| Chapter 1: | The Milltown Cleanup |
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seven years to complete the project and that it would cost $106 million. In August 2005 this re-revised plan was formalized in the Consent Decree (signed by all parties and recognized in federal court). Negotiations concerning the contracting of cleanup activities officially began in the fall of 2005.
The People of the Study
This book traces the primary concerns of Milltown locals in 2005 as they discussed the contamination and the cleanup. Of interest are the distinct sets of interpretive resources employed by locals, both as a means of understanding their situation and for projecting into the future. The informants interviewed for this project represented a variety of perspectives from two locations: 1) perspectives from individuals living in the hamlets nearest the Milltown Superfund cleanup effort and most likely to directly benefit from the cleanup—primarily Milltown, Bonner, East Riverside and Piltzville; and 2) perspectives from individuals in the community immediately downstream from the Milltown Superfund cleanup effort—Missoula. The interviews with locals exposed interesting clusters and differences in the uses of information and logics.
For the purpose of reporting their concerns in this work, local informants were grouped and composite profiles were established under pseudonyms. As a practical matter, this choice allows us to present the local discourses in a manner reflective of conversations among a few local individuals. The theoretical basis of this choice is discussed in chapter 2. Here, we simply wish to introduce you to the rationale behind each of the composite character types and to the pseudonyms used throughout this book.
Our first composite is drawn from the personal profiles of long-term residents of the nearby small unincorporated residential areas––or hamlets––who lived either in close proximity to the contaminated wells or in households affected by the contamination. They ranged in age from their mid-40s to their mid-90s. They provided detailed accounts of the 25-year saga from the vantage point of residents whose personal health