by Michael Rigert
Staff Writer

According to a recent audit report to Congress, the removal of unexploded munitions and hazardous waste at inactive U.S. military ranges across the country may take up to 300 years to clean up. Tooele County is home to seven of those ranges.

Delivered to Congress from the General Accounting Office (GAO), its report said the Defense department had yet to assess three-fifths of the 2,307 potentially contaminated sites earmarked in September 2002. That raises concerns as some of the abandoned properties have been redeveloped with residences and recreational facilities.

“(The Defense department) has made limited progress in its program,” states the GAO report. “(It) does not yet have a complete and viable plan for cleaning up military munitions at remaining potentially contaminated sites. (The department’s) plan is lacking in several aspects ...”

Under a Defense program initiated in 1986 called Defense Environmental Restoration, the department must “identify, assess, and clean up military munitions contaminations” at over 15 million acres of ranges suspected of having unexploded ordnance. Nearly $25 billion has already been spent over the past 20 years on recovery efforts at nearly 30,000 military sites.

This is significant because in June 2003, a defense inventory disclosed that of 14 sites in Utah (both active and inactive military installations), seven ranges with potentially hazardous ordnance and waste are located in Tooele County.

They include the Utah Test and Training Range, Dugway South Triangle, Yellow Jacket Ranges, Wendover Air Force Auxiliary Field, an abandoned gravel pit near Wendover, Wendover Bombing and Gun Range, and Wendover Special Weapons Bombing Range.
Defense estimates indicate the cleanup will cost anywhere from $8 billion to $35 billion, an increase from an earlier figure of $20 billion.

Of the 2,307 potentially contaminated sites identified, the GAO said 362 required no further study or cleanup and 1,387 had either not begun or completed an initial evaluation. Assessments on 558 sites had been finished, with 475 of those not requiring any clean up action.

With the federal government currently spending about $106 million per year on ridding the closed ranges of bombs, shells, mines and other waste, the report said it could take from 75 to 330 years to complete the task.

e-mail: mrigert@tooeletranscript.com