Photo By James Frisinger | Suzanne Beauchamp is account manager for the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program for...... read more read more
FORT WORTH, Texas – Thousands of military properties nationwide, many dating to World War I and II, are no longer the property of the Department of Defense. They were transferred to cities and states or to private owners after being declared surplus.
But some of these properties still had life-safety hazards from their use in training, gunnery practice and testing new weapons.
The Formerly Used Defense Sites Program emerged in the mid-1980s when concern grew about debris and contamination left on sites transferred out of DoD’s control, said Suzanne Beauchamp. She is the FUDS account manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Regional Planning and Environmental Center in the Fort Worth District. She once worked the FUDS program at Headquarters USACE but is very happy to be back at the district level based in Tulsa working for the RPEC.
In 1986, Congress created the Defense Environmental Restoration Program. FUDS is authorized under DERP, and DoD gave the Army Corps the lead to execute the program for all former military properties that incurred contamination issues prior to 1986, said Beauchamp.
Cleaning up these sites – and monitoring the residual risk until they are free of hazardous contamination – is the mission of separate USACE FUDS teams across the country. The RPEC FUDS team was asked, in addition, to run a pilot to prepare for the national roll out of a new notification and safety education element to the program.
Lands from over 7,000 former military facilities nationwide were dispersed to a wide range of new uses – homes, cropland, ranches, city- and state-owned parks, said DoD Environmental Programs Chief Chris Evans at USACE Headquarters. Some are still Federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
After taking a careful inventory, the USACE FUDS teams determined that many sites had no chemical or munitions contamination issues. For the rest, the DoD made a commitment to clean them up, said Evans. At the end of the day the USACE mission is to ensure that the properties will be safe for their intended use, he said.
The RPEC FUDS team manages the inventory of 602 sites within the Southwestern Division military boundaries (Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas). Those sites include 267 chemical contamination sites and 308 munitions sites. The team has met the remedial action objectives, or what is known as “Response Complete,” on 253 or 94.7% of the chemical sites and 126 or 40.9% of the munitions sites, said Beauchamp.
The DoD goal for the chemical sites is to be at Response Complete on 90% of the sites by 2018 and at 95% Response Complete by 2021. Southwestern Division has already met the 2018 goal and should meet the 2021 goal by the end of next year, said Beauchamp. The DoD also set an Interim Risk Management Goal for the FUDS program to notify landowners, at least once every five years, that they live on a FUDS and what they should do if they find munitions on their property.
Interim Risk Management for FUDS – also called the Public Notification and Safety Education Initiative – monitors the long queue of sites awaiting cleanup nationwide. It ensures that new owners, for instance, are aware that risks remain. The RPEC team launched the pilot to test notification procedures in March 2015; it was then rolled out by FUDS teams nationwide.
This new notification and safety education effort, worked with Corps contractor Bristol Environmental Remediation Services, follows a set protocol. Communications assessments are reviewed, media interest is calculated, safety sheets are prepared for each site. Congressional offices are notified in advance of each annual mass mailing that notifies FUDS landowners. State environmental regulators are advised (in Texas, it is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality). With the letters, property owners are educated on what actions to take to reduce the risks from remaining hazards. Local first responders are forewarned in case the letters trigger calls from people reporting suspicious objects.
So far 1,072 letters have gone out just within SWD military boundaries, but they’ve drawn little reaction.
“We thought there might be a big outcry. Instead it was radio silence,” said Beauchamp. One owner wanted to make sure it wasn’t some kind of scam to reduce the price of the property in a future sale.
Every year one-fifth of FUDS owners will be notified. The last round of letters goes out in 2019. Then the five-year notification cycle will repeat, until the last of the FUDS are cleaned up.
By now thousands of landholders have been notified nationwide but calls to a national FUDS telephone number still haven’t reached 200, said Evans.
Some reactions have been a plus, said Beauchamp. One owner knew a lot about the site, wasn’t concerned about the munitions and provided a lot of helpful information. A couple of corporations along the Houston Ship Channel asked for a copy of the site inspection report to see if they needed to institute any safety procedures to cover future diggings in that area.
“That’s what we want with Interim Risk Management – ‘There might be something there, take appropriate precautions if you are working in this area’ – I was pleased with that,” she said.
As of today, 1,852 sites are still awaiting cleanup, said Evans.
This year the RPEC FUDS team anticipates 15 decision documents. This should position the team to execute $11 million of remedial activities if the funding is available, said Beauchamp. Five Camp Claiborne FUDS project cleanups in Alexandria, La., were approved for remediation. A “no action” decision document was signed this year for the Oklahoma Ordnance Works in Pryor, Okla. With that clearance, the industrial park occupying the site no longer needs monitoring.
The chemical contamination project on the Camp Wolters FUDS in Mineral Wells, Texas, reached Response Complete last year and was closed out.
Ultimately, the program will ramp down when the last site is certified Response Complete, said Evans. This vision of “Response Complete in Our Lifetime” was the focus of a recent national FUDS conference in San Antonio, Texas.
“We’re really trying to double down, to refocus, to make sure we are making good decisions day to day to see how we can get those sites cleaned up and get those to Response Complete,” said Evans. “We want this generation of Corps employees to see the end. That’s quite a reach for us. This is an exciting time to be working on the FUDS program.”
How FUDS Program ranks cleanup actions
It will cost about $14 billion to clean up the rest of the sites, according to an estimate issued by the FUDS Program at Corps Headquarters. Since funding is only about $250 million a year, it may take decades.
With this backlog, the DoD adopted a long-term strategy to execute the cleanup. Each site was ranked for the level of risk. For munitions contamination, the Munitions Response Site Prioritization Protocol (MRSPP) assigns risk from 1 (the highest) down to 8 (hardly any risk at all). For hazardous waste contamination, the Installation Restoration Program is used (with risk categorized as high, medium or low). The vast majority of sites are contaminated with munitions, not chemicals, said Beauchamp, the FUDS account manager.
By 2012, site inspections were performed on all known FUDS. Inspections revealed many were never used as munitions sites as once planned, said Beauchamp. Others were used, but inspectors never could find anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to clean up.
Often the inspectors found debris but nothing explosive. These lands required a more thorough look – a remedial investigation – probing deeper into the soil, expanded grid sampling and examining any anomalies, said Beauchamp. Is it munitions debris – or horseshoes?
After assigning risk under MRSPP, the team has to decide if it needs to be cleaned up, how to do it and how to determine if it has been cleaned up, said Beauchamp. If a cleanup is warranted, a feasibility study is performed and public comment sought. At the end, a decision document is prepared, which includes anticipated costs of any cleanup.
Cleanup priorities are evaluated in cooperation with environmental regulators in each state. This guidance helps the FUDS team write collaborative work plans.
“We want to make sure we address the sites with the highest potential for risk before ones that are low in risk,” she said. Final work plans are forwarded to the Army and the DoD to select the next sites to be cleaned up.
“Regulators understand we only have so much money and that it may be 20 years before I get back to a site to go with remediation,” said Beauchamp. “Interim Risk Management is our effort to address that concern.”
| Date Taken: | 11.03.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 11.03.2016 16:50 |
| Story ID: | 213776 |
| Location: | FORT WORTH, TX, US |
| Web Views: | 163 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Army team manages risk at former military sites now in private hands, by James Frisinger, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
LEAVE A COMMENT