Danger of Old Bombs Is Bigger, Group Says

The federal government has understated the scale of the safety problem posed by old bombs and chemical and biological weapons buried at former military sites throughout the United States, including three in California, according to documents disclosed by a group that airs accusations from whistle-blowing bureaucrats.

In one of the documents -- a private briefing paper for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new enforcement director, John Suarez -- EPA officials stated that finding and removing the leftover weapons “has the potential to be the largest environmental cleanup program ever to be implemented in the United States.” The more than 16,000 military installations containing unexploded ordnance cover an area larger than Florida, the briefing paper said.

Yet many of the sites have already been converted to civilian uses despite the presence of bombs, and the Defense Department has been taking “ill-advised shortcuts to limit costs” on many cleanups, according to the paper, which was leaked along with other documents by an EPA official to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Washington-based group that shields whistle-blowers and publicizes their claims.

The group planned to release all of the documents today. They include an early draft of an EPA survey on the unexploded munitions problem that contained critical conclusions omitted from the final, official draft, which was released two years ago.

The source of the documents “is someone in a position to provide it,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. He described his organization as an “information Laundromat” that protects conscientious public servants from retribution.

Among the documents is an EPA survey of closed military bases in 2000 which found that more than half of the sites polled -- including Ft. Ord on the Monterey Peninsula -- either had located chemical or biological weapons or suspected that they were present.

Ft. Ord previously reported that it had found such weapons on site and, along with the Salton Sea Test Base in Imperial County and Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, reported the presence of unexploded munitions.

Military officials are conducting cleanups of all three California sites. Ft. Ord, which was home to more than two dozen firing ranges for decades, is now the site of the Cal State Monterey Bay campus.

The EPA survey also found that the military had often used open burning and detonation techniques to get rid of the munitions without proper environmental permits, and that it had failed to erect fencing or warning signs at half of the old sites still containing munitions, even though many are near housing, parks and other civilian sites.

Most of those findings were either modified or omitted from the final EPA report, which was later made public, a comparison shows. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said its source at the EPA contends that the omissions were made under pressure from the Department of Defense, which had paid for the survey. Defense officials in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to the findings on chemical and biological weapons, the survey originally criticized methods that the Defense Department has been using to determine how to clean up sites. It concluded that the department has relied too heavily on statistical sampling to determine the likely presence of bombs. The EPA draft said the Defense Department also should have been examining records and conducting more inspections of the old firing ranges.

“At the ranges where statistical models were used, 91% of recommendations that were generated were not acceptable to EPA,” stated one portion of the survey omitted from the final draft. It also concluded that the sampling, although more inexpensive, “may be inadequate in protecting human health and safety.”