News Coverage
Report says cleanup cost miscalculated
Published June 28, 2004
The Pentagon was so sloppy when calculating the cost of removing perchlorate and other toxins from military sites that its estimate of $16 billion to $165 billion is almost worthless, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
Furthermore, the report concluded, the Defense Department has no policy either for monitoring or cleaning more than 200 chemicals associated with military munitions from its operational military ranges.
Finally, when it comes to perchlorate -- the rocket fuel contaminant that has been found in 350 California groundwater wells and is predominant in aerospace-rich Southern California -- the Pentagon has not provided money to fund its own contamination sampling policies.
The Pentagon on Tuesday disputed the General Accounting Office findings. But environmental activists and one Southern California lawmaker called the report an alarming sign that the Defense Department is not taking public health seriously.
"It is irresponsible that the military has chosen not to take steps to monitor and reduce perchlorate contamination," Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte,who requested the investigation, said in a statement.
As part of the investigation, auditors visited seven Defense Department installations where perchlorate had been detected, including Edwards Air Force Base in the Antelope Valley.
While the GAO found that most installations were not cleaning up known perchlorate contamination, Edwards was an exception.
Edwards, where perchlorate was first detected in 1997, constructed a treatment facility. Two 2002 samples found that none of the 12 chemicals listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's list of unregulated contaminants, including perchlorate, was detected in any of the groundwater samples collected from drinking water wells.
Beginning in 2002, Congress twice ordered the Pentagon to turn over a comprehensive assessment of unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions and contaminants at current and former defense facilities. Lawmakers also directed the Pentagon to estimate the projected cost of cleaning the contamination.
But according to the GAO report, each branch of the military used different methods for estimating costs, so that the Air Force's average for cleaning a contaminated acre was $755, while the Army's estimate was $7,577 and the Marine Corps' figure was $3,634.
Moreover, the report found that the military's estimates were based on unreliable assumptions about just how much contamination exists at about 10,444 ranges throughout the United States.
For example, a 2003 inventory of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton near San Diego, which the Pentagon used to estimate cleanup costs, found 39,084 acres of contaminated rangeland. But another inventory conducted just a year later found nearly three times as many contaminated acres.
Noting that the Pentagon did not fully explain the mix of data and how that affected its cost estimates, the GAO concluded, "The usefulness of DOD's overall cleanup cost estimates is questionable."
Said Anu Mittal, the leading GAO investigator on the report: "We're not quite sure what the purpose of giving something to Congress that's so questionable really is. You're giving something to lawmakers they can't use."
Sonya Lunder, an analyst for the Environmental Working Group advocacy organization that recently released a study of perchlorate in California milk, said the Pentagon hasn't taken the time to study the scope of perchlorate contamination, and instead has given Congress purposely inflated cleanup estimates.
"It's a sign they're not taking this issue seriously enough," Lunder said. "An effective way to stall progress and to stall cleanup is to tell everybody that it's going to cost an incredible amount of money."
The GAO recommended the Pentagon provide Congress with a new "realistic" set of cost estimates, which include an explanation of the calculations. It also recommended the Pentagon provide specific funding for perchlorate sampling at sites where it has not yet been done.
Said Solis, "It is time the military step up to its responsibility to ensure the land and water it impacts are clean, both for the military families and for this nation."