$90 Million Club

According to Defense Department figures, 126 current and former Department of Defense facilities will cost a total of more than $90 million each to clean or otherwise address hazardous waste contamination. CPEO has determined membership in the $90 Million Club by adding facility-specific data, from the Defense Environmental Restoration Program Fiscal Year 2001 Annual Report to Congress, on cleanup expenses through fiscal year 2001 to Defense projects of the cost to complete at each facility. Those data, as well as first time official (and incomplete) data on the Military Munitions Response Program, are included in the table linked to below.

While the historical data is generally accurate, the cost-to-complete projections are subject to dramatic change. Many of the facilities listed in CPEO's 1995 version of the $100 Million Club lost their membership as cost projections plummeted. On the other hand, several facilities now in the Club didn't qualify in 1995. We anticipate that new technologies and risk management strategies will push costs down in the future, but they will be outweighed by the identification of munitions response obligations, the discovery of new contamination (such as the plutonium found at McClellan Air Force base), and new or tighter cleanup standards for contaminants such as arsenic, trichloroethylene, and perchlorate.

At the $90 Million Club facilities, official projected costs ($18,004,277,000) significantly exceed combined historical costs ($10,318,551,000). This is largely due to the inclusion, in the Defense Environmental Restoration Program Annual Report, of new estimates for Military Munitions Response at Formerly Used Defense Sites.