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CHAPTER 4: Base Cleanups, Sovereign Impunity, and the Expansion of the Beaten Zone
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chapter four Base Cleanups, Sovereign Impunity, and the Expansion of the Beaten Zone Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commander-in-chief of the Union forces during the Civil War, felt no hesitation in placing himself within what military riflemen call the “beaten zone”: the elliptical pattern (or “cone”) formed by machinegun rounds striking either the ground or the target. Nevertheless, Grant had several brushes with serious injury if not death during the war, in particular at Fort Harrison, Petersburg, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. Indeed, at Fort Harrison and Vicksburg , shells burst near him as he wrote dispatches in the open. This prompted one soldier who witnessed his composure under fire to exclaim, “Ulysses don’t scare worth a damn!” The EPA, environmental groups, the states, and nongovernmental organizations in the United States can be excused for substituting the “U.S. military” for “Ulysses” in that sentence when it came to the Pentagon’s nonchalance in complying with ENR protection laws during the Cold War. As discussed in prior chapters, the armed services and their allies in Congress had positioned the military well beyond the beaten zone, allowing the services to keep control of the substance, scope, and pace of greening efforts. By the time Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, the nation was far from understanding the sobering legacy that this attitude had bequeathed to taxpayers. Three things were clear to Clintonites, however. First, the scope of the problem was large. Late in the George H. W. Bush administration, the DoD estimated that its military bases in the U.S. alone harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites covering nearly twenty-seven million acres of contaminated property. In fact, 81 percent of federal facilities on the National Priorities List (NPL) belonged to the DoD. And by 1992 the DoD was involved in some phase of the cleanup process at nearly 1,800 military bases at home and abroad. Second, contaminants at these sites included low-level radioactive waste, unexploded ordnance (UXO), acids, nitrates, heavy metals, fuels, and cleaning solvents. Proportionally, contamination from fuels and solvents (e.g., gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, cleaning compounds, and degreasers) were found at 60 percent of DoD sites. Likewise, toxic and hazardous wastes (e.g., heavy metals such as lead and mercury, chemical munitions residues, explosive compounds, and caustics like cleaners, paints, and strippers) were the primary problem at 30 percent of DoD sites. Further compounding the problem, 8 percent of DoD sites were plagued by UXO, and 2 percent suffered low-level nuclear waste contamination from equipment treated with radium (e.g., dials and gauges). Third, the ultimate scope of the problem was unclear and cost estimates were spiraling. In 1985, for example, the DoD estimated cleanup costs at $5 to $10 billion for a universe of 400 to 800 contaminated sites. Yet by 1988 the DoD had reported 12,000 potential sites, with estimated cleanup costs totaling $8.5 to $12.8 billion over the next five to seven years alone. Then, less than a year later, DoD revised its estimates (in 1987 dollars) upward to between $11 and $15 billion, including $2 billion for the army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. But even these figures had to be revised drastically by the end of 1989. The number of sites identified increased by 24 percent, to 15,257, and cleanup costs soared as high as $42.2 billion. Moreover, the Pentagon still lacked even reasonable “guestimates” about the severity of contamination at its nearly 7,000 formerly used defense sites scattered in the United States and abroad. Nor did these estimates include the costs of remedial actions at base closures to get them transferred into private hands for economic development under BRAC I, II, and III. At the same time Democrats and Republicans in Congress, environmental groups in Washington, and grassroots ENR activists near military bases complained that the Pentagon’s cleanup efforts were too slow, confrontational, and lacking in good faith. In particular they felt that the military was deliberately slowing down cleanups by “studying the problem to death.” In response, two major efforts to ameliorate these problems occurred during the early 1990s. The first, the Community Environmental Response Facilitation Act (CERFA), was launched by Congress in the last year of the Bush administration. The second was President Clinton’s base closure Community Reinvestment Program. Launched by the White House in mid-1993 by executive order, this program was typically referred to as his Fast-Track Cleanup Program. Under...