Table Of ContentCleanup of Chemical and Explosive Munitions
Cleanup of Chemical and
Explosive Munitions
Locating, Identifying Contaminants,
and Planning for Environmental
Remediation of Land and Sea Military
Ranges and Ordnance Dumpsites
Second edition
Richard D. Albright
Norwich, NY, USA
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11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my dear wife Sheila and my fine sons Richard and Arie, who graciously
allowed me the time for my obsession
And to my father, the late Granville Albright, Deputy Chief, Detroit Fire
Department, who taught me the value of public service
Notice
This book is intended to provide general, first-step information about the identifi-
cation and cleanup of chemical and explosive munitions sites for organizations and
communities that are faced with cleaning up an old munitions burial site. It is not
intended as a thorough instruction manual on munitions site remediation, nor is it
intended as a primary source of research information since it does not include all
information or discuss all situations that might occur. It cannot be assumed that all
necessary warnings and precautionary measures are contained in this work, and that
other, or additional, information or assessments may not be required. For the cleanup
of munitions sites it will be necessary to obtain additional detailed information from
other sources as well as expertise from those with extensive training.
To the best knowledge of the publisher and the editors, the information presented
is accurate and no warranty, express or implied, is made. Neither the publisher nor
the author assume any liability or responsibility for completeness or accuracy of the
information presented or any damages of any kind alleged to result in connection
with, or arising from, the use of this book.
Foreword
In 1991 I wrote, in the introduction to a report called The U.S. Military’s Toxics
Legacy:
Imagine, for a moment, that a foreign nation has dispatched a band of terrorists
to the United States. The intruders silently move across the landscape depositing
toxic chemicals at a thousand sites around the country. Some of the toxic compounds
quickly enter the rivers and underground reservoirs that supply America with drink-
ing water. Other chemicals contaminate our neighborhoods and backyards where
our children play. Still others sit like time bombs, destined to contaminate our
water supplies after months, years, or even decades. The toxic chemicals carried
by these enemies are the products of the most sophisticated laboratories on Earth.
They cause birth defects, liver disease, and cancer. Their effects may be felt for
generations.
Unquestionably, if this imagined threat were real, we would turn to the Pentagon
to combat this threat to our national security. After all, the Pentagon’s job is to
defend the nation against outside enemies.
But what do we do when the threat comes, not from abroad, but from the
Department of Defense (DOD) itself? What if our own worst enemy is the same
institution that is charged with defending us?
We turn to environmental regulators like Rich Albright.
I first met Rich in February 2001. I was in DC for a meeting, and a friend
invited me to an Army Corps of Engineers-sponsored community meeting at Sibley
Hospital, in the Spring Valley neighborhood in northwest Washington. This area, as
Rich documents, contains a witches’ brew of old chemical warfare materiel, other
hazardous substances, and unexploded ordnance left over from its days, during
World War I, as the American University Experimental Station.
The Army Corps had conducted an emergency response for this “Formerly
Used Defense Site” in the early 1990s, declared victory, and moved on. But Rich
Albright, representing the DC Department of Health, forced the Corps to begin a
much larger investigation. This effort marched along slowly, under the radar screen
of Washington’s hyperactive mass media, until January 2001, when it made the
front page of Washington Post. High concentrations of arsenic—the active ingredi-
ent in many early chemical weapons—had been found in soil around the American
University Child Development Center.
Between 250 and 300 people crowded the Sibley auditorium for the Army’s regu-
lar community meeting. Attendees included the wife of a U.S. Senator—who lives in
Spring Valley—and scores of lawyers for the District’s high-powered law firms—all
xvi Foreword
residents of the neighborhood. They were upset, but polite. A few were outspoken.
They had many questions.
In my work, I’ve visited dozens of communities in the U.S. that host active or
former military installations and ranges. Spring Valley is near the top of the list, in
terms of public exposure to really nasty stuff, as well as the political influence of its
residents. So it’s one of the most active programs. But people at other former mili-
tary facilities from the Aleutians to Puerto Rico are similarly concerned, with just as
many unanswered questions.
Overall, I think I’ve had a better experience than Rich with the Army Corps, the
entity with primary cleanup responsibility at Formerly Used Defense Sites. I’ve
found many Army Corps personnel and their contractors to be diligent and compe-
tent, though the constraints of funding and bureaucracy often get in the way. Still,
one only needs to look at former U.S. facilities overseas, in places like Panama and
the Philippines, to recognize the essential role played by environmental regulatory
agencies such as the DC Health Department.
I think few people are surprised when live munitions are found on old battle-
fields, such as the forests of Verdun, the jungles and rice paddies of Indochina, or
the Kuwaiti desert. However, not many people recognize that the most bombs, shells,
and grenades are fired in training or testing, while many more have been discarded
en masse when they have become unserviceable or obsolete.
Excluding active military ranges and ocean ranges, the U.S. has as many as
10 million acres of former military land ranges, containing tens or even hundreds
of millions of live ordnance items. Some, such as “inert” practice rounds, could
barely dent a bulldozer. Others, from 2,000-pound aerial bombs to artillery rounds
containing aging mustard agent, are potentially deadly. It’s remarkable, in fact, that
the number of civilian fatalities from such weapons since World War II—at least as
reported by government agencies—is counted in the dozens.
Despite all the sensitivity today to “weapons of mass destruction,” very few
people recognize that all of the major powers stockpiled huge quantities of chemi-
cal weapons during World War II. After all, chemical munitions—similar to those
tested at the American University Experimental Station—were used in the trenches
of the Western Front during World War I. Miraculously, the advanced lethal chemical
munitions of World War II never made it into battle, but they have not disappeared.
Most were buried on land or dumped at sea. Tens of thousands of small chemical
agent identification sets, designed to train troops to recognize the smell of chemical
weapons, were presumably disposed of at military bases throughout the U.S., using
the technology of the time: land burial, without lasting documentation.
The challenge of protecting the American people from our own weapons is for-
midable, but possible. Three things are necessary to address the little known but per-
sistent risks of public encounters with old munitions and chemical warfare materiel:
knowledge, will, and resources.
Knowledge. The records of U.S. military activities during the two world wars
were incomplete and many have disappeared. That’s understandable: Fighting a
great war, it was hard to conceive of unknown environmental impacts decades
in the future. Furthermore, none of people who participated in the World War I
Foreword xvii
mobilization are still alive, to tell their stories. Still, it is possible for environmen-
tal sleuths like Rich Albright to guide current investigations using old records, aerial
photos, and knowledge of how research, testing, and training were conducted.
The Will. While many people in the Defense Department, environmental agen-
cies, and Congress recognize the hazards posed by old munitions, others view the
risks as relatively insignificant. It took a scary news story—the explosive death of
two boys on a San Diego cul-de-sac in 1983—to start the Army Corps’ programs
to investigate formerly used ranges. It took the report of arsenic at the American
University children’s center to attract a crowd to Sibley hospital. We all know what
it takes to get a stop sign installed at a busy intersection. Unfortunately, the crisis
mentality only gets specific hazards addressed. Unless overall funding is increased,
resources are diverted from other important projects.
Resources. The Defense Department’s Formerly Used Defense Sites program
has always been the poor stepchild among the U.S. military’s environmental pro-
grams, even though it is responsible for sites, like Spring Valley, where Americans
are living, working, playing, and going to school. In its most recent annual environ-
mental report, the Pentagon reported that munitions response is required, or may be
required, at nearly 1200 former military facilities. Chances are that there are many
sites that have not yet made it into the database. That same report estimates that the
cost to complete munitions response (the cleanup up of live explosives, chemical
warfare materiel, and related wastes) at those sites will total nearly $13 billion.
What’s the annual budget for munitions response at Formerly Used Defense
Sites? Usually about $90 million per year. At that rate, it will take 145 years to make
land acceptably, but not completely safe.
Until the Defense Department and Congress budget adequate funds for timely
response, the country must rely upon a handful of activists and environmental regu-
lators to demands that the hazards be addressed. More pressure is necessary if the
level of effort—higher at Spring Valley than most other sites—is to be expanded to
match the risks. Otherwise, as more Americans come into contact with the legacy of
preparations for past wars, people will be asking why we didn’t take action when we
first recognized the danger.
Lenny Siegel
Executive Director,
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
Preface
When the District of Columbia started cleaning up the first of 27 ordnance ranges,
the project seemed simple. We had a small National Guard training facility with mor-
tar and small arms ranges. Because the impact area was in a public park, we had to
clean up the unexploded ordnance (UXO) immediately. It seemed like metal detec-
tors and shovels would solve the problem in short order.
Suddenly, we had liquid filled (chemical) shells being detonated on-site near a
hospital. We had to find a truckload of buried ammunition. We had arsenic in the
groundwater and lead in the soil. We had buried leftover poison gas used on the
bonus marchers (Adamsite actually killed the pregnant wife of one of the veter-
ans) and we had the potential of buried poison gas grenades stockpiled for the civil
rights marchers. We had a buried Sherman tank. We had a “whites only” swim-
ming pool buried so that black guardsman could not swim in it after integration (no
pool, no integration). The pool was reportedly filled with barrels of waste oil, sol-
vent, and paint. We had a 20-foot long auger, blown out of a monitoring well hole
when it struck an explosive or ordnance item. We had a contractor and the Corps
of Engineers Project Manager almost coming to blows in a public meeting over
whether they had found four or five Livens drums (a large World War I chemical
mortar shell). The previous Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager resigned and
entered a seminary hopefully finding a life without lying about the gas shells. Did I
mention polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)?
The only thing we did not have was a secret society guarding first-century docu-
ments. But at least we had buried treasure—a railroad car full of bronze cannons and
swords given to us by the French government after World War I, supposedly buried
when the site was closed.
With all these surprises at a benign National Guard Training Facility, what could
be in store for local citizens or a state government trying to clean up a large mili-
tary installation? I was soon to find out when I tackled my next site, what was once
the American University Experiment Station (AUES), and which is today the neigh-
borhood of Spring Valley, which by most accounts is now the worst Department of
Defense weapons dumpsite in the country.
There are approximately 25.1 million land acres and about 161 million water
acres of ranges in this country. Estimates of the extent of military ranges var-
ies greatly. As Lee Davidson reported in 2004 (“Military Lacks Data about Test
Ranges,” Desert Morning News, July 2, 2004.),
xx Preface
The General Accounting Office (GAO) said different arms of the military used dif-
ferent criteria, assumptions and methods in their inventories, which ‘raise questions
about the reliability’ of comparisons and cost estimates made using them.
It said the Pentagon reported 10,444 operational ranges covering 24.6 million
acres nationally in a 2003 inventory. But a 2004 inventory listed 353 range com-
plexes and 172 individual ranges on 26 million acres worldwide.
Sometimes the same arm of the military reported different numbers in separate
inventories for the same ranges, it said.
For example, one inventory said the Marine’s Camp Lejeune, NC, has 95,872
acres of rangeland, while a more recent inventory says it has 152,000 acres, even
though the entire installation covers 153,000 acres.
Another example is that the Marine’s Camp Pendleton, CA, was listed having 39,084
acres of range in one inventory, and 114,000 acres in a more recent one—a threefold
increase.
I wrote this book as a guide for those who are trying to clean up these ranges,
whether they are experienced environmental scientists, Explosive and Ordnance
Demolition (EOD) personnel, or the farmers next door. Because of the surprises I
encountered at the National Guard facility, I also included many experimental com-
pounds more likely to exist only at a few experimental sites like university research
laboratories, Fort Dietrich, MD, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD, Porton Downs,
UK, or Lakehurst, NJ. Although at the start of World War I and World War II we
were so seriously behind in the arms race, any of the poison gases or explosives
listed herein could have been tested at any range.
It is my intention that this book will also provide a valuable reference tool for
those charged with protecting us against dangerous chemicals and explosives in the
fight against terrorism. One of the reasons that the Chemical Weapons Ban Treaty
only included an odd half-dozen compounds is because many substances listed in
this book as effective chemical weapons are also used in industrial and agricultural
operations. Many are available for sale to terrorists over the Internet. Terrorists in
Iraq are now using chlorine, a common drinking water disinfectant, as a poison
gas with tragic results. That same gas sits unguarded on railroad sidings near many
American cities.
The book will be useful to first responders and elected officials because many of
these lesser-known chemical weapons are manufactured, used, and shipped in large
quantities through their respective populated areas. Scarcely a month goes by in
which a train or truck wreck does not release some dangerous chemical. If a spilled
chemical is listed in this book as a poison gas, it may guide the official accident
response in a more protective fashion. Transportation placards only tell part of the
story. Even industry officials may also be ignorant of the origin and danger of some
materials. Proper planning and legislative actions require knowledge of the nature of
the problem.
Did you know that nicotine was tested as a poison gas by the military? Indeed,
the lead compound added to gasoline for many years—now an environmental dis-
aster—started out as an experimental chemical weapon. That same lead compound
