January 10, 2013 -
OLYMPIA, Wash. - As Washington Governor Chris Gregoire gets ready to leave office next week, members from her staff are taking a look back.
When she ends her time as governor, she'll take with her more than two decades of experience fighting to clean up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
In the mid-1980s, Gregoire was a deputy state attorney general lobbying the U.S. government to disclose whether the top-secret Hanford nuclear reservation posed any environmental or health risks.
As director of Ecology, she helped negotiate a 1989 agreement requiring the federal government to clean up the site. She then served three terms as state attorney general and two terms as governor, often working to enforce that agreement.
Gregoire says she's still confident the site will be cleaned up, but acknowledges she was naive to think the agreement would resolve the problem because so much was unknown about Hanford then.
