Military endangers public by shirking duty to clean up its messes

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Wisconsin
THE CAPITAL TIMES
Laura Olah: Military endangers public by shirking duty to clean up its
messes
By Laura Olah
March 1, 2004

Rural Wisconsin families are paying the ultimate price for decades of
delayed cleanup of environmental toxins left by the U.S. military.

Recently two more families learned that their drinking water wells are
contaminated with unsafe levels of explosives from the Badger Army
Ammunition Plant. They are now drinking bottled water provided by the
Army.

This is not the first time farm families living near Badger have learned
that solvents and other wastes from decades of munitions production
poisoned their drinking water. In 1990, three families living nearly two
miles from Badger learned that levels of carcinogenic solvents in their
water were 15 times higher than safe standards. And worse, that they had
been drinking and bathing in contaminated water for more than 15 years.

A suspected source of the water contamination discovered recently is a
series of settling ponds that span the southern boundary of the
7,400-acre facility. During active production years, the ponds carried
industrial and sanitary waste water from inside the plant to the nearby
Wisconsin River. Residual levels of mercury, lead and other pollutants
in the river are so potent that tiny creatures that normally thrive in
healthy river sediments are nonexistent.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the U.S. military began to take a serious
look at the potential environmental cost of the production, testing and
disposal of munitions, including at Badger. The first study, completed
in May 1977, identified many of the sites at Badger that have still not
been cleaned up, including the settling ponds and the river.

According to an enforceable cleanup plan issued by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Natural
Resources in 1993, these sites should have been dealt with years ago.
For more than a decade, however, the Army has successfully argued that
it doesn't have the money to complete the required level of cleanup,
pushing instead for deed and use restrictions that would allow more
contamination to be left in place.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/69164.php

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