Report Faults Pentagon on Toxic Cleanup : Environment: The inspector general cites slow response and lack of qualified personnel. There are 14,401 contaminated sites on U.S. military bases.

An internal Defense Department review of the military’s environmental cleanup program has uncovered substantial problems, including slow response to reports of contamination and hostile relations with federal and state environmental regulators.

The study found that the Pentagon lacks qualified people to supervise cleanups and said that the military services have no consistent priority system for determining which of the more than 14,000 contaminated sites on U.S. military bases should be addressed first.

The report, prepared by the Pentagon’s inspector general, also cites inadequate supervision of the contractors brought in to carry out virtually all of the military’s environmental repairs.

Senior defense officials declined to comment on the unreleased report, whose key findings were made available to The Times.

The Pentagon’s official estimate of the cost of cleaning up the contaminated sites is about $20 billion. But officials from the inspector general’s office pegged the cost at $100 billion to $200 billion--not including the cost of cleaning up the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons plants and hundreds of polluted sites at U.S. military bases overseas.

The study is the first comprehensive review of the Defense Environmental Restoration Program, the Pentagon’s $600-million-a-year effort to identify polluted sites at military facilities, rank them in order of severity and oversee remedial action.

The program, created seven years ago, so far has identified 14,401 contaminated sites at 1,579 military installations in the United States. As of the beginning of this year, cleanups had been completed at only 287 of the sites, according to Pentagon figures.

Officials from the inspector general’s office found that it takes an average of six years from the time a dump is discovered until the first shovel of dirt is turned to begin repairing the site.

Similar delays are encountered in cleaning up private industry sites, but officials noted that the civilian world throws up a number of legal and regulatory obstacles that the military does not face.

The report lists several factors slowing cleanup of the military’s toxic waste dumps:

--The Pentagon suffers from a shortage of qualified engineers, geologists and chemists to assess the danger posed by the sites and map out a remedial action program. The report said that such technicians are in great demand by private industry and other government agencies and that turnover among military personnel working on environmental projects is extremely high.

--There is similar competition for competent contractors to carry out the actual repair work. Many of the top firms are fully employed doing lucrative cleanup work at more than 1,000 Superfund toxic waste sites created by industry.

--The military services have no consistent scheme for ranking the worst sites for priority attention. Only those sites that qualify for inclusion on the Superfund list are subject to a formal ranking system and managed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency; the rest are attacked in haphazard fashion according to the individual military services’ priorities.

--Relations between the military and state and federal regulators are poor, slowing decisions on who will pay to clean up polluted sites, how thoroughly they will be cleaned and how quickly they will be addressed. The Pentagon claims exemption from most state and federal regulation under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” but several bills are pending in Congress to subject the military to the same enforcement actions now applied to private polluters.

--Record-keeping for environmental actions at military bases is weak or nonexistent, the inspector general’s staff found. The military services are only now creating management information systems to track progress at contaminated sites, assess technology available to speed cleanups and monitor contractor performance.

--The Defense Department is simply burying much of its hazardous waste in landfills rather than making it harmless by more expensive, permanent treatment methods. But the cheaper short-term solution may create long-term costs and liabilities if the dumps leak in the future, the inspector general warned.