State worried about safety, cost to defuse old weapons ranges

By Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News
March 6, 2004

Untold thousands of aging, unexploded bombs are scattered across Colorado, hidden military leftovers that health experts call a growing hazard and a mess that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up.

State regulators have identified at least two dozen sites where old ordnance has been found. The one causing the greatest alarm: the former Lowry Bombing and Gunnery Range southeast of Denver, where workers have discovered more than 3,000 live munitions - with 75 percent of the search-and-destroy work still to come.

But cleanup work is expected to take another 10 years and nervous regulators want the Army to move faster at Lowry. They're worried about the rising odds that a wandering resident will have a close encounter of the wrong kind.

"According to the Department of Defense, the Lowry Range has the highest explosive hazard element rating possible, with a score of 98 of 100," Doug Benevento, director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, wrote in a letter last October to Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., to coax more cleanup funds from the Army.

"Over 8,000 new homes will be built on and adjacent to the Lowry range in the next few years. All of these areas are within easy walking distance of historical military training sites where both chemical and conventional UXO may remain on the surface," the letter said. "With largely uncontrolled site access, it is difficult to ensure that the public is protected."

Peril lurks nationwide

Nationwide, these aging munitions, some from the World War I era, contaminate about 15 million acres and have killed or maimed nearly 200 civilians, according to an Environmental Protection Agency report in 2001. And public health officials fear that those numbers will climb as more development encroaches on old bombing ranges.

Colorado's sites include the Lowry range, the 250,000-acre mountainous Army training region known as Camp Hale near Leadville, and many smaller sites scattered from the Plains to the plateau country of the state's Western Slope.

In all, old ranges in Colorado cover an estimated 1 million acres, and at many of those spots, much is still unknown about the hazards lying above and below ground. In some cases, the Department of Defense has yet to conduct even an initial survey.

An astonishing array of weapons was thrown, fired, dropped or destroyed at these sites. At Lowry alone, killers such as shrapnel-spraying fragmentation bombs, incendiary bombs, small rockets and a wide variety of projectiles have been found. In 2002, workers discovered soil laced with deadly mustard agent.

Most of the devices exploded as designed, but about 10 percent didn't - a rate anticipated by the military, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. With millions of pieces used at a place like Lowry, it leaves thousands upon thousands of pieces that amount to still-dangerous duds.

"Any piece of unexploded ordnance has the potential to take your life - even the small things," said Edward Wilson, operations supervisor for Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure Inc., the contractor overseeing the Lowry cleanup for the Army Corps.

Despite these hazards, bombing range cleanups at Lowry, Colorado's other UXO sites and around the nation remain slow. After five years of work at Lowry "none of the 12 areas of concern have been completed," according to Benevento's letter.

And the threat is not abstract. Among the accidents cited in a database compiled by the EPA:

• Two boys playing with an anti-tank bazooka shell at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in 1976 were killed when it exploded.

• In 1999, a child was burned on his face, hand and knee after finding a grenade simulator at Fort Campbell, Tenn.

• Seven campers were injured in 1986 when they tossed an old grenade into a campfire. They had found the M-79 grenade while hiking near Hurricane Mesa in Utah, a public land area once used as a testing ground.

• Two 8-year-old boys were killed and another severely injured in 1983 when an artillery round exploded in a San Diego subdivision that was once an Army tank training range.

Colorado's hidden hazards

At Lowry and Camp Hale, both populated by hikers, horseback riders and others seeking wide-open spaces, it's a small wonder that no one has been hurt or killed, say those familiar with the history of the sites.

Lowry was used for military training from 1942 through 1963. In the early 1990s, Boy Scouts on a tree-planting expedition at the range raised the profile of the ordnance problem while digging a hole and striking old weaponry.

The city of Aurora, in preparation for opening Aurora Reservoir, soon conducted a $250,000 cleanup. But dozens of projectiles kept showing up on the shores when the water receded.

By 1998, the Army Corps of Engineers did its own clearance of the reservoir area. Today, the reservoir - which attracts 100,000 people a year for swimming, sunbathing and sailboarding, according to Aurora - sits adjacent to areas of the range that have yet to be cleared of UXO.

Several groups are undaunted by the explosive landscape. A cattle rancher, a gun club and model airplane enthusiasts who use the Lowry range are among them.

So are the dozens of hobbyists who throughout the fall and winter don English hunting jackets and mount horses as part of the Arapahoe Hunt, where they prance across the bombing range with their hounds in the lead, chasing coyotes instead of foxes. Even kids take part in the sport, dressed in black hunt coats, white ties, tan britches and tall boots.

Hunt club members tend not to fret over the bombs. Once, they took a liking to a few, small, oblong munitions and put them on display in their hunt barn. Army Corps officials later discovered that two of the bombs were live. A hunt club official said regulators overreacted.

"We've been out here about 16 years. We ride twice a week from September to April," said Donald O'Connor, master of foxhounds for the club.

One party that is unnerved by the bombs, however, is the Lowry range's primary landlord, the State Land Board, which owns 37 square miles at the site. The agency has a clause in its lease with the Arapahoe Hunt group that releases the land board of liability should any rider suffer a UXO-related injury.

Proximity to hazard hasn't stopped developers, four of whom, including homebuilding giant Lennar, were so anxious to build on or near the western fringes of the site that they stopped waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers and hired private bomb-cleanup specialists to scour 2,400 acres.

Lennar recently paid about $8 million to the firm Foster Wheeler to clear about 1,000 acres that the Army Corps didn't consider high priority. The company found 800,000 rounds of projectiles, primarily 20 mm and 50-caliber munitions. Some 3,000 of them were live, said Ed Dbrowski, president of the Colorado land division for Lennar.

He said the Army Corps' offer to take care of any munitions later discovered by homeowners, didn't cut it.

"We wanted to make sure the property was clear of any ordnance before we were going to sell homesites to any buyers," said Dbrowski, who added that prospective buyers will be notified the site is a former bombing range. "We believe it is a concern and a safety risk and that's why we believed cleanup was necessary."

In the shadow of danger

A drive along Gun Club and Smoky Hill roads reveals a flurry of construction adjacent to, or within, the bombing range boundaries: Home Depot, Wal-Mart, new neighborhoods with names such as Serenity Ridge and Blackstone Country Club, as well as a brand new high school, Cherokee Trail.

Meanwhile earth-movers roam the landscape like ants on a Twinkie, laying the ground for a new golf course and more homes, some on land just recently cleared of munitions.

And recently, state regulators had to suggest to the new high school's principal that allowing the cross-country team to train on the range wasn't a good idea.

At the massive Camp Hale site in central Colorado, hunters have found live 81 mm mortar rounds and a fuse for an anti-tank land mine. In 2002, a fire burned in an area contaminated with UXO, forcing firefighters to work with Army Corps ordnance specialists to avoid setting off any aging weaponry.

Established in 1942 to provide winter and mountain warfare training during World War II, Camp Hale even hosted the Central Intelligence Agency, which secretly trained Tibetan soldiers there from 1959 through 1965. Numerous weapons were used at the site, including anti-tank rockets, rifle grenades, hand grenades, and high explosive and illumination mortars.

Costs to clean up Lowry and Camp Hale are staggering. At Lowry, the Army already has spent $50 million, and will likely spend another $80 million before the work is done, perhaps by 2014. That doesn't include about $15 million spent removing old chemical weapons, or possible chemical weapons.

Camp Hale, four times as large as Lowry and far more remote, will cost even more, perhaps $350 million.

Nationally, the costs are equally troubling. A recent estimate by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon-appointed study group, suggested that costs could run to more than $50 billion to scour more than 2,300 ranges that the affect some 10 million to 15 million acres, at least the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware combined.

What's more, the military is creating new sites faster than old ones are being cleaned up as troops continue to train: "Looking to the future, we note that we use enormous amounts of explosive munitions in training - more than 2 million rounds per year. We are adding more UXOs per year than we currently clean up at our $200 million level of effort," the report said.

The Defense Science Board report, issued in November 2003, goes further, criticizing the Pentagon for not devoting enough funds to the matter.

"A $200 million-per-year funding applied to a tens-of-billions-of-dollars problem implies that the Department of Defense gives this issue low priority and clearly doesn't care if it takes 100 years to solve," the paper said.

"That low priority was evident to the (study group) throughout the study. It is also evident to many of the 'stakeholders' in the UXO issue (the local citizens, the state regulators, environmental groups), who justifiably see the Department of Defense's total effort on UXO cleanup as unresponsive."

Generally, the military acknowledges the messes it has left behind, but argues that training with and testing of weapons is critical to its overriding mission of military readiness.

Cost hinders cleanup

In 2000, the military announced it would take a more energetic approach to the cleanup of old ranges and better respond to local communities. But budget constraints have hampered those efforts.

"Department of Defense and Army leadership recognize the funding problems and are working to increase funding to accelerate (site) cleanups," says an Army Corps brochure on environmental restoration at old military grounds.

Indeed, meager funds are left to spread to hundreds of competing projects around the country. That's an argument that carries some sway, even with the Colorado politicians and officials seeking a speedier cleanup.

"I think they're under pressure to fund a lot of different sites. Obviously, they don't have money for everything," said Benevento, of the health department, who was hesitant to criticize. "I think they've taken us very seriously."

The meandering pace is evident at Lowry, where teams of workers use surprisingly primitive techniques to search for unexploded bombs: hand-held metal detectors and shovels.

"The technology hasn't caught up with trying to clear 100 square miles of ordnance," said Jeff Edson, who oversees federal facility cleanups for the state health department.

Once they find an unexploded device, workers often can't be sure if it's live or inert. They often move it carefully to another site where it's destroyed. But with certain high-risk finds, they simply put a detonating charge nearby and destroy it where it is.

The work at Lowry did a get a boost last month when the Army, prodded by Rep. Beauprez, announced it would make the site one of three in the country subject to a special contracting arrangement that comes with a one-time infusion of $5 million. Still, it's doubtful that the additional money will shave much time off the work.

In the meantime, public health officials fret over what's still in the ground.

M-23 Igniters, for example: softball-shaped munitions that have been found on the surface at Lowry and present both an explosive and fire hazard. Or 37 mm projectiles spread in several areas of the range.

"Objects like these are of concern because they are found on the surface, are relatively small and inviting to children and others, (are) very sensitive and have high potential to harm people who handle them or may be nearby," according to the health department's letter outlining its concerns to Beauprez.

"It is our observation that it is typically the smaller munitions that present the greatest hazards to the public. . . . (they) look inviting and may not appear to be very dangerous, but have some of the most sensitive fuses . . . (and) have caused death and injuries to civilians in California."