage to Military Base Workers
Alaska Health Report Cannot ID Agent, Urges Permanent Paving for Base Site
WASHINGTON
A long-delayed state health department report on a 2006 incident at
Alaska's Fort Wainwright finds that an unknown volatile chemical likely
inflicted nerve damage on workers. The draft report, posted today by
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), finds that the
chemical may be still present onsite and the area, now a parking lot,
"should not be disturbed at any time in the future" without alerting
environmental authorities. At least four workers were permanently
disabled and are still seeking compensation for medical bills.
The report by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services
entitled "Chemical Exposure Incident at the Hangar 6 Construction Site
June 29th and 30th, 2006" has still not been finalized. In building
Aircraft Maintenance Hangar No. 6, a chemical was encountered by the
construction crew that caused more than 30 workers to require
hospitalization, at least 4 of whom continue to suffer disabilities.
Hangar
6 was built on the grounds of a 1940s-era structure that burnt down in
2004. Despite the fact that the site was a "designated Hazardous Waste
Accumulation point" the Corps of Engineers work-up stated "No
contaminated soils are suspected at this project location." When the
workers broke through a cap covering a black, oily substance they were
immediately overcome by nausea, headaches, and a host of other symptoms.
The state health report found -
- An unknown, volatile chemical likely caused nerve damage to the disabled workers;
- Even after the exposures, work continued on the site and was halted only upon discovery of an unexploded mortar shell; and
- The exposure site, now a parking lot, likely poses no further damage unless it is disturbed.
"Construction
workers on American military bases play Russian roulette never knowing
if they will uncover a toxic nightmare," stated PEER Executive Director
Jeff Ruch, noting that Fort Wainwright has been on the national
Superfund list since 1990 due to a myriad of contaminated sites. "Two
years after a designated hazardous waste site burned, the Army sent
workers to dig up the site with no warning or protective equipment.
What will stop the Army from sending workers to dig up this same site in
five or ten years with similar results?"
The state health
report was initiated in October 2006 and the draft was completed more
than four years later in November 2010. The reason for this inordinate
delay in finishing the draft is not publicly known and the draft was
obtained through a public records request by the attorney seeking to
obtain workers' compensation for the disabled construction crew. The
draft report is awaiting final approval from the federal Centers for
Disease Control, which helped finance the review.
A civil suit
by the workers against the U.S. Army was dismissed because the workers,
who were not federal employees but were employed by a private
contractor, were limited to state workers' compensation as their only
relief, yet have not been finally awarded that compensation.
"The
casualties at Hangar 6 were utterly avoidable," added Ruch, pointing to
similar incidents at Fort Wainwright that have also been left
unresolved. "The original negligence at the base, however, has been
compounded by government health authorities who have dawdled so long
that it appears to be a deliberate decision to render any review
irrelevant by the passage of time."
###
Read the draft state health report
See the dismissed civil complaint
Look at the toxic fiasco at Fort Wainwright's Taku Gardens
PEER protects public employees who protect our environment. We are a service organization for environmental and public health professionals, land managers, scientists, enforcement officers, and other civil servants dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values. We work with current and former federal, state, local, and tribal employees.
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Kenyan healthcare workers are pushing back hard against reported plans for the U.S. to establish Ebola quarantine/treatment facilities in Kenya for exposed American personnel during the ongoing Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Central/East Africa.
[image or embed]
— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) May 28, 2026 at 11:31 AM
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With the conviction of three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington on federal "conspiracy" charges Thursday, civil rights advocates and legal experts fear that the Trump administration may have just been handed a powerful tool to criminalize dissent.
Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II, nicknamed the "Spokane 3," were indicted last year for their actions at a protest in June 2025, where they attempted to physically obstruct ICE agents from transporting two Venezuelan immigrants to an ICE processing facility in Tacoma.
Both of the men reportedly entered the US legally under a humanitarian parole program that had been terminated by the Trump administration, leading advocates to protest their detention.
As Spokesman-Review, a Spokane newspaper, described:
Protesters that day eventually began linking arms around vans and in front of agents’ cars. The event grew chaotic. ICE agents entered a crowd of people standing outside the facility’s parking lot gate and began grabbing people by the necks and arms, pushing them to the ground. Protesters also slashed tires of vans meant to transport the detainees.
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Legal experts described it as a novel approach that wrapped many people involved in the protest into a single "conspiracy" regardless of whether they committed specific criminal acts.
“Usually if a protest gets out of hand and people are hurt or property is hurt, you see charges based on that,” Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor and a University of Washington law professor, told The New York Times earlier this month. “They’re not going after people based on specific harm done. They’re stretching conspiracy charges to target protesters and people who organize protests.”
Facing pressure from the federal government to bring the case following a national memo sent from the DOJ to prioritize and publicize cases against ICE agents, then-acting US Attorney for Eastern Washington Richard Barker resigned last year rather than bring charges against the protesters.
He said at the time he was grateful he “never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that [he] didn’t believe in." His successor, Stephanie Van Marter, however, did sign the order.
Six of the defendants pleaded guilty to the charges to avoid federal prison time. But Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla chose to fight them, believing the case was part of an unjust attempt to criminalize their right to protest.
After a trial that lasted seven days, a jury found the three defendants guilty of conspiracy. But the defense has argued that the trial was marred by problems that rendered the verdict faulty.
As the Guardian explained:
In February, a federal judge ordered the release of a Venezuelan migrant whose transportation for deportation the protesters sought to block, ruling his arrest violated the constitution.
But the jury, drawn from conservative eastern Washington state, did not hear those facts at trial, thanks to rulings by Judge [Rebecca] Pennell. Pennell, a former federal public defender and appointee of the Democratic president Joe Biden, also ruled the protesters on trial could not use the First Amendment as a defense, though they were allowed to state their reasons for demonstrating.
Instead, the jury watched hours of law enforcement body camera video and heard from a parade of ICE agents... Jeremy Burlingame, an ICE agent who testified, had authored social media posts that called Black politicians “lying ghetto garbage” and transgender people “mentally ill.” He boosted a post showing ICE arresting a pregnant woman at gunpoint that called her a “pregnant invader.”
Federal prosecutors deemed the posts troubling enough to recall Burlingame to impeach him, despite the fact that he was their witness...
But Burlingame’s online posts, the lack of injury to ICE officers, and the absence of evidence showing communication between the three defendants prior to the protest were not enough to sway the jury.
The defendants now face potential sentences of up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, they are expected to appeal the verdict and have filed a rarely used motion allowing their attorneys to argue that no rational juror could find their clients guilty.
"I question whether justice truly was served by today’s verdict,” Barker told the Spokesman-Review. "This was the first conspiracy prosecution in Eastern Washington history under... a Civil War-era law dusted off to punish members of the Spokane community who stood up for two young men who were unlawfully detained by ICE."
Video by KREM 2 News/Youtube
Looking beyond the details of the trial itself, many observers questioned the very premise of the DOJ's prosecution.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said from the start of the trial she believed it was "politically motivated."
"It was meant to make an example out of people who disagreed with federal immigration policy," she said.
City council member Sarah Dixit, who said she took part in the protest, said: "Based on the evidence that was shown, I personally didn’t see evidence of what they were accused of. Conspiracy is a charge that feels complicated to prove, and I don’t believe that the government made a strong case for that.”
Others expressed fear for the precedent that had been set. La Rond Baker, the legal director of the Washington ACLU, said the Trump administration "has a demonstrable history of using the Department of Justice to silence and punish its critics."
The administration has pursued similar sweeping conspiracy charges against other groups of anti-ICE protesters around the country—including in Los Angeles, Broadview, Illinois, and North Texas.
“The verdict was painfully disappointing,” said Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich. “I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with."
In a comment to The Guardian, Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and executive director of its Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, said the verdict was "frightening."
“By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy,” he said. “The goal posts keep moving.”
Bajun Mavalwalla Sr., a retired US Army intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan, said his son—also a veteran of the same war—and the other two defendants were standing for "the freedoms that separate this country from the dictatorships.”
“People in Spokane and people in Eastern Washington need to understand that we were guinea pigs. That they brought the swamp of Washington, DC, into our area to stop American citizens from exercising our rights that are guaranteed,” the elder Mavalwalla said after his son was convicted.
“It was the whole point of the Constitution, the right to protest, the right to dissent, the right to assemble, all of those things are now in question because of this case," he said. "My son has taken the brunt of the entire weight of the United States government onto their shoulders.”
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