A Thousand Points of Blight

By BRUCE VAN VOORST WASHINGTON

Pearl Harbor made history as the target of the 1941 Japanese air attack. But the 91-year-old naval base earned a more dubious distinction last month when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added the site to its list of the nation's most dangerously polluted places. Among the hazards scattered across 12,264 acres: unlined landfills, pesticide-disposal pits, chromic acid- disposal areas, heavy-metal contamination and waste-oil leakage.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Pearl Harbor's pollution is that it is duplicated at hundreds of military installations around the country. Stick a shovel into the ground at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground north of Baltimore, 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, senior specialist with Friends of the Earth: "Every day we learn more about the Pentagon's environmental pollution. The public still has only a piece of the puzzle."

The armed forces, whose installations cover 25.6 million acres of America, have for decades allowed the leakage of oil and other fuels, drained toxic chemicals into waterways, dumped lethal sludge at unlined landfills and littered the country with unexploded shells and bombs. Military bases often sit astride local water sources, and some neighboring towns have detected higher incidences of tumors, cancer and birth defects. "Each of the military services is guilty," says Seth Shulman, author of The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military. "From coast to coast, there's an unbroken seam of toxic time bombs."

A service-by-service overview:

ARMY. Normal operations at Army bases generate huge amounts of fuel spills, solvents and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Munitions and chemical weapons are manufactured and often tested at Army sites. The dimensions of the problem become clear at the 4 1/2-acre O Field at Aberdeen Proving Ground. At first glance, it looks like any other fenced-in, treeless site on this picturesque peninsula that juts into Chesapeake Bay. Yet for decades, O Field served as a dumping ground for vast amounts of toxic chemicals. Soil tests show concentrations of benzene and trichloroethylene (TCE) that are hundreds of times higher than the acceptable EPA limits; the vinyl chloride level is 1,500 times greater than allowed.

AIR FORCE. McClellan Air Force Base, 10 miles northeast of Sacramento, California, is on the EPA's Superfund worst-case list, and virtually every other air base has its share of problems. Maintenance crews at McClellan used powerful solvents to strip paint from F-15 aircraft and remove grease from F- 111 engine parts. A major electroplating operation dumped chrome, lead and other metals into the ground. Altogether, the Air Force has discovered 177 toxic sites on McClellan's 3,500 acres. Local water wells have been shut down because of contamination. At one site, the TCE level was 4,500 times the EPA limit. Merely locating the polluted sites has cost $72 million.

NAVY. The Navy's oldest pollution problem has been the waste generated by ships, some of which -- like aircraft carriers with crews of 5,000 -- are small floating cities. For generations, Navy vessels just threw their garbage and industrial wastes overboard. Now sea dumping of toxic materials is unnecessary, thanks to onboard compactors and a vigorous program of reducing the amount of packaging taken aboard.

Paint-stripping and engine-maintenance operations present a more formidable challenge. At the Naval Air Engineering Center in Lakehurst, New Jersey, a plume of water contaminated by TCE solvent is leaking into the aquifer that supplies water to the southern part of the state. Investigations at the Norfolk Naval Base complex in Virginia are only partly completed, but it already appears that the Navy's biggest single installation may turn out to be its biggest contamination problem.

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.

The 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.

The problems -- and costs -- have been aggravated by years of neglect. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter instructed the military to comply with environmental legislation, but the order was not enforced. Although Congress in 1980 passed the Superfund law, which made private polluters responsible for cleaning up hazardous wastes, the departments of Defense and Energy were left largely self-regulated. Increasingly, local communities, appalled at revelations about military pollution, clamored for information about what was going on in their neighborhoods and demanded that the Pentagon be made accountable. Only in September did Congress finally pass an act that puts federal facilities under the same environmental enforcement regimen as the civilian sector -- making federal violators liable for the same fines. "At last the government has to meet the same standards as everybody else," says Shira Flax, an environmental expert with the Sierra Club.

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 in determining the bill," says Richard Jones, senior official on the Pease project. "In the cleanup business, you don't know what you don't know, and that can cost you a lot."

The best way to keep down future costs is to avoid creating so many problems in the first place. Pollution can be reduced by such technological advances as new non-toxic solvents for washing aircraft engines, and plastic granules to replace grit for blasting paint off aircraft fuselage parts. Baking soda is being tested as a nonlethal paint remover, and scientists are also investigating the potential for lasers to do the job. Noting that bacteria can strip paint from buried tin cans, scientists are examining the feasibility of getting microorganisms to do the same job for aircraft fuselages.

Since 1988 Congress has voted to close or scale down a total of 120 bases and convert much of the property to civilian use, but it has also insisted that facilities be turned over environmentally clean. Nonetheless, communities have shied away from accepting future liability for any of the sites, and some transfers 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.

Military officials have legitimate complaints about the difficulties of working with the maze of federal and state regulations, and with the bureaucracy that enforces them. The Pentagon also contends that the EPA's standards are too exacting. "EPA would have us restore the world cleaner than God made it," complains a Pentagon official. Even dedicated environmentalists are beginning to say some cleanups need cost-benefit analysis. "There comes a point when the investment is simply too great, considering the tiny risks involved," says Lewis Walker, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environment. Perhaps. But considering the scale of military pollution, and its potential hazard to millions of Americans living near tainted installations, that point is still a long way off.