The Defense Department still is resisting orders to clean up three contaminated military bases after more than two decades of disagreements between government agencies over the hazardous sites, the Government Accountability Office has found.
The Pentagon is the nation’s biggest polluter, The Washington Post reports. It is responsible for 141 of the 1,620 Superfund sites — areas designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as among the most contaminated in the country.
The GAO examined cleanup efforts at Maryland’s Fort Meade Army Base, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base, and found little long-term progress. By law the EPA is supposed to sign interagency agreements with federal agencies that own Superfund sites — but no deal has been reached between the EPA and the Pentagon to push forward with cleanups at Tyndall and three other areas.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said officials were reviewing the report, but had no further comment.
Without an interagency agreement, the audit said, the EPA had “little leverage” to clean up a contaminated site. The report recommended that Congress give the EPA the power to impose penalties for failure to clean up sites, even without an agreement. The Pentagon, in the report’s published comments, said it opposed this suggestion.
