Keepin' Us Healthy

The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country.

  Truthout

Actually, I’m surprised the EPA under Bush is ordering clean-ups. Maybe they know it doesn’t matter if you don’t enforce the orders.

Pentagon officials say they are voluntarily cleaning up the three sites named in the EPA's "final orders" - Fort Meade in Maryland, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

But they don’t want anyone checking to make sure.

At all three sites, the military has released toxic chemicals - some known to cause cancer and other serious health problems - into the soil and groundwater.

[...]

EPA spokeswoman Roxanne Smith said final orders were issued because the agency is worried about drinking water and soil contamination at Fort Meade, Tyndall and McGuire. "Under DOD's management, some of these sites have languished for years, with limited or no cleanup underway," she said.

[...]

Congress established the Superfund program in 1980 to clean up the country's most contaminated places, and of the 1,255 sites on the list the Pentagon owns 129 - the most of any entity. Other federal agencies with properties on the list include NASA and the Energy Department, but they have signed EPA cleanup agreements without protest.

But Superfund sites are only one aspect of the Pentagon's environmental problems. It has about 25,000 contaminated properties in all 50 states, and it will cost billions and take decades to clean them up.

The Pentagon poisons American citizens, and its own troops. I assume the brass drink bottled water.