"The extent of contamination on U.S. bases is shocking," said Gernot Rotter, a member of the environmentalist Green Party in the legislature of the German state of Rhineland-Pfalz, home of the largest contingent of American GIs outside the United States. "Up to now, the government in Bonn has done nothing. I'm not blaming the Americans as much as the German government, which has allowed them to do whatever they want.
"And that's the problem. The military is entirely self-regulating. Militaries are always arrogant. They are separate. They speak a different language. They have a different culture. They make up their own rules," Rotter said.
Regulation Is Lax
In theory and in policy, the American armed services abroad follow U.S. or host nation environmental law, whichever is stricter. In practice, they follow neither because U.S. regulation does not reach overseas while military installations are generally exempted from host nation laws under basing agreements, said Rep. Richard Ray (D-Ga.), chairman of a House Armed Services Committee panel that monitors military environmental practices.
"There has not been a thorough or independent review of the Department of Defense's compliance with this policy" requiring voluntary adherence to U.S. or foreign law, Ray said at a recent hearing on the subject. "And, in addition, consistent environmental guidance among the various services did not appear to exist within the same host nation."
Berteau, the Pentagon environmental official, conceded that in the past overseas military commanders treated wastes negligently, but said the current generation of officers is "a lot more sensitive to these issues than previous commanders were."
Yet today, seven years after the Pentagon created the Defense Environmental Restoration Program to investigate chemical contamination at U.S. facilities, the Defense Department has no program and no budget for cleaning up its polluted overseas bases, Berteau acknowledged.
As a result of past negligence at overseas installations, negotiations with foreign governments over environmental damages will be tense, expensive and perhaps ultimately damaging to U.S. interests abroad, senior military and civilian government officials said.
"You're getting into some very sensitive foreign policy questions," Berteau said.
U.S. commanders responsible for environmental management in Europe have only recently begun to devote money to investigating and cleaning up toxic pollution on bases there. Maj. Gen. Bill Ray, chief of engineering at U.S. Army-Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, West Germany, said he spends about $25 million of his $1-billion annual budget on environmental compliance and cleanup. But he acknowledged that the sum only begins to address the very worst problems and that his environmental activities are "grossly undercapitalized."
The Air Force spends $9 million to $10 million a year on environmental protection projects in Europe, but such a sum could easily be consumed by the cost of cleaning one medium-sized contamination site, according to environmental officials at U.S. Air Force-Europe headquarters at Ramstein Air Base in West Germany. The service spends a total of $25 million on all environmental activities outside the United States, according to Air Force officials in Washington.
The Air Force's current worst known site in West Germany--extensive jet fuel contamination of ground water at Rhine-Main Air Base near Frankfurt--will cost an estimated $15 million and take at least five years to clean up, officials said. Bonn and Washington are negotiating the question of who pays the bill.
Lt. Col. John R. Mullans of the Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of environmental activities at the huge Kaiserslautern complex of Army installations in West Germany, said there are dozens of known and suspected sites of chemical contamination at "K-town's" 16 separate facilities.
Many of the hot spots are motor pool areas where used oils and chemical cleaning solvents were simply dumped on unpaved ground for decades, contaminating soil and likely polluting ground water. Mullans stated flatly that the Army does not have the money to clean up the sites--or even to pave most of the motor pools--"given the current funding situation."
In another example of how current budget problems contribute to environmental degradation abroad, Kaiserslautern was scheduled to get an approved storage facility to handle hazardous wastes until they can be safely disposed of at licensed German dumps or sent back to the United States for burial. But funding for the facility--and several others like it in Europe and elsewhere--has been eliminated.
"I've had some stuff sitting around for two years," Mullans said. "I now have no clear way to get rid of contaminated soil. I've got mounds of it just sitting on slabs." U.S. law prohibits storage of toxic waste for more than 90 days.
Third World Problems
