FEBRUARY 24, 2023 — For more than 50 years the Army has turned current and former defense training sites into environmentally safe areas for Soldiers and their families, installation staff and the surrounding communities.
The work is done through the Army’s Environmental Restoration Program, also known as the cleanup program. Here they identify sites impacted by hazardous contaminants, pollutants and munitions from past activities and develop ways to return the land to a productive use.
“We take action to resolve threats to human health and the environment,” said Susan Elrod, G-9 environmental restoration branch chief. “We’re able to give sites back to installations to continue their mission.”
The cleanup program centers around installations with ongoing operations. It’s divided into the Installation Restoration Program and the Military Munitions Response Program.
The Installation Restoration Program, which has been around since 1975, investigates and cleans up contamination posing a risk to human health and the environment. Whereas the Military Munitions Response Program addresses threats to human health and the environment posed by unexploded ordnance and munitions constituents.
As of 2021, the cleanup program has met its remediation goal of 91% with roughly 1,200 sites where cleanup actions are ongoing.
Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri, is one of those.
Disposal pits were discovered here using aerial photography in the 1980s. The area was then placed on the national priorities list due to the contamination in the groundwater and the acreage it covers.
Since that time, it has gone through several remedial investigations, as well as several treatment options with little success, until a recent pilot study discovered a way forward.
The team on site installed a system that removes harmful contaminants from the soil and groundwater using heat. Applying this new technology, the Army began the extraction process in December 2022.
“This project is the continuation of the Army’s efforts to work towards remedying the contaminants completely, as well as tackle the long-term treatment costs by reducing the timeframe for cleanup,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Denton, LCAAP commander. “Because of the amount of contamination that’s there, it takes an aggressive approach to remediate it, and that’s what the Army has in store.”
The four-step remediation process starts with removing the water, which is currently ongoing, shifts to thermal heating, then onto contamination extraction and finally cooling. The process will take around 180 days with a summer 2023 completion date.
If it’s successful, the process could help reduce the estimated remediation time from 760 years to less than 70 years.
“[Restoration] is important because we’re doing environmental stewardship,” said Sara Clark, LCAAP’s remedial project manager and environmental coordinator. “We’re trying to take care of the environment by using state-of-the-art technologies and getting rid of the contamination in the ground sooner rather than later.”
The Army will monitor the area for years to come, just as it does with other sites following remediation. Lake City is one of an estimated 113 sites that the Army hopes will finish remediation by the end of 2023.
By Christopher Hurd, Army News Service