Rocky Mountain News
Sunday March 31, 1991


MILITARY'S TOXIC SITE LIST GROWS BY 3,000 PENTAGON REQUESTING
$1.3 BILLION FOR CLEANUP, BUT HAS BARELY STARTED ON 17,000 HAZARD SPOTS
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By: ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - The Defense Department has added 3,000 toxic waste sites to its cleanup list, bringing the total, at 1,855 current and former military installations, to 17,482, according to a report to Congress.

The Pentagon is seeking about $1.3 billion in its new budget request for next fiscal year for the cleanup effort, or about 20% more than it is spending this year.

In a cover letter, deputy assistant defense secretary Thomas Baca said "significant headway" has been made in the cleanup effort, although work at many sites has yet to begin. The report says that many of the additional sites are at small military installations.

Some of the contaminated sites include wastes from weapons manufacturing and testing as well as training exercises. In many cases toxic materials and chemicals were dumped without protection and penetrated into groundwater.

The Defense Department report said that preliminary assessments have been made at 16,000 of the 17,482 sites, but actual cleanup work has begun at only 1,400 of them. Work has been completed at only a handful of sites, the report said.

Earlier this month, the National Toxic Campaign Fund, a private advocacy group in Boston, released data from last year's Pentagon report to Congress, showing 14,401 likely contaminated sites at 1,579 military bases nationwide.

"The problem is even worse than we imagined," said Gary Cohen, executive director of the National Toxic Campaign Fund. "The military's cleanup record continues to proceed at a snail's pace while more and more contaminated sites are discovered." It's unknown what the entire cleanup eventually will cost, although some estimates have been as high as $200 billion.

Among the major facilities with new sites designated for cleanup are the Ravenna Army Ammunition Plant in Ohio, the Mississippi Army Ammunition Plant, the Long Beach Naval station in California, and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

Dugway has 127 sites and was the Army's chemical weapons test range.