EPA Role Proposed : Military Goes Own Way on Toxic Waste Cleanup

The military marches to a different drummer when it comes to toxic waste cleanup, say state and local officials who have no control over chemicals used by the armed forces.

“The Department of Defense pursues its own cleanup program without any oversight,” said Roger Gwinn, aide to Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento) “The EPA doesn’t get involved, and the local and state health authorities aren’t given the opportunity to respond to cleanup plans.”

Fazio and two other congressmen earlier this month proposed legislation that would allow the federal Environmental Protection Agency to oversee military waste disposal, despite President Reagan’s executive order exempting the military from federal laws regarding toxic waste.

Orange County Base

In Orange County, officials have been trying unsuccessfully for two years to get a Marine helicopter base to present a formal cleanup plan, says Nira Yamachika of the county’s Environmental Management Agency.

This despite local findings that military fuels and solvents are contaminating creeks that feed the increasingly polluted Upper Newport Bay, and that benzene and five other cancer-causing chemicals have tainted the base’s soil and water.

“We have to budget, then it goes through a review of the DOD, then we must get approval from Congress,” says Jim Simko, environmental engineer for the Marine Corps Helicopter Station at Tustin.

Public Reaction Cited

Traditionally, the military has responded to local cleanup demands only when the public gets irate, Gwinn says. “It depends to a great extent on the public attention given to a particular site,” he said.

Yamachika says she agrees with that theory.

The EPA listed 39 military bases nationwide with hazardous waste threats, and seven are in California --including three in Sacramento and others in Sunnyvale, San Bernardino, Lathrop and Merced.

Dr. James Stratton, a toxic expert with the state health department, says that for decades the military took fuels and solvents and “poured it in the ground and let it evaporate without any thought to the impact on the environment.”

“They’re much more cooperative than they used to be,” he says, “but I wouldn’t rule out the chance that individual base commanders are less apt to cooperate.”

“I don’t think there’s a military base without an environmental problem,” Army Lt. Col. Craig MacNab said in Washington, “but there’s not an industry or a municipality without one either.”