Monday, November 16, 2009

How Much Has the Navy Ruined?

After sharing the info I could find about Navy contamination in Dallas, I studied the bigger picture - military contamination throughout the US. The problem is so widespread that I've contacted Propublica asking them to help research the situation, and I think they are aware of the problem and will address it.
I could find no one concise document that tells how much land/water the Navy has ruined and the cost of fixing it. Neither did I find one document that neatly listed all the agreements the Navy is backing out of completely or reducing commitment to fulfill. Each affected state is being given the minimal info required by law, and I do not think communities of citizens receive information or opportunity to protest.
I must add, also, that I see the Navy continuing to hire remediation companies to perform clean ups in other places. The clean up seems to be linked with the ability to sell and repurpose toxic land, recovering clean up cost.
Speaking of cost...
In 2003, quite a while back, the govt revealed that if all the federal sites in need of remediation were cleaned up to a "stringent" standard which the law could require, the cost would be well over 600 billion dollars-in 2003 dollars! And that was before our economy crashed in 2008 and the govt bailed out the financial, auto, banking industries and got bailed out itself by China. Remediation costs could be a trillion now-with the entire national debt being twelve trillion!
(To put things in perspective, FOX NEWS just reported that 800 billion has been paid out in the current stimulus program, which has failed to solve the 10.2% unenployment problem, by the way...And, let's not forget the Iraq/Afghanistan war, which has cost 4.1 trillion! Gosh, the stimulus was nothing compared to the war, if these news network figures are correct.)
So, here's a thought for today: It is completely possible that the water beneath the US is ruined to a far greater extent than we realize, and our government cannot pay to fix it and doesn't know how.
Nature will take her course and continue the cycles of water and life as best she can, but humans will not escape consequences.
I have stated I believe most problems can be remediated or at least vastly improved; but it's true that once aquifers are involved, and once toxic chemicals have had many, many years to seep through ground water and migrate; well...you reach the point of no return. Apparently contamination is like cancer-you have to catch it in the early stages while it's controllable. And "control" depends a great deal on the physical and reactive properties of the chemicals involved and on hydrogeologic features.
At the Dallas NAS, groundwater contamination has migrated.
Don't we have the right to know the perimeters and exactly what is or isn't being done and why? And is just monitoring enough? Where is communication?
The Navy does not want publicity regarding its destruction of US land and water
and that makes me very nervous about the true depth of the problem. I'm sure the Navy doesn't want the public to realize that it put off clean ups for so long that now many situations are hopeless or hopelessly expensive to address. If only Dallas had known the Navy's buying time-buying decades really - would mean no clean up for us. If only we had not thought everything else was more important.
So, I appeal to our public-spirited scientists and journalists to help research a national contaminated groundwater situation that is not easy to uncover and understand, but very needed.
We always thought the US escaped the destruction of war-unlike Europe-but I'm worried that our damage-which can't presently be rebuilt- exists underground.

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