Molly Murray has two stories in today's News Journal on the issue of dredged-up archeological artifacts. In the main story, Beach work mindful of artifacts, she discusses the various precautions planned by the state and by the US Corps of Engineers as they prepare to dredge sand from the ocean floor to replenish Delaware's Atlantic beaches.
There's also a companion piece, Lewes artifacts may be from 2 sites, which looks at what has been learned from the artifacts that were accidentally dredged-up from the Delaware Bay floor late last year.
As a Lewes resident, and with some interest in history and archeology, I've been watching this story and posting links to coverage of it in the past few months. There's at least one person out there with strong feeling about this issue. He, or she, prefers to remain anonymous in his, or her, comments. And they are fairly strong comments.
I hope my anonymous commenter will take some comfort from the precautions outlined in Molly's longer piece this morning. I believe that the folks running these dredging programs are trying to avoid a repeat of what happened off Lewes Beach and I give them credit for their efforts.
It may be because I am a state employee. It may also be because I worked for several years with some of the DNREC players in this story back in the early 1990s. But I have to say that I am confident that the people at DNREC, and even the feds on this project, are not evil people. They are people, and they are trying to do their jobs, serve the people of the state and protect the environment and the heritage of the state.
Stuff happens. There are always mistakes in life. What would be a problem is if we didn't try to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them.
2 comments:
These were not mistakes. These were blatant violations of state and federal law by not reporting the artifacts which one of the project managers called "trash". The Army Corps and DNREC are supposed to have qualified personnel who know how to ID artifacts, and if they do, they should be fired now and not let to work on the Rehoboth Dewey project, which they are.
The truth will come out but don't count on Delaware to do any enforcement or even the federal government. Count on losing federal $$ continued DNREC screw ups. The Governor will not remove the people in DNREC. So not only will the people suffer from DNRECs' mistakes, but so does states' history.
You clearly have strong feelings about this subject. I hope you have shared your concerns with DNREC, the Corps, et al, using your actual name. I don't think there's anything I can do for you.
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