Enewetak Atoll cleanup vets, facing cancer, hope long-shot 'atomic veteran' bill becomes law Bangor Daily News, Maine
By Abigail Curtis
Published: April 3, 2016
Laird and Dean were among approximately 6,000 American soldiers tasked with rehabilitating the atoll between 1977 and 1980 before it was returned to the people of the Marshall Islands.
BANGOR, Maine (Tribune News Service) — Congress is considering a bill that would create a special “atomic veteran” designation for the men and women who worked to clean up nuclear waste from a South Pacific atoll nearly 40 years ago, a move that Maine veteran Paul Laird says was a long time coming.
But Laird, a 59-year-old from Otisfield who served with the U.S. Army’s 84th Engineer Battalion on Enewetak Atoll and who is a three-time cancer survivor, said that the bill has only a slim chance of becoming law — and that is not acceptable to him. As of now, only 30 co-sponsors have officially signed on to the bill, which is a number the Mainer said does not seem like enough.
“We are not seeing people jump up and down to get onboard,” he said earlier this month. “We’re a little disappointed. We’re trying however we can to get the word out, but people just don’t seem to think it’s very important.” read more here
Problems uncovered in Meade cleanup Fed report finds pollution repair efforts ineffective at military posts By PAMELA WOOD, Staff Writer
Published 08/19/10 When it comes to cleaning up polluted military installations - including Fort George G. Meade - federal defense and environmental officials are rarely on the same page, threatening the success of restoration efforts, according to a new report.
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, spent a year and a half evaluating the efforts to clean up decades' worth of pollution at Fort Meade and other military installations. The GAO's report found serious problems, including:
The Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency have different ways of defining polluted areas and measuring cleanup efforts.
Some military facilities don't have formal cleanup agreements with the EPA. Fort Meade's agreement was signed in 2009 - after the GAO investigation began and the state threatened to sue.
The military uses performance-based contracts, which may motivate environmental contractors to overlook problems or push for less costly and less-complicated cleanup techniques.
In some cases, the military moved forward with cleanups without approval from the EPA.
The GAO report, released Monday, looked at the 141 military installations on the "National Priorities List" or "Superfund list" of the nation's most polluted sites. It gave special attention to Fort Meade, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. read more here Problems uncovered in Meade cleanup linked from Stars and Stripes
Lejeune veteran receives full disability on contaminated water claims
March 16, 2010 1:20 AM HOPE HODGE A former Camp Lejeune Marine suffering from a rare blood disease last week became one of a small number of veterans to receive full disability due to historical water contamination.
Braintree, Mass., resident Paul Buckley said he was shocked after multiple claim denials from the Department of Veterans Affairs to discover a packet in his mailbox granting his claim in full.
“I opened it up and almost fell to the ground,” he said.
The victory comes after a long and harrowing journey for the 46-year-old veteran. On May 10, 2006, more than 20 years after Buckley’s contract with the Marine Corps ended, he became rapidly ill, driving himself to the hospital before collapsing in its emergency room. He was in a coma for 10 days.
Buckley, then 42, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an uncommon and largely incurable form of cancer that typically afflicts a far different demographic.
“The doctors were confused because the people who get my disease are primarily elderly and they have worked in industries where there has been exposure to certain chemicals,” Buckley said. “I was burning my brain trying to figure out where I got this.”
Staff with the Boston branch of Disabled American Veterans, who advocated on Buckley’s behalf, said that he represented a “perfect storm” of circumstances: no environmental or family links to his disease and a detailed nexus letter from doctors with Harvard Medical School making his case.
Army Corps of Engineers will examine Chickasaw Elementary for WWII debris, toxins
Rich McKay | Sentinel Staff Writer
February 25, 2009
ORANGE COUNTY - Sometime in the next two months, teams from the Army Corps of Engineers will check the grounds at Chickasaw Elementary School for any sign of debris or contamination left from a former World War II-era bombing range. Project manager Randy Curtis told Orange County commissioners Tuesday that there is no cause for alarm because the school at 6900 Autumnvale Drive appears to have been built in a buffer zone for the former Orlando Army Airfield, Toxic Gas and Decontamination Yard -- and not on an active area. The 2,100-acre site came to light during an investigation of another bombing range. In the 1940s, when the land was swamp and scrub, the Army used the land as a toxic-gas yard.
Plastics, food and medical waste from base among trash burned
Troops stationed at U.S. base call coughing caused by smoke "Iraqi crud"
Pentagon says any harmful health affects from smoke are temporary
By Adam Levine
CNN Supervising Pentagon Producer
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The pervasive smoke spewing from the junk heap at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq is causing many returning troops to be concerned about the effects on their long-term health.
For four years, the burn pit was a festering dump, spewing acrid smoke over the base, including housing and the hospital.
Until three incinerators were installed, the smelly pit was the only place to dispose of trash, including plastics, food and medical waste.
"At the peak, before they went to use the real industrial incinerators, it was about 500,000 pounds a day of stuff," according to a transcript of an April 2008 presentation by Dr. Bill Halperin, who heads the Occupational and Environmental Health Subcommittee at the Defense Health Board. "The way it was burned was by putting jet fuel on it."
A lawsuit filed against the burn pit operators by a contractor alleges the burn pit also contained body parts.
The story
The pervasive smoke spewing from the junk heap at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq is causing many returning troops to be concerned about the effects on their long-term health.
For four years, the burn pit was a festering dump, spewing acrid smoke over the base, including housing and the hospital.
Until three incinerators were installed, the smelly pit was the only place to dispose of trash, including plastics, food and medical waste. Read full article »
"Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains. The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths," says the lawsuit filed in Texas federal court.
Aside from Balad, there are similar pits at bases elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some still have no incinerators.
Many of the soldiers who went through Balad since the beginning of the war had become used to "Iraqi crud," as they dubbed the symptom.
"I had a chronic cough, irritation, shortness of breath," said Dr. Chris Coppola, an Air Force surgeon who worked on base in 2005 and again in 2007, "I was coughing up phlegm, sometimes black stuff and dust."
While Coppola said he didn't work in the burn pit, he knew the medical waste was going there.
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By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer Posted : Thursday Oct 2, 2008 16:48:46 EDT
The U.S. Army is creating a toxic mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a new report that details cases of hazardous waste dumped in ditches, soldiers setting up tents on top of fuel spills and service members exposed to cyanide gas during overseas deployments.
The report by the Rand Corp. think tank also says the Defense Department has no overarching policy to ensure environmental mishaps in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t harm troops’ health, create political disputes and avoid costly clean-up efforts when it’s time to leave those countries.
“If not properly addressed in planning or operations, environmental considerations can make it more difficult for the Army to sustain the mission — yet environmental considerations are not well incorporated into Army planning or operations in any phase of an operation,” states the report, released in late September by the Rand Arroyo Center, a federally funded research and development center that supports the Army.
The report, “Green Warriors: Army Environmental Considerations for Contingency Operations from Planning through Post-Conflict, states:
• A contractor hired by the Defense Department dumped waste oil in a landfill in Iraq and then sold the barrels.
• U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan buried several drums containing unidentified liquids, which later turned out to be hazardous, posing a risk of soil and groundwater contamination.
• In Iraq, an airfield sits over an old airfield with leaking fuel tanks. “Major health issues arise whenever it is necessary to dig.”
• Commanders in Iraq have set up hazardous-waste disposal areas close to camp perimeters, creating a force-protection issue since they were potential targets for hand grenades and IEDs.
• High-grade diesel fuel was spilled in a lake in Iraq that was used for drinking water at a base. The lake is no longer used as a source of drinking water.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: August 17, 2008
Filed at 3:03 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Every two weeks, firefighters ascend a condemned, black-shrouded skyscraper, checking carefully marked exit signs, a rebuilt water supply system and wide-open corridors. They wear protective suits on floors still contaminated by toxic dust from the World Trade Center.
A year ago, more than 100 firefighters ran into the partially demolished building during a fire and had trouble finding their way out. Thick, plastic sheets meant to contain asbestos on some floors also held in smoke. Two firefighters died on the building's 14th floor when their oxygen supply ran out.
The Aug. 18, 2007, fire at the former Deutsche Bank tower across a street from ground zero exposed the incompetence of multiple government agencies assigned to near-daily inspections of the building, which was being dismantled. It also unmasked a questionable subcontractor and the Fire Department's failure to point out dozens of hazards -- including the cutting of a pipe meant to supply water to fire hoses -- before the blaze.
''The community had been raising red flags for months and sometimes years'' about the toxic tower, said environmental activist Kimberly Flynn. ''It's a mystery to us how you can have the number of inspectors that ... were practically living in that building and have that level of disaster.'' click post title for more
Army Knew Alaska Base Family Housing Site was Toxic Carol Goldberg
Public Employees for Environmenal Responsibility
Jul 09, 2008
July 7, 2008, Washington, DC - The U.S. Army knew that the site chosen to build a family housing complex at Fort Wainwright was a toxic dump but proceeded anyway, in violation of federal laws and service policies, according to an audit by the Army’s own Office of Staff Judge Advocate that was released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Despite creating a hugely expensive debacle, sickening workers, spreading pollution and retaliating against whistleblowers, the base command has absolved itself and issued an "outstanding" rating to the official who green-lighted the project.
The January 2007 Army audit questioned "the wisdom of building a family housing complex on top of a known 1950s-era military landfill" and concluded that "the situation with the Taku construction project is the direct result of multiple individuals failing to adhere to Army and federal regulations and guidance."
Nonetheless, the Army command excused the failures at Fort Wainwright by issuing a report just six months later which dismissed any major concerns but skipped over most of the audit findings, including –
Construction workers became ill at both Taku Gardens and another toxic hotspot because the projects were not slowed to properly analyze the sites. As with the illnesses, worker safety in digging through unexploded ordnance was dismissed with one base official stating "if a bulldozer did encounter a live artillery shell, it would simply scare the driver." go here for more http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/10603
