Military Smokes and Obscurants

[ajs@sagady.com]

*This message was originally posted to IGC's Environmental Justice
Newsgroup on 9/27/99


Citizens living around the military reservation at 
Grayling, MI and Michigan National 
Guard members may be interested in a new National
Academy of Sciences study on the toxicity of 
military smokes and obscurants that are most likely
used at Grayling during training exercises.

The URLs are:

http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/enter2.cgi?0309065992.html
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/5582.html
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/9621.html

There are also two previous volumes which were mostly 
devoted to obscurants rather than smokes...(the second and third URL)....

Frankly, one of the obscurants, hexachloroethane, should be 
evaluated for persistence and bioaccumulative effects.  Military 
practice is to burn hexachloroethane in the presence of zinc oxide
and aluminum.   It should also merit a look as to whether or not
hexachloroethane is covered by any phaseout plans under
the Montreal Protocol on protection of the ozone layer.

Other methods of obscurant formation are described using 
oils injected into hot manifolds to produce smoke.

I have not had a chance to read the reports other
than the summaries but these kinds of military practices raise several
potential questions associated with emissions of polycyclic aromatic 
hydrocarbons and toxic chlorinated compound emissions.
For the Grayling, MI location, this should raised some citizen 
concerns about deposition in local streams, lakes and rivers
and Great Lakes deposition.

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