[CPEO-MEF] Best Practices Report

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

On March 31, 2000, the Pentagon's Environmental Security office
published "Cleanup Program Review: Best Practices Report for the Defense
Environmental Restoration Program." Instead of carrying out a routine
semi-annual assessment of the cleanup program, the Cleanup Office
convened a meeting of 16 installations and properties, nominated by the
Army, Navy, Air Force, Defense Logistics Agency, and the Formerly Used
Defense Sites program. The participants in this innovative review came
up with what they considered best practices in Defense Deparment
cleanup, and those practices are described in the forty-page report. The
report is available at http://www.denix.osd.mil/bp-report as a 507K PDF
(Adobe Acrobat) file.

The report describes what the Defense Department considers to be best
cleanup practices, and some of the examples make sense. For instance,
the Army and its two regulators have kept the same personnel on the BRAC
Cleanup Team at the Army Materials Technology Laboratory (Watertown, MA)
since 1992. At the Black Hills Ordnance Depot, officials have combined
ordnance and toxic remediation efforts to compress the work schedule.

On the other hand, some of the best practices seem to depend simply upon
doing less cleanup. The use of "Contingency Records of Decision" at
Homestead Air Force Base, Florida appears at first to be innovative, but
the Air Force has merely the identified of "monitored natural
attenuation with land use controls" as a backup should pump-and-treat
systems fail to perform adequately.

Lenny Siegel

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org

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