Armed Conflict
Munitions, landfills and underground tanks — each endanger the environment and public health and safety when left behind at former military sites, often without label or explanation. But one federal initiative is trying to change all that.
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There are 227 Formerly Used Defense Sites in Michigan. Source: Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. |
In October 2006, a team of scientists approached the Waugoshance Lighthouse near Charlevoix, Mich. Their mission: Locate unexploded bombs that have been lying on the Lake Michigan floor for decades.
With assistance from Underwater Ordnance Recovery, Inc. and the U.S. Coast Guard, state officials found two bombs and one torpedo — relics from World War II target practice — resting in water less than 10 feet deep.
Photographs and maps created during the expedition will help an explosives removal team from the U.S. Navy get rid of the items, which despite their age and exposure to harsh waters are considered “armed and dangerous,” according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
Unexploded weaponry isn’t the only potential hazard left in Michigan by U.S. Armed Forces. Scientists are also looking for and trying to clean up landfills and leaking underground tanks hidden on abandoned military sites, ticking away like environmental time bombs. That’s the purpose of a federal program called FUDS — Formerly Used Defense Sites — run by the Army Corps of Engineers and state environmental agencies.
The FUDS program began in the 1980s, but a 2001 Congressional investigation detailed a scathing review of the Corps’ progress and reporting. That report prompted the re-evaluation of almost 10,000 former military sites throughout the nation, 227 of which are in Michigan. The sites were once used as training grounds, firing ranges, prisoner of war camps, actual battlegrounds. A plan to evaluate and remediate sites in Michigan was released in 2003 and received funding just last year, when investigations at places like the Waugoshance Lighthouse began.
‘Where are the landfills?’
The military is known for being tidy and organized, and those are usually considered good values. But such orderliness makes locating environmental harms difficult.
“When you go to an old industrial site, you can figure out where the dump is right off the bat because everything’s sticking up; they just hauled it over there and threw it,” said Bob Delaney, the MDEQ’s lead scientist on the FUDS program. “But when I started working on [Department of Defense] sites, I was like, ‘Where are the landfills?’ It wasn’t apparent for a long time because they’d put sand over the top and plant pine trees.”
The detective work involved in locating military landfills includes reading through historical records and original military documents, taking aerial photographs, interviewing people who worked at the base and using geophysical equipment to detect metals buried underground.
On sites as large as Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Mich. — operated originally by the Army on 14,400 acres and now run by the Michigan National Guard on approximately 8,000 acres — that kind of investigation is overwhelming. The part of the base considered “former” once housed cavalry from World War I, storage bunkers from World War II, a top-secret radar building from the Cold War era and large open spaces used to train soldiers for war. Today, these grounds have been transformed into a cemetery, private industrial facilities and a large outdoor recreation area.
Once all the major landfills and “dumplets” are located on a given base, scientists have to determine two things: The type of trash buried there and how the landfill was constructed.
Many landfills just have regular trash in them. But, as Delaney said, “If you get enough people in a place and you put in enough trash, that’s a big problem. There’s no cheap solution, and they’re always going to be an issue because they don’t go away.”
Most landfills — military or otherwise — could be built without permits until the late 1970s. And, even when state law required a license, technology was not very advanced. At one major landfill at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, Mich., the permit required only that the landfill be covered with sand. “There’s nothing on the bottom, and it’s just in sand, where it can leak like a sieve,” Delaney said. “But that was actually advanced technology at that point because they actually put a cover on it.”
Despite landfills’ long lifespan, regulators require some basic remedies: Gases coming off the landfill must be capped and managed, the property must be deed restricted so no one digs up the trash and the groundwater must be kept clean.
Other landfills could contain industrial chemicals or other hazardous materials.
According to Delaney, the main concern at military sites is asbestos, a known carcinogen once used in building construction. The military often bulldozed entire buildings to replace them with facilities appropriate for the latest military technology.
Since asbestos is not a groundwater concern but can become deadly when aerated, the solution is usually to keep it buried — but cover it with extra dirt, inspect it regularly and restrict its use so nobody ever digs it up accidentally.
Tanks Without Guns
The military’s fanatic tidiness is mirrored by another extreme behavior — closing down entire operations so quickly that useful, but potentially harmful, items are left behind.
“They might have closed the gate and locked it,” Delaney said. “But most of the time they just left.”
David Fitzpatrick, an expert in military history who teaches at Washtenaw Community College and the University of Michigan, said such speedy downsizing is typical after major conflicts: “That happens in virtually every war the United States has ever fought. You have a very small regular military establishment in times of peace, followed by a tremendous growth of the military for a conflict, followed by a drastic reduction in the military once again.”
And according to Deborah Larson, a project manager with MDEQ, that trend affects the environment: “When the military made a decision to move or abandon, it was really on a very short timeline. So nobody said, ‘We’re going to shut down in six months. How should we handle all our environmental problems?’”
Such departures often meant abandoning resources that could have been used elsewhere. In fact, brand new products were sometimes thrown away just to reconcile inventory records, another unexpected consequence of militaristic organization. If collecting those useful materials wasn’t a high priority, neither was un-earthing underground storage tanks.
According to Delaney, these tanks are probably just filled with spent fuel — but they won’t know for sure until they can locate and excavate them. Such work encounters the same roadblocks as locating and remediating landfills. Groundwater contamination is the main concern.
Long Fuses
By far the most intriguing effect of former military sites — though more a public safety concern than an environmental issue — is the presence of unexploded devices at former military sites.
“It goes back to the cannonball era,” Delaney said. “Actually, that’s one of the most dangerous types of ordnance because the black powder lasts forever. Plus, the type of fusing they used gets more unstable over time. But I don’t think we have a lot of those lying around anymore.”
Types of ordnance more often found at Michigan’s former military sites include bullets and the occasional hand grenade. At Fort Custer, where they burn part of the forested area to promote plant growth every year, abandoned grenades often explode in the heat of the fire.
Another concern is “burial pits” — places where the military hid artillery like magazine clips, bullets and small grenades — which are sometimes found by developers who disturb the grounds formerly owned by the Department of Defense.
“You don’t want some guy with a back-hoe coming in and digging into that,” Delaney said. “In Europe, that happens frequently because they had an enormous amount of bombing.”
Indeed, according to one report, the Bomb Disposal Unit of the Belgium Armed Forces finds about 10 World War I era bombs every day in Belgium and neighboring countries.
The majority of the United States wasn’t bombed during any conflict in the past 100 years, but U.S. soldiers did fire upon U.S. soil as part of their training.
“During World War II, we were doing our training for pilots in the Pacific and some German U-boats jumped up amongst them and killed a bunch of trainees, so we moved all of that into Lake Michigan,” Delaney said.
Training took place throughout the Great Lakes during the second Great War. In Lake Michigan, the Navy ran two mock-ups of air craft carriers, and in Lake Huron, soldiers trained on air-to-air missile attacks. Such target practice resulted in unexploded bombs being dropped into lake waters because only about a third of all artillery actually exploded at the time.
But training wasn’t the only military activity going on in Michigan. “Because we were such an industrialized state, the Defense Department would actually come in and run factories,” Delaney said. “If the site built ordnance, that’s a concern because, like at any factory, when something’s off spec, they just get rid of it. And the way they usually got rid of it was to dig a hole and put it in.”
At least 14 Michigan former defense sites held or worked with “Nike” missiles, which contain nuclear technology. “But if it was nuclear, you’re okay because they were really careful about nuclear weapons,” Delaney said. “If it was hand grenades, they were not careful, so those are much more dangerous. I worked on Wurtsmith [Air Force Base], which was a nuclear site, and we never found anything nuclear – period. But hand grenades are really the most dangerous piece of abandoned ordnance because they’re fascinating, kids can pick them up, and they shoot off really easily.”
Another 75 Years
Nationwide, there are 9,800 potential FUDS. Some of them are being cleaned up and some of them are still being evaluated. But according to Candy Walters, a public affairs officer with the Corps of Engineers, “The list may never be complete. If any new information is presented to us after a site is closed, we will go back and re-evaluate the site. There are always new chemicals and new interactions being discovered.”
Cost estimates to clean up contamination already discovered to be military’s responsibility are around $19 billion. With current funding steady at around $250 million per year over the last five fiscal years, it will take more than 75 years to complete cleanups.
“Our policy is to clean up worst first,” Walters said. “Risk is based on what’s happening in the environment, what the pathways are, and what the receptors are. So if a piece of property is just sitting there, not contaminating anyone’s drinking water and not impacting the health of animals, plants or humans living close by, but there’s another property 10 miles away near which houses are being built, we would probably try to go to that property first – but it’s whatever the states want us to do.”
Although the Corps runs and funds the program, it works with state agencies to develop the State Management Action Plan and give some additional funding to places like the MDEQ to support the program.
“They voluntarily follow our law, but they don’t know our law,” Delaney said. “The Defense Department is working in 50 states and umpteen countries and territories, and to have to deal with all the different environmental laws all over the place – they just realize they’re not going to be the expert. And so they pay us to provide that regulatory expertise so that they’re following our law.”
According to Larson, before the 2001 report on the Corps’ progress, the state wasn’t really involved with the DOD program at all.
Delaney said the state didn’t know the extent of the problem and didn’t have the time or resources to devote to finding out – not when the DOD said it was taking care of it on its own. “The comment came back at the time, ‘Well, at least the military is doing something. We’ve got tons of sites where nobody is doing anything.’ And we didn’t want to shift a major amount of resources to it,” he said. “It was being handled by DOD, as far as we understood.”
The 2001 report, commissioned in part by Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), said that about 38 percent of the Corps’ determinations that no DOD action was needed were “questionable” – usually because an actual investigation with photos, maps, documents and interviews was never conducted. That’s why Congress asked the Corps to re-evaluate every single potential former military site in the country.
But Delaney doesn’t think the Department of Defense or the Corps of Engineers were purposefully slacking off.
“The military – their main mission isn’t cleaning up stuff. Their main mission is blowing up things and winning wars,” he said. “So the environmental stuff was sort of an add-on to them – and that wasn’t just the military, that was pretty much all of society. So they went out and dismissed all kinds of Formerly Used Defense Sites as not having any problems. And the people determining that didn’t have any training in environmental science, usually.”
Today’s mentality is different, according to Walters. “I think everyone agrees that what was the standard practice in the 1940s is not the standard practice these days,” she said. “As the country has learned more and environmental science has grown and evolved, the military has grown and evolved as well.”
Delaney and Larson go further, calling the military an environmental leader. “They’re developing more expertise in efficiency in dealing with the environment on their sites than probably almost anybody in the world,” Delaney said. “As a professional in this business, that was striking to me. It’s a tremendous transformation.”
Larson agreed: “Under the current political climate, the EPA has been squeezed down to such a tiny budget it can’t really do a lot of environmental protection – but the military is.”
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Katie Coleman is the editor of EJ and a second-year graduate student in the environmental journalism program at MSU. This is her fourth issue as editor and her third appearance as a writer. Contact Katie at colem221@msu.edu.
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