Contamination Nation

Pentagon officials have officially identified over 22,000 toxic sites, on some 2,000 bases nationwide, yet they say they don't know how many people are exposed to off-base pollution. Nor have they compiled statistics on the number of off-base contaminated sites. Last spring, Defense Deputy Under Secretary of Environmental Security Sherri Goodman testified before a military procurement subcommittee of House National Security Committee, and spoke in support of the proposed environmental component of the DoD budget. "We now have hundreds of people in communities from Cape Cod to California," testified Goodman, "that have to get bottled water from the Department of Defense, because we've contaminated their water supply....If we aren't able to continue cleanup, we're going to have hundreds more people who have to get bottled water, because we've contaminated their water supply."

Over the past four decades, aircraft maintenance operations have contributed heavily to the DoD toxic stew. Chlorinated solvents such as TCE, paint strippers, degreasers, heavy metals, fuels (from leaking underground jet fuel storage tanks and pipelines), as well as weapons materials such as nerve gas, depleted uranium, radioactive substances and Agent Orange, have not gone away, but are now reappearing in area groundwater and soils.

In some cases, contaminants have migrated miles beyond base fences. Adding to Defense Department woes, thousands of acres are littered with unexploded ordnance. The U.S. government is the nation's largest industry and also its largest polluter, now responsible officially for some 61,155 contaminated sites nationally, at a potential cleanup cost of $390 billion. DoD's 1,705 active and closing facilities contain some 22,000 hazardous waste sites, and there are 8,004 more at Formerly Used Defense Sites, known as FUDS.

Of the current $251.9 billion Defense Budget, $4.7 billion funds environmental programs, including research and development and pollution prevention, all accounting for slightly less than 2 percent of the defense budget. Despite Goodman's testimony, DoD received 8 percent less than the requested amount.

Last fiscal year, $300 million for environmental remediation was removed from the 1996 budget because, according to Congress, little progress had been made on the cleanups. To date, the DoD reports spending nearly $12.6 billion on hazardous waste studies and cleanups, yet the job may take as long as seventy-five years to complete.