Word: cleanup
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...