[CPEO-MEF] Goodman column on UXO cleanup

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

[The following column by former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Sherri
Wasserman Goodman appeared in the Washington Post on August 5, 2001.]

The Bombs Beneath Us 

By Sherri W. Goodman

The operation in Washington's Spring Valley neighborhood to find and
remove military materials dating back to World War I illuminates a
little known facet of military cleanups: There are hundreds of sites in
communities across the country with buried ordnance waiting to be
cleaned up. From Spring Valley to San Diego, the country is littered
with old test and training ranges that are now suburban developments or
shopping malls.

In most cases, little documentation exists on the types of ordnance used
or precisely how and where bombs were disposed of or dropped. The risks
are real, from the health concerns now facing Spring Valley residents
due to the presence of chemical weapons to the possibility that people
will stumble onto live ordnance, which killed several San Diego boys a
decade ago. 

The reason these cleanups are not yet complete is threefold: money,
technology and legal mandate. Although the military has devoted tens of
billions of dollars to cleaning up contaminated sites on active and
closing military bases, an effort I oversaw for the past eight years,
far less money is available to clean up the truly old military sites,
known as FUDS (formerly used defense sites).

While the Pentagon devotes about $1.5 billion a year to cleaning up
contaminated sites on active and closing military bases, it spends only
$200 million a year of that amount on FUDS. Moreover, until the past few
years, most of the funding for the FUDS program was devoted to meeting
Environmental Protection Agency requirements to clean up Superfund
hazardous waste sites, not old bombing areas. 

The Defense Department needs a substantial increase in funds to find and
remove buried ordnance, particularly at FUDS. With rapid suburban growth
nationwide, citizens and developers are increasingly stumbling onto
sites where ordnance was once used or discarded. Instead of the $40
million a year devoted to this effort, the Defense Department needs to
commit at least $150 million annually. And the effort to find and detect
ordnance that did not detonate but that could do so in the future (in
military parlance, unexploded ordnance, or UXO) needs to be separated
from hazardous waste cleanup, to provide the focus that the UXO effort needs.

Finding and removing old bombs, and determining what kind of bombs they
are, is a fundamentally different technological and human safety problem
than removing oil or solvents from soil and groundwater. Here lies
another aspect of the old ordnance problem: advancing technologies to
find and remove these bombs.

Until recently, the military has relied on World War II-era magnetometry
to locate buried munitions. This method produces an enormous number of
false positives: For every real bomb located, often hundreds of pieces
of harmless scrap metal are also found. Each item must be carefully
excavated by highly trained personnel, because it is impossible to tell
whether it is a piece of UXO that could explode.

In the past few years advanced technologies, such as radars and advanced
sensors, have become more widely available. But they are still not
widely in use by the Army Corps of Engineers, which does most of the
contracting for this cleanup. Although under my tenure funding for UXO
technology more than doubled, it is still insufficient given the
magnitude of the problem.

Finally, Congress should give the Pentagon a firm legal mandate to find
and properly manage unexploded ordnance and its chemical constituents.
Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Bob Riley (R-Ala.) have recently
introduced legislation to do so. It should be included in the defense
bill currently being prepared by the Armed Services committees. UXO
cleanup has been managed as part of the Defense Department's hazardous
waste cleanup program, but to ensure that the unique challenges of
dealing with explosives are properly and comprehensively addressed,
Congress should create a separate program in the department for ordnance
detection and cleanup.

The military knows these changes are needed. But I know from my
experience in the Pentagon that getting more money to clean up old bombs
is not as compelling as getting funds for today's troops. Only with
these changes will the military be able to take the "aggressive action"
that Rep. Connie Morella (R-Md.) called for last week on the Spring
Valley cleanup.

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