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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 68

A Thousand Points of Blight


From fuel spills and toxic wastes to live shells and lethal
landfills, the U.S. military is the nation's No. 1 polluter

By BRUCE VAN VOORST/WASHINGTON


    Pearl Harbor made history as the target of the 1941
Japanese air attack. But the 91-year-old naval base earned a
more dubious distinction last month when the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) added the site to its list of the
nation's most dangerously polluted places. Among the hazards
scattered across 12,264 acres: unlined landfills,
pesticide-disposal pits, chromic acid-disposal areas,
heavy-metal contamination and waste-oil leakage.

    Perhaps the most shocking thing about Pearl Harbor's
pollution is that it is duplicated at hundreds of military
installations around the country. Stick a shovel into the ground
at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground north of Baltimore,
Maryland, and the soil begins to burn with phosphorous waste
from decades of manufacturing military flares. A firing range
the size of Manhattan at the Army's Jefferson Proving Ground in
southeastern Indiana is littered with 1.5 million unexploded
artillery shells; officials are torn between footing a $6
billion cleanup bill and simply padlocking the place and
throwing away the key. In June a midnight blast equal to 4,700
lbs. of TNT rocked the sleepy Washington suburb of White Oak,
Maryland, whose residents had long since forgotten the naval
chemical-ordnance bunker in their midst. Says Ralph De Gennaro,
senior specialist with Friends of the Earth: "Every day we learn
more about the Pentagon's environmental pollution. The public
still has only a piece of the puzzle."

    The armed forces, whose installations cover 25.6 million
acres of America, have for decades allowed the leakage of oil
and other fuels, drained toxic chemicals into waterways, dumped
lethal sludge at unlined landfills and littered the country with
unexploded shells and bombs. Military bases often sit astride
local water sources, and some neighboring towns have detected
higher incidences of tumors, cancer and birth defects. "Each of
the military services is guilty," says Seth Shulman, author of
The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S.
Military. "From coast to coast, there's an unbroken seam of
toxic time bombs."

    A service-by-service overview:

    ARMY. Normal operations at Army bases generate huge
amounts of fuel spills, solvents and polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs). Munitions and chemical weapons are manufactured and
often tested at Army sites. The dimensions of the problem become
clear at the 4 1/2-acre O Field at Aberdeen Proving Ground. At
first glance, it looks like any other fenced-in, treeless site
on this picturesque peninsula that juts into Chesapeake Bay.
Yet for decades, O Field served as a dumping ground for vast
amounts of toxic chemicals. Soil tests show concentrations of
benzene and tri chloroethylene (TCE) that are hundreds of times
higher than the acceptable EPA limits; the vinyl chloride level
is 1,500 times greater than allowed.

    AIR FORCE. McClellan Air Force Base, 10 miles northeast of
Sacramento, California, is on the EPA's Superfund worst-case
list, and virtually every other air base has its share of
problems. Maintenance crews at McClellan used powerful solvents
to strip paint from F-15 aircraft and remove grease from F-111
engine parts. A major electroplating operation dumped chrome,
lead and other metals into the ground. Altogether, the Air Force
has discovered 177 toxic sites on McClellan's 3,500 acres. Local
water wells have been shut down because of contamination. At one
site, the TCE level was 4,500 times the EPA limit. Merely
locating the polluted sites has cost $72 million.

    NAVY. The Navy's oldest pollution problem has been the
waste generated by ships, some of which -- like aircraft
carriers with crews of 5,000 -- are small floating cities. For
generations, Navy vessels just threw their garbage and
industrial wastes overboard. Now sea dumping of toxic materials
is unnecessary, thanks to onboard compactors and a vigorous
program of reducing the amount of packaging taken aboard.

    Paint-stripping and engine-maintenance operations present
a more formidable challenge. At the Naval Air Engineering
Center in Lake hurst, New Jersey, a plume of water contaminated
by TCE solvent is leaking into the aquifer that supplies water
to the southern part of the state. Investigations at the
Norfolk Naval Base complex in Virginia are only partly
completed, but it already appears that the Navy's biggest single
installation may turn out to be its biggest contamination
problem.

    Prodded by environmentalists and Congress, the Pentagon is
beginning to act. So far, officials have identified 10,924
hazardous hot spots at 1,877 installations, including 123 of the
Superfund's 1,236 sites. At a time of shrinking defense budgets,
environmental cleanup is the fastest-growing category of
military expenditure -- up 18%, from $2.9 billion last year to
$3.4 billion in new 1993 funding.

    The task is so overwhelming that accurate cost projections
are almost impossible to make. Some analysts put the figure at
$20 billion over the next 30 years, not including overseas
bases or the nuclear facilities run by the Department of Energy.
The Pentagon's inspector general has said the cleanup bill
might go as high as $120 billion -- about what America spent on
the Apollo space program in today's dollars.

    The problems -- and costs -- have been aggravated by years
of neglect. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter instructed the
military to comply with environmental legislation, but the order
was not enforced. Although Congress in 1980 passed the
Superfund law, which made private polluters responsible for
cleaning up hazardous wastes, the departments of Defense and
Energy were left largely self-regulated. Increasingly, local
communities, appalled at revelations about military pollution,
clamored for information about what was going on in their
neighborhoods and demanded that the Pentagon be made
accountable. Only in September did Congress finally pass an act
that puts federal facilities under the same environmental
enforcement regimen as the civilian sector -- making federal
violators liable for the same fines. "At last the government has
to meet the same standards as everybody else," says Shira Flax,
an environmental expert with the Sierra Club.

    What little real cleanup has already taken place has
proved astronomically expensive. Moving 10.5 million gal. of
toxic liquids and 500,000 cu. yds. of contaminated soil from one
site at the Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado cost $32
million; cleaning up the whole base is likely to top $1.5
billion. Digging out a single landfill the size of a tennis
court at Norfolk cost $18 million, and there are 21 other
identified sites. Removing 600 drums of buried toxic wastes at
Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire cost $22 million. "We are
only on the threshold in determining the bill," says Richard
Jones, senior official on the Pease project. "In the cleanup
business, you don't know what you don't know, and that can cost
you a lot."

    The best way to keep down future costs is to avoid
creating so many problems in the first place. Pollution can be
reduced by such technological advances as new non-toxic solvents
for washing aircraft engines, and plastic granules to replace
grit for blasting paint off aircraft fuselage parts. Baking
soda is being tested as a nonlethal paint remover, and
scientists are also investigating the potential for lasers to
do the job. Noting that bacteria can strip paint from buried tin
cans, scientists are examining the feasibility of getting
microorgan isms to do the same job for aircraft fuselages.

    Since 1988 Congress has voted to close or scale down a
total of 120 bases and convert much of the property to civilian
use, but it has also insisted that facilities be turned over
environmentally clean. Nonetheless, communities have shied away
from accepting future liability for any of the sites, and some
transfers seem likely to drag on for decades. President Bush
last month signed a bill sponsored by Congressman Leon Panetta
designed to streamline procedures for allowing certain portions
of the bases to be turned over piece by piece, and for assuring
that the Federal Government remains responsible for any future
cleanup problems.

    Military officials have legitimate complaints about the
difficulties of working with the maze of federal and state
regulations, and with the bureaucracy that enforces them. The
Pentagon also contends that the EPA's standards are too
exacting. "EPA would have us restore the world cleaner than God
made it," complains a Pentagon official. Even dedicated
environmentalists are beginning to say some cleanups need
cost-benefit analysis. "There comes a point when the investment
is simply too great, considering the tiny risks involved," says
Lewis Walker, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for
Environment. Perhaps. But considering the scale of military
pollution, and its potential hazard to millions of Americans
living near tainted installations, that point is still a long
way off.