Military Hazardous Waste Sickens Land and People

[ensho]

http://www.truth-out.org/war-and-tragedy-commons-part-2-military-hazardous-waste-sickens-land-and-people/1311868811


Worldwide, the military is the most secretive, shielded and privileged of polluters because the hallowed mantra, national security, trumps the public's right to know. Thus, most of the extant data on pollution from US-military-related sites is available solely because of citizen pressure on the Department of Defense (DoD), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Congress to inventory, assess, and divulge the extent of the military's environmentally hazardous activities. Citizen awareness and demands for disclosure of military site pollution grew during the 1980's, in the heyday of the new hazardous waste laws, which set standards for storing, transporting, and disposal of solid and hazardous waste as defined in the statutes - namely, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA 1976) and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which initiated the Superfund program in 1980.

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Today nearly 900 of EPA's approximately 1,300 Superfund sites - the suite of waste sites classified as those most hazardous to human and ecological health - are abandoned military bases or facilities or military industrial manufacturing and testing sites that produced weapons, military vehicles, and other military-related products and services. The sites include chemical warfare and research facilities; plane, ship and tank manufacture and repair facilities; training and maneuver bases; and abandoned disposal pits. Common contaminants include metal cleaning solvents, pesticides, machining oils, metals, metalworking fluids and chemical ingredients used in explosives. Dumped into pits, leaking from corroding containers, buried in unlined landfills, and left on test ranges, military toxics have leached into groundwater and polluted drinking water.

According to the 2008-2009 President's Cancer Panel report, up to 500,000 people may have consumed solvent-contaminated drinking water in and around the Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina from the late 1950's through the mid-1980's. The solvents, trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, were traced to an off-base dry cleaning company. Another solvent contaminant, the carcinogen benzene, had been used to clean military equipment. Once used, the spent benzene was routinely dumped or buried on-site near the base drinking water wells. For decades, government authorities adamantly dismissed ongoing reports of cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects among the military and their families as unrelated to Camp Lejeune's water supply. Only recently has the government agreed to set up a registry, web site and call center for residents. In 2005, a study was launched to document childhood leukemia and other serious health conditions in children born at Camp Lejeune and exposed in utero to the contaminated drinking water.

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our military should be brought home from all over the world, trained in the ways of HAZMAT and be made to clean up all their bases in the US and then sent to clean up all our bases around the world.

however

nothing anywhere will be cleaned up and they continue to pollute and kill

[indepat]

1. Such small prices to pay for keeping us safe

:patriot:

[Javaman]

2. what of the millions of tons of ordinance from the world wars that were dumped in the oceans?

fisherman in the Atlantic are still pulling up unexploded gas ordinance from WWI.