Toxic Immunity

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Volume 1, Issue 45 | November 3, 2003

F R O M T H E E D I T O R

It's the kind of deal that big corporate polluters would love to get. Faced by a

growing hazardous waste crisis, Pentagon officials are proposing that the

military simply be exempted from a host of federal environmental laws, including

the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. And, as Jon R. Luoma reports

in the November/December Issue of Mother Jones, " Bush appointees at the EPA

appear to have embraced the Pentagon's agenda. "

Read: Toxic Immunity

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/45/ma_571_01.htm

Will Tacy,

Editor, MotherJones.com

 

Toxic Immunity

Faced with a hazardous-waste crisis, the Pentagon is pushing hard to exempt

itself from the nation's environmental laws.

Jon R. Luoma

November/December 2003 Issue

" It feels like somebody wrote a new rule -- the bigger a mess you make, the

easier it should be to just walk away, " says Laura Olah, a Wisconsin activist

who heads a grassroots group called Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger.

Badger, in this case, is a former Army ammunition plant near the town of Sauk

Prairie, Wisconsin -- a sprawling industrial complex that operated from World

War II through the mid-1970s and produced not only munitions, but a flood of

toxic wastes. Today, a witches' brew of contaminants, including the heavy metals

mercury and cadmium and the cancer-causing compounds carbon tetrachloride and

trichloroethylene, is seeping into the groundwater beneath the 7,300-acre site.

For more than a decade, several local farm families unwittingly drew their well

water directly from the heart of the contamination; in the nearby Wisconsin

River, sediments are contaminated with more than 20 times the allowable amount

of mercury.

 

Olah says her group just wants the Defense Department to clean up the site

before it abandons Badger entirely. But the Pentagon has missed a series of

deadlines in a cleanup agreement with the state of Wisconsin. In recent years,

it has also backed away from a plan to remove large volumes of contaminated soil

from the base, proposing instead to fence off and monitor the toxic hot spots.

 

Badger is hardly an isolated case. From Cape Cod in Massachusetts to McClellan

Air Force Base in California, the Pentagon is facing mounting criticism for

failing to clean up military sites contaminated with everything from old

munitions to radioactive materials and residues from biological-weapons

research. Now, citing the demands of the war on terrorism and working with

sympathetic officials in the administration and Congress, the department has

stepped up efforts to remove substantial parts of its operations from

environmental oversight.

 

Last December, Defense officials drew up a 24-page strategy memorandum, laying

out a plan for a " multi-year campaign " to exempt the military from federal laws

including the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the

Clean Air Act, as well as rules governing solid and hazardous wastes. The

strategy also called for Congress to state " that munitions deposited and

remaining on operational ranges are not 'solid wastes' " -- a move that with one

stroke would exempt the Pentagon from having to clean up the old shells, fuels,

and other weapons " constituents " that turn places like Badger into health

hazards.

 

The Pentagon is seeking these changes even though current law already allows it

to gain exemptions from any environmental regulations that might hinder military

preparedness; according to a 2002 study by Congress' General Accounting Office,

the Defense Department has never run into any significant problems in this

regard.

 

Nonetheless, Bush appointees at the EPA appear to have embraced the Pentagon's

agenda. In April, EPA enforcement chief John Suarez told Congress that the

Pentagon's proposals to ease hazardous-waste regulations were " appropriate " and

in line with " existing EPA policy " -- even though only weeks earlier, a report

from Suarez's own staff to the President's Office of Management and Budget had

specifically warned against relaxing the waste rules, noting that the munitions

could present " an imminent and substantial endangerment of health or the

environment. " The hazardous-waste exemption failed to pass Congress this spring

-- though the Pentagon got one step closer to an item on its environmental wish

list when the House approved an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act,

which has been an impediment to a controversial Navy sonar program. Hill

staffers say they expect the hazardous-waste proposal to be introduced again in

the coming months.

 

The changes could affect thousands of sites across the nation. Late last year,

EPA staffers prepared an internal briefing document for Suarez, suggesting that

removing toxic waste just from the Pentagon's thousands of weapons ranges " has

the potential to be the largest environmental cleanup program ever to be

implemented in the United States. " According to the report, which was never

publicly released, the contaminated ranges cover an area as large as Florida, or

about 40 million acres. Yet, it noted, there had been a " disturbing trend " on

the Pentagon's part of taking " ill-advised short-cuts to limit costs. "

 

In all, more than 27,000 military waste sites have been documented nationwide;

they include the vast Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod, where

contamination threatens the drinking water for more than a quarter million

residents, as well as Fort Detrick in Maryland, where cleanup contractors in

2001 turned up test tubes filled with residues of anthrax and other bioweapons

materials. But even as the scope of the problem continues to expand, internal

EPA reports suggest, the Department of Defense is seeking to conceal the extent

of the contamination.

 

According to a survey of inactive weapons ranges commissioned by the Pentagon in

2000, nearly half the 206 sites studied lacked adequate fencing, or even simple

signs, to keep the public away from areas where hazardous munitions might lie.

The same report also found that wastes from chemical or biological weapons might

be present at more than 50 percent of the sites. The document's first draft

stopped just short of calling the Defense Department a scofflaw, stating that it

" often does not adhere to...applicable statutes or regulations " and concluding

that " the ranges in this survey pose potentially significant threats to human

health and the environment. "

 

By the time the final version of the report appeared later that year, both of

those statements, along with seven additional pages of observations and

criticisms of the Pentagon, had been removed. Jeff Ruch, executive director of

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility -- a whistleblower group that

obtained copies of the original document -- says agency staffers told him that

the report had been censored in response to pressure from the Pentagon.

 

In recent months, the Pentagon has quietly scored a series of other concessions

from the EPA. In one decision -- announced in a press release late on a Friday

last July -- the agency declared that it would not, as had been widely expected,

tighten drinking-water standards for perchlorate, a rocket-fuel additive that

has contaminated scores of bases and weapons-manufacturing sites. Perchlorate

seeping into the Colorado River from a Nevada rocket plant has contaminated the

drinking-water supply for 15 million people; a recent study by the nonprofit

Environmental Working Group suggests that most of the nation's winter lettuce --

the bulk of which is irrigated with Colorado River water -- contains significant

amounts of the toxin.

 

Also this summer, the EPA announced it would no longer require property owners

to remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are also suspected

carcinogens, from buildings before selling them -- a change that would largely

benefit the Pentagon, which owns hundreds of PCB-contaminated sites. Under the

new rules, the Pentagon could transfer those sites to schools, hospitals, and

other civilian users without incurring liability for the contamination or

requiring evidence of any cleanup.

 

Watchdog groups expect the Defense Department to continue pushing for

environmental exemptions, both within the administration and in Congress. " This

isn't over, " says Karen Wayland of the Washington-based Natural Resources

Defense Council. " There was such a public outcry when they first floated these

ideas a couple of years ago that we thought they'd back off. But they're casting

it as an issue of military readiness in the age of terrorism, and leaning hard

on everyone from the moderate Republicans in Congress to the EPA to get out of

the way. "

 

 

 

 

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/45/ma_571_01.html

 

 

 

 

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