Bombs in Our Backyard: Investigating One of America’s Greatest Polluters

December 14th, 2017 - by admin

Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica – 2017-12-14 23:48:22

https://www.propublica.org/article/reporting-recipe-bombs-in-your-backyard

Reporting Recipe:
Bombs in Your Backyard

Ryann Grochowski Jones and Abrahm Lustgarten

(November 30, 2017) — For the past year, ProPublica has been documenting the state of toxic pollution left behind by the military across the US As part of this investigation, we acquired a dataset of all facilities that the Department of Defense considers contaminated.

Today we used the data to publish an interactive news application called Bombs in Your Backyard.
Here’s how you can use it to find hazardous sites near you — and what, if anything, is being done to remedy the pollution.

The data, which has never been released before, comes from the Defense Environmental Restoration Program, which the DOD administers to measure and document cleanup efforts at current and former military locations.

There are a lot of great local investigative stories waiting to be done with the data. This reporting recipe is meant to help you find and report ones near you.

Bombs in Your Backyard
The military spends more than a billion dollars a year to clean up sites its operations have contaminated with toxic waste and explosives. A full map of these sites — which exist in every state in the country, some near schools and residential neighborhoods — has never been made public; until now.

Why You Should Care
* There are more than 40,000 hazardous sites across the country polluted by US military operations, affecting a total amount of land larger than the entire state of Florida. Some of these sites are probably near you and you may not even know it.

* Many of these sites have extensive groundwater and soil pollution, or present a risk of exploding bombs and munitions, even if they are open to the public. Some have been converted to parks and wildlife reserves and even housing developments.

* Many sites were part of old defense facilities that have long since shut down, and may not be known locally, even though a risk of exposure to contaminants may still be present.

* Even sites where the DOD says it has already completed its response can present an ongoing threat or risk to the public.

* While the data pinpoints a precise location, contamination from that location may well affect a much larger area, including public and private lands and the water supplies beneath them. You may want to investigate environmental concerns in an area surrounding a defense site for connections to the pollution there.

Background Reading
* Open Burns, Ill Winds The Pentagon’s handling of munitions and their waste has poisoned millions of acres, and left Americans to guess at the threat to their health.

* How Military Outsourcing Turned Toxic Fraud. Bribery. Incompetence. The military’s use of contractors adds to a legacy of environmental damage.

* Kaboom TownThe US military burns millions of pounds of munitions in a tiny, African-American corner of Louisiana. The town’s residents say they’re forgotten in the plume.

Important Definitions
Before you start thinking about how you can use this data to report on facilities in your area, you should know some definitions.

* An installation, as the DOD means it, is a property formerly or currently owned by a DOD organization, like a military base, bombing range or munitions plant.

* Within installations are specific cleanup sites, which are the contaminated areas of an installation. An installation can have one site, or hundreds.

* Response Complete means the DOD cleanup actions are complete. It does not necessarily mean that a site has been cleaned up, or that there is no longer an environmental risk. In some cases, “completed” sites are simply restricted or fenced off to keep the public away. In other cases, the DOD may have concluded that no cleanup was required by law or was necessary. Note that long-term monitoring or other restrictions may still be in place after a site has reached “Response Complete” status.

* The DOD evaluates the risk posed by contaminated sites relative to all others in the cleanup program in order to prioritize which sites get cleaned up first. A site designated as “high risk” is considered so by DOD as compared to other sites in the program. When designating risk, the DOD takes into account the hazards of contaminants and where and how they might affect humans and the environment.

The DOD uses a different designation for sites that contain unexploded ordnance or discarded military munitions. We simplify the two scales into one. You can read more about the risk designations in our full methodology under “Risk Levels.”

Story Ideas
* Which land near you is contaminated by former military activities? Millions of acres across the country present a risk to the public through exposure to polluted water, soils or unexploded munitions. They may be closer to you than you think. Use the app’s location search bar to see installations near you, or select the “Use My Location” button to be located automatically.

* You’ll need to give our site permission to access your location data. (Don’t worry, we won’t store it.) The app will also display a list of the closest “high risk” sites near you.

* Have groundwater resources near you been polluted by former military activities? Water pollution is one of the most serious, and most common, lingering effects of past military activities and it’s invisible. But this data can alert you to sites with ongoing risks. The app lists if a site’s groundwater or surface water is known to have been contaminated.

* Former military sites are littered with unexploded ordnance in places which are now public parks and residential areas. Finding explosives is uncommon, but it’s possible. These sites are marked with a bomb icon in the interactive database.

* Which lands have restricted access and why? Maybe you know about a former defense site near you, even one that has been cleaned up. Many former military sites have been certified as “Response Complete” but still carry restrictions that limit what people can or should do near these sites to stay safe. Just because the DOD is no longer attending to pollution doesn’t mean that there is no longer a public risk. These sites are labeled with “No Access” in the app.

* The map pinpoints a precise location identified with a cleanup site, but the affected area may be much larger, even spreading off of Defense Department lands. Sites in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, for example, affect hundreds of acres in residential areas far from the point of contamination. The map should serve as a starting point to investigate known sources of pollution that could have a broader effect on your area.

* There may be historical Defense Department sites near you that you never knew about. While the contamination at these sites may have been fixed, the map can also lead to new insights into local historical activities and the role parts of your community played in past wars.

* What are the facilities in my state that my readers should know about? If you look along the left of the main page you’ll see a list of states and how many installations with medium and high-risk sites we found in each. If you click on the name of your state, you can see lots more about the facilities there, including which installations have the most high risk sites.

To find out more about the contaminants at a site near you, you can contact your state’s hazardous waste program and/or environmental agency. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (which can also be a source in its own right) keeps a list of state agencies here.

If a site has been examined for health risks in the past, you can find more information by consulting the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The ATSDR also keeps information on many of the most common toxic contaminants found at military sites.

How We Got and Prepared the Data
We got the data from the Department of Defense via a public records request. It arrived as 93 separate relational database tables, with extensive documentation.

To prepare the data for the interactive map, we first cleaned it. We excluded from the map any installations whose latitude and longitude data field weren’t in the same state as the one listed in the “state” data field for that site’s record.

We hand-checked 550 individual site coordinates, including all the ones for sites deemed “high risk.” We removed six of them from the map that we found to be erroneous.

There were another 30 instances where we could not verify the accuracy of the latitude and longitude. With this very low percentage of error, we are confident in the accuracy of site locations. If you notice a wrong location, please contact us.

You should read our complete methodology to understand the data and what we did to clean and display it.

We hope this interactive database is useful and that you find great stories in it. If you end up publishing anything in the data, please let us know!

Ryann Grochowski Jones is the deputy data editor at ProPublica.
Abrahm Lustgarten covers energy, water, climate change and anything else having to do with the environment for ProPublica.


Bombs in Our Backyard:
How Military Outsourcing Turned Toxic

Fraud. Bribery. Incompetence. The military’s use of
contractors adds to a legacy of environmental damage

Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica

(September 26, 2017) — In August 2016, an inspector from the US Environmental Protection Agency arrived at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, a nerve center for the US military’s global air combat operations, to conduct a routine look at the base’s handling of its hazardous waste.

Barksdale, like many military bases, generates large volumes of hazardous materials, including thousands of pounds of toxic powder left over from cleaning, painting and maintaining airplanes.

For years, Barksdale had been sending a portion of its waste to an Ohio company, US Technology Corp., that had sold officials at the base on a seemingly ingenious solution for disposing of it: The company would take the contaminated powder from refurbished war planes and repurpose it into cinderblocks that would be used to build everything from schools to hotels to big-box department stores — even a pregnancy support center in Ohio. The deal would ostensibly shield the Air Force from the liabililty of being a large producer of dangerous hazardous trash.

The arrangement was not unique.

The military is one of the country’s largest polluters, with an inventory of toxic sites on American soil that once topped 39,000. At many locations, the Pentagon has relied on contractors like US Technology to assist in cleaning and restoring land, removing waste, clearing unexploded bombs, and decontaminating buildings, streams and soil.

In addition to its work for Barksdale, US Technology had won some 830 contracts with other military facilities — Army, Air Force, Navy and logistics bases — totaling more than $49 million, many of them to dispose of similar powders.

In taking on environmental cleanup jobs, contractors often bring needed expertise to technical tasks the Pentagon isn’t equipped to do itself. They also absorb much of the legal responsibility for disposing of military-made hazards, in some cases helping the Pentagon — at least on paper — winnow down its list of toxic liabilities.

But in outsourcing this work, the military has often struggled to provide adequate oversight to ensure that work is done competently — or is completed at all.

Today, records show, some of the most dangerous cleanup work that has been entrusted to contractors remains unfinished, or worse, has been falsely pronounced complete, leaving people who live near former military sites to assume these areas are now safe.

What the EPA inspector found when he visited Barksdale was an object lesson in the system’s blind spots.

Barrels of the waste hadn’t been shipped off and recycled, but rather were stored in a garage tucked away from the facility’s main operations. Further, shipping documents suggested that what waste had been sent off the base hadn’t gone to US Technology’s recycling plant in Ohio, as an Air Force official first told the EPA, but instead had gone to company warehouses in at least two other states. Storing hazardous waste without a permit — and without immediately recycling it — can be illegal.

The inspection findings triggered an investigation to determine if the Air Force had been storing hazardous waste that it was supposed to have been recycling without a permit. It also suggested broader problems with US Technology, which was already the subject of an inquiry in Georgia into whether it was illegally dumping waste — including material that could have come from Barksdale — near a residential neighborhood there.

Barksdale officials told ProPublica that the base “has never stored” hazardous materials at the request of US Technology. The Air Force and the Pentagon declined to answer any specific questions about US Technology’s work, except to say that the base had been working with the company for at least a decade.

ProPublica pieced together what happened at Barksdale using EPA records, including a 1,000-page document compiled by one of its lead investigators, as well as Air Force correspondence, court files, Pentagon contracts and other materials.

The documents make clear that officials at Barksdale should have been wary of doing business with US Technology from the start. The head of one of its sub-contractors had been sent to prison in 2008 for illegally dumping hazardous waste under another Pentagon contract.

US Technology had been investigated for related wrongdoing — storing or dumping material it claimed to be recycling — in two other states. Indeed, a 2011 Pentagon report to Congress about contractor fraud included US Technology on a list of companies that had criminal or civil judgments against them, but which still received millions of dollars in subsequent contracts.

Neither the Air Force nor the Pentagon would respond to questions about why the various military branches continued to award contracts to US Technology despite its problems.

The EPA also would not say whether it was looking into US Technology’s contracts with other bases — deals involving millions of pounds of toxic powder and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars — but such a step might well be prudent.

In April, US Technology’s founder and president, Raymond Williams, was indicted in US District Court in Missouri for trucking millions of pounds of its hazardous powder waste — from Defense and other types of contracts — over state lines, where, according to EPA documents, the company had been storing it instead of recycling it.

In June, Williams was indicted in Georgia on federal charges related to bribing an Air Force official for recycling contracts. Williams has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

Asked about Barksdale and other contracts that have gone awry, one of the Pentagon’s top environmental officials told ProPublica that there is no systemic problem with the military’s approach to cleanup or other environmental contracting.

Maureen Sullivan, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment, safety and occupational health, said the military might have thousands of companies under contract at any given time and that the Barksdale case and others like it amount to rare examples of negligence or incompetence.

“Not everybody is an angel,” Sullivan said.

Still, the Pentagon and its various monitors have issued repeated warnings about problems related to environmental cleanup contractors.

In 2001, the Defense Department’s own inspector general discussed the “significant risk of fraud” in environmental cleanup contracts as one of the Pentagon’s “high risk vulnerabilities.” That report did not list recommendations for reform, chiefly because many of the office’s previous efforts imploring changes had been ignored.

A decade later, the US Government Accountability Office concluded that many Pentagon environmental cleanup contracts were vulnerable to corner-cutting, lack of quality review and plain incompetence.

The report made clear that the department relied heavily on performance-based contracts despite federal guidelines which cautioned against using them for environmental jobs, perhaps because doing so furthered the Pentagon’s self-interest in ridding itself of environmental headaches.

“The evidence is in, a contractor is only as good as the oversight that they have,” said Jane Williams, the executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, a watchdog group that has been tracking defense site cleanups across the country since 1989. “The defense department turns a blind eye… They want to write a check and have someone else do it.”

AIRMEN CALL BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE “The Deuce” — home to the 2nd Bombing Wing of the 8th Air Force, a legendary unit in American aerial bombardment with roots going back to World War I.

The Wing was moved to Barksdale in 1963, with the production of the B-52. In 1991, seven B-52s flew the longest round-trip combat mission in aviation history from Barksdale’s hangers, firing the first cruise missiles of the first Gulf War into Baghdad from their holds beneath the bombers’ gaping wings.

Today, nearly half of the Air Force’s remaining B-52’s fly from this heavily guarded, 22,000-acre base, which has 8,500 airmen stationed there. Those 185,000-pound hunks of aging, flexing metal — still the workhorse of the nation’s strike force more than 55 years after the last one was made — need an extraordinary amount of work to keep them in the air.

At Barksdale, the airplanes’ parts are sanded and painted, corrosion removed, cracks in the fuselage cut out and patched, rivets drilled hollow and replaced. All so the planes can return to flight training over Eastern Europe or bombing raids against ISIS in Syria.

Essential to this unglamorous, but vital work are millions of tiny glass and plastic beads that machinists use to blast against metal parts to strip away paint and corrosion. The process leaves huge amounts of toxic dust, including the flaked paint and bits of pulverized metal from the planes themselves.

US Technology was founded in 1987 by Williams, described by colleagues as an eccentric entrepreneur with a love for historic fighter planes and airplane design. US Technology and its dozen or so affiliated corporations have tried to sell everything from inexpensive prop fighter planes to the United Arab Emirates to concrete blocks. But the core business has always been the bead blasting and recycling.

For years Barksdale handled the waste produced by its airplane maintenance just as it handled any other hazardous material: It catalogued and labeled it, registered the quantities with the EPA and state authorities, and shipped it to a specialized disposal facility in Kentucky that was licensed to burn or bury the stuff.

But in the last decade, the Pentagon began to press Barksdale and other bases to comply with “waste minimization” rules set out in federal regulations. Barksdale officials said they were required to cut the volume of waste the base produced by 10 percent from 2010 levels by 2020, for example. Increasingly, all bases — which compete for funding and whose officers vie for promotions — are judged on meeting or beating quotas for limiting and then promptly handling waste.

Documents make clear US Technology’s pitch spoke directly to Barksdale and was calibrated to help achieve these aims. The company promised to supply all of the base’s blast powder and then retrieve the spent material — thousands of pounds of it a year — to use as fill to make cinderblocks.

The EPA and Ohio environment officials had certified this was relatively safe, so long as the cinderblocks didn’t come into contact with the ground, where they could potentially contaminate food and water supplies.

The deal also promised other benefits.

Because US Technology was a recycler, the toxic material it removed from Barksdale would no longer be classified legally as “hazardous waste.” This semantic end run spared the Air Force from having to meet strict federal regulations for where such waste goes and for protecting people from being harmed by it.

As one company sales document put it, recyclable materials “are exempt from regulation as a waste.” It also meant that, at least technically, Barksdale’s ledger would show that it was producing less waste overall, and thus edging closer to the Pentagon’s goals.

US Technology’s sales documents boasted that its approach offered its military customers “maximum protection” from liability and costs related to cleanups, and could maybe even prevent contaminated areas from becoming Superfund sites.

Still, the presentations left out important bits of the company’s history.

In order to be exempt from hazardous waste laws, federal regulations require waste recycling companies like US Technology to re-purpose at least three-quarters of the hazardous material they collect as part of contracts in any given year. The rule is meant to ensure that waste isn’t simply being stored. Storing hazardous waste requires a highly specialized license and, done wrong, can lead to environmental disaster.

In 2002, however, Ohio and EPA investigators inspected US Technology’s plantand found discrepancies in its inventories of hazardous materials received from the military and other customers.

Of some 3.6 million pounds of material US Technology had accepted in 2000, for example, only 98,000 pounds of it had been used for recycled products, a figure “well short of the required amount,” according to Ohio state records. In an alleyway next to the building, investigators found stacks of unused outdoor patio furniture apparently molded from hazardous powder but never sold.

“There obviously wasn’t a market for the furniture,” wrote Nyall McKenna, the Ohio environment regulator who led the investigation.

The investigators found that US Technology had directly recycled a small portion of the material, but shipped the vast majority of it to a processing company in Mississippi that US Technology had hired to reformulate the material into large blocks that the US Army Corps of Engineers — a Pentagon branch itself — could use in its management of the country’s river systems.

But it turned out the processing company, Hydromex, hadn’t been recycling the material either. Instead, it had been burying US Technology’s waste in trenches it dug underground, and then had used the remaining powder to make a concrete slab that covered the holes.

By the time the EPA and state regulators learned this, more than 11 million pounds of waste from Ohio, and US Technology customers around the country — packed into 25,000 drums — had been stashed at the site in Yazoo, Mississippi.

Hydromex’s owner was sent to prison for more than three years. US Technology and its officials avoided prosecution, saying the company was not aware of Hydromex’s dumping and was itself a victim of fraud. (In a later civil trial, a jury rejected US Technology’s fraud claims against the property owner of the Hydromex plant.) In the eyes of regulators, though, US Technology remained liable for the waste material under environmental law, and would ultimately be tasked with removing and — again — properly recycling the dumped waste.

EPA documents and emails obtained by the agency show some of the material dumped in Mississippi came from US military bases and that the case had gotten the attention of the Air Force in particular.

At least two other bases — Robins Air Force Base in Georgia and Hill Air Force base in Utah — had been working with US Technology, and others were about to start until they were informally warned off by headquarters, pending a review, according to Air Force documents.

In the end, though, any Air Force wariness concerning US Technology proved short-lived. Senior brass, as part of their look at what had gone wrong in 2002, visited the company’s operations in 2005 and came away with a favorable view.

“US Technology has a very impressive recycling operation,” William Hoogsteden, a project manager at the Air Force research laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, wrote in a 2005 memo. The company, the official concluded, “looks to be one of the few legitimate and viable recycling processes using spent plastic media.”

Another 2005 letter pushed US Technology’s appeal explicitly. “Their products help us achieve diversion targets (recycle vs. disposal),” wrote David Fort, an Air Force hazardous waste program manager, in an internal Air Force exchange. “This is something that we simply ought to take advantage of.”

In 2006, various Pentagon branches signed 30 contracts with US Technology worth more than $2.7 million.

THE VOLUME AND COMPLEXITY of environmental cleanup work has led the Pentagon to rely more and more on contractors like US Technology. According to the GAO, such companies now handle nearly all of the hazardous waste the Defense Department generates annually, and, according to Pentagon data obtained by ProPublica, at least 2,400 contaminated cleanup sites across the country have been outsourced to private firms.

Cleaning up contamination at these sites has already consumed more than $42 billion in taxpayer funds, much of it paid to contractors. By the Pentagon’s conservative estimates, the total cleanup bill is likely to top $70 billion, making Defense pollution one of the most expensive environmental calamities in American history, and a lucrative mainstay for private concerns.

Virtually all Pentagon contracting — for weapons, aircraft, base security, reconstruction in war zones, and more — has come under criticism for cost overruns and, at times, for being open to exploitation. It’s impossible to say how environmental cleanup contractors compare to others in these regards.

But experts say environmental work is especially hard to monitor; waste disposal and contamination are easy to hide and hard to track. Also, with Pentagon officials under pressure to reduce the list of contaminated sites and cut the costs of attending to them, there’s less incentive to question contractors that say problems are fixed or jobs are done well.

A lengthy trail of damning reports from military watchdogs, however, suggests the same problems have cropped up time and again when the Pentagon has delegated environmental cleanups to contractors.

In 2015, calling environmental issues a “longstanding material weakness,” the Pentagon’s inspector general said that despite publishing some 20 previous reports on the issue, little progress had been made in adopting recommendations.

One of those previous reports was the 2001 report to Congress, which noted that environmental crimes committed by hazardous waste contractors warranted the majority of attention from the agency’s criminal investigations division.

Contractors cut corners, falsely certified as done environmental work they hadn’t completed, illegally dumped dangerous materials, or employed workers who weren’t properly trained for their tasks, the report said, describing such incidents as “typical” and “discussed regularly.”

The inspector general noted that across all branches of the Pentagon, environmental contracts were ripe for abuse because remediation relies so heavily on contractors to self-report their progress. And it also noted that the results of the review were “disappointing because the department made limited progress in carrying out numerous agreed-upon recommendations” from the past.

John Arlington, who researched corruption at defense sites as a former chief investigator for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said the problems were epic.

“We discovered a very long history of hazardous disposal practices of the worst sort,” said Arlington, who now serves as general counsel for the SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

In many cases, egregious malpractice — or even intentional deception — hasn’t been enough to steer the Pentagon away from particular contractors.

In San Francisco, in 2016, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that employees of a prominent global environmental engineering firm hired by the Navy had falsified soil samples from a radioactive experiment site soon to be converted to housing in the nation’s hottest real estate market.

The contractor, Tetra Tech, has received more than $2.3 billion in defense contracts over the past decade, and was being paid more than $300 million for its cleanup in San Francisco.

In a legal petition the San Francisco environment group Greenaction submitted to NRC investigators, several Tetra Tech whistleblowers said that, in order to save money, Tetra Tech managers had ordered them to replace contaminated soil samples with clean soil, dump contaminated soil in trenches on the property, falsify documents certifying the work and manipulate the computer data analyzing radiation levels. Their allegations raised questions about environmental safety across some 420 acres of the site.

Tetra Tech, which conducted an internal investigation and conceded its samples had been swapped, “emphatically denies” that its management was involved or that there was a broader conspiracy at the site, according to a statement the company sent to ProPublica.

The NRC, at first, fined Tetra Tech $7,000, but even that amount was later reduced after an agreement that the company would hold additional training for its employees. A Navy spokesperson said that while Tetra Tech is still under contract, it is no longer doing field work at the site.

At Camp Minden, a former Army ammunition plant now owned by Louisiana and used by its National Guard, a munitions waste recycling contractor’s failures caused a disaster too big to ignore.

As part of a nationwide effort to decommission more than a billion pounds of aging weapons, the Army hired a company called Explo Systems to disassemble 1.3 million artillery charges at Minden. For $8.6 million, the firm would remove the shells and casings and empty an explosive propellant powder called M6. Explo claimed to have industrial facilities to recycle the M6, and said it would safely destroy some of it while converting the rest into blasting charges it planned to sell to the mining industry.

Had the Army ever looked into Explo’s capabilities, it would have learned that it had not yet built two of the processing facilities it would need to destroy and convert the Army’s explosive material. Nevertheless, by mid-2012, Explo documents appeared to show that it had shipped and sold nearly 18 million pounds of the explosives.

That illusion quite literally blew up on Oct. 15, 2012, when a massive explosion rocked the Minden grounds, shattering windows in the town four miles away, toppling 11 rail cars, and sending a mushroom cloud 7,000 feet into the sky. EPA records describe a blast radius of raw explosives landing as close as a few thousand feet from the nearby town.

When Louisiana State police executed a search warrant of the base, they found nearly 18 million pounds of M6 explosives stored haphazardly across the property. Photographs show enormous cardboard boxes overstuffed with explosives, sagging under their own weight with water stains rotting their base.

The boxes teetered in hallways, were stacked in doorways and spilled out in the surrounding yards, where thousands of them were lined up across fields like parked cars at a county fair. Louisiana’s extreme heat and humidity had taken its toll, degrading the chemical stabilizers that bond the explosives, until they verged on spontaneous ignition.

The remaining materials could have blown at any time. Louisiana’s governor declared a state of emergency, and for a week that December, the small community of Doyline along the base’s fence line was evacuated.

“It was a perfect storm,” said J.C. King, the Army’s director of munitions and the chief official responsible for Army explosives cleanups, in an interview at the Pentagon in July.

King says what happened in Minden, though, is no longer the Army’s problem; when Explo signed its contract, it assumed ownership of the explosives and any contamination that might be associated with them, he said.

EPA investigators determined Explo had falsified its sales paperwork and, in fact, had few customers; the very premise of its Army contract was a lie. Six of its executives wound up indicted. They have pleaded not guilty, and are currently awaiting trial in Louisiana. Explo Systems declared bankruptcy the next fall, abandoning the explosives. Its executives did not respond to a request for comment made through their attorney.

Despite the substantial real-world harm that has resulted from misconduct by contractors, the Pentagon continues to rely ever more heavily on them for environmental work even as the budget for that work has been whittled.

Experts say the process is flawed, incentivizing shortcuts and outsourcing to save money and preserve the Pentagon’s primary military mission. But unless the Pentagon substantially tightens oversight to weed out problem contractors, experts say, the Defense Department’s enormous environmental cleanup program — an effort affecting an amount of land larger than the state of Florida — will only become more vulnerable to abuse.

“It’s about priorities; you either pay for a certain result or you end up playing hide the ball,” said William Frank, who for 25 years oversaw Pentagon cleanups at the EPA as a senior attorney in the Federal Facilities Enforcement Office. “The DoD is not accountable and it hasn’t been. But they are complicit. The process itself has this fatal flaw of the necessity of balancing the military warfighter mission and the weapons development industry versus their legal liability” under environmental law. “And it’s not working.”

WHEN THE EPA’S DAVID ROBERTSON showed up at Barksdale in August 2016, it appears he was there to do nothing more than a pro-forma inspection. It didn’t take Robertson long, however, to figure out the deal US Technology offered the base was less than advertised, and maybe even a complete sham.

His inspection report shows that thousands of pounds of waste from Barksdale hadn’t been shipped to the company’s plant in Ohio, as a Barksdale official initially had said. Instead, shipping documents suggested that much of the waste had been trucked to warehouses in Arkansas and Georgia.

There was no paperwork whatsoever for more than a year, from July 2014 until February 2016. And then there were the 55-gallon drums full of bead blast powder on the base itself — labeled “exempt,” and not as hazardous. Some of the grayish powder was loose, sprinkled across the tops of the drums.

Standard practice for EPA waste inspectors is to examine every link in the chain of custody before they sign off on a site. Robertson — seeking to verify the explanations offered by Barksdale staff — called regulators in Georgia and Arkansas and told them about the manifests indicating Barksdale waste had been shipped into their states.

The Arkansas regulators, according to what Robertson wrote in his inspection report, told him they knew nothing about the shipments or about warehouses storing waste.

An EPA official in Georgia, however, was alarmed by the call from Robertson. He alerted Robertson to US Technology’s past legal troubles in Mississippi, and said he’d already been investigating US Technology’s facility in Macon for dumping hazardous waste nearly identical to what Barksdale had produced — and shipped to Macon in 2016 — on the grounds of an old track, called the Middle Georgia Raceway.

The track, which once hosted NASCAR races, hasn’t been used for more than auto shows and test driving events since the 1980s, but the community surrounding it has slowly encroached, turning the once-rural and industrial area into a tightly packed nest of suburban streets and family homes.

According to EPA documents from Georgia, one of US Technology’s affiliated companies, US Technology Aerospace Engineering, loaded the waste into dumpsters and trucked it to the raceway, where it was spread over several access roads and stashed in barrels lined up as an impact barrier for drivers on the oval.

The EPA report does not say directly whether investigators determined the waste came from Barksdale, but it is described as bead-blast waste from the sandblasting of machinery. They found gray piles of loose, dusty material less than 90 feet from people’s backyards.

In June 2016, the EPA sent an environmental contracting firm out to the track to sample the soils. Lab reports show the company found significant levels of chromium, arsenic, lead and cadmium. Only the arsenic exceeded health limits when measured for an industrial area — which the racetrack is zoned as. But the levels of chromium, lead and cadmium would all be considered much more dangerous if judged by residential health standards.

By that measure, the Middle Georgia Raceway contained arsenic at 28 times the EPA’s limit, and cadmium at nearly four times what would be considered safe. High levels of chromium were also present, but there is no federal screening standard.

Robertson makes clear in his report on Barksdale that he suspected both the Air Force and US Technology of what the EPA calls “sham recycling.” The EPA would not comment on the status of its investigation, but its documents show it has assigned an agency criminal investigator and criminal counsel to the case.

The Georgia dumping — which EPA is investigating separately — suggests a potentially larger problem with US Technology.

The company appeared, once again, to be having difficulty turning its powder waste into viable products. According to John Socotch, the company’s long-time director of sales, the market for US Technology’s powder dried up when the construction industry tanked in 2008 and it never fully recovered.

“Ray had to continually find other means, other companies to recycle the material,” Socotch said of the company’s owner in an interview with ProPublica. He said the company tried selling military waste for brick facades and to glass companies, in order “to get rid of the material.”

In Georgia, the raceway’s owner, a local real estate developer who also owns the building in Macon that served as US Technology’s warehouse, told ProPublica that Williams personally appealed to him to dump the waste.

“They were asking me about potential sources to get rid of the stuff, because it just accumulates in the warehouse,” said Tim Thornton. Thornton said Williams promised him the material wasn’t hazardous.

Ray Williams did not return repeated phone calls from ProPublica, and his lawyer declined to comment. According to Socotch, Williams sold the company’s patents, contracts and processes in April 2015 to an Ohio businessman named Anthony Giancola. Giancola’s office did not return repeated calls for comment, but arranged for Socotch to speak with ProPublica.

The sale of the company has not distanced Williams from criminal cases related to its military contracts. In June, he was indicted in a US District Court in Georgia on charges of paying a Department of Defense official $20,000 a year to tailor contracts at Robins Air Force base so that only US Technology’s bead blasting and recycling services could satisfy them.

According to the 84 counts in the indictment, between 2004 and 2013 Williams allegedly conspired with the officer, Mark Cundiff, on contracts large and small, including a $25 million supply contract for US bases and NATO members to purchase blasting materials. Cundiff has pleaded guilty in the case.

In a separate case, Missouri officials indicted Williams and US Technology Corp. in April 2017 on charges of conspiracy to illegally dispose of hazardous waste. After the Hydromex case in Mississippi, US Technology acquired Hydromex and Williams promised to properly recycle the material that had been dumped in Yazoo.

Instead, in 2013, Missouri officials determined that US Technology had trucked the material — 9 million pounds of it — over the state border and deposited it in a US Technology warehouse in Berger, Mo. Williams has pleaded not guilty in that case.

Today, US Technology Corp. has reconstituted itself under new leadership, and a slightly revised name.

In April 2015, US Technology Corp. fired all of its employees, according to Socotch. The next day the new owner, who had purchased the patented products and the recycling process from Williams, hired everyone back — including Socotch, the long-time sales director. The company is now called US Technology Media, and is located in one of Williams’ old recycling buildings.

“We’re trying to get people to understand we are not that guy,” Socotch said of Williams. “We are not that company.”

The Pentagon, it seems, is already persuaded.

Between April 2015 and June 2017, the Pentagon awarded 62 contracts to the new company, worth more than $1.9 million. Barksdale officials continued to deal with the new company — and shipped more of its waste to it — in 2016. In late July, after EPA officials sent federal agencies a letter warning them that US Technology was under investigation, and the Pentagon banned US Technology Corp. — the old company — from any new government contracts, adding them to a list of forbidden companies. Contracts with the new company are still allowed.

Back at Barksdale, records show that the Air Force has promised the EPA it will now handle its waste on its own, registering its barrels of contaminated powder in federal and state hazardous waste databases and likely shipping them to the licensed disposal facility in Kentucky. It says it will no longer work with US Technology Media.

That, of course, leaves the question of what ever happened to decades worth of hazardous materials Williams and US Technology removed from American military installations. Socotch says much of it was properly recycled, but he declined to say how much or to document the effort.

It appears that neither the company nor the Air Force plans to take responsibility for the unprocessed waste. Whatever hazardous waste US Technology had accumulated in its warehouses, Socotch said, is still owned by US Technology Corp., Williams’ apparently now-defunct company.

“I can only speak for the new company, because the new company started fresh,” Socotch said. “I don’t know what the old company continues to do to get rid of recycled material.”

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter, with a focus at the intersection of business, climate and energy.
Nina Hedevang, Razi Syed, Alex Gonzalez, Lauren Gurley, Clare Victoria Church, Alessandra Freitas, Emma Cillekens and Eli Kurland, students in the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute graduate studies program, have contributed reporting for the Bombs in Our Backyard project.

Help us Investigate: If you have experience with or information about the military’s use of contractors and environmental cleanups, email Abrahm.Lustgarten@propublica.org. For additional coverage, see more from ProPublica’s Bombs in Our Backyard series.

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