Super Military Mess in Maryland

Mar 3, 2003

A test on ground water this past December in Harford County, north of Baltimore, found water contaminated by perchlorate, a military rocket fuel. The county is the site of Aberdeen Proving Ground, a 72,000 acre base where chemical weapons research has been done for decades.

Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is also loaded with buried bombs and deadly nerve agents and cancer-causing solvents; it is so damaged it has earned a place on the Superfund list. If and when the clean-up is finished over the next 30 years, the cost for Aberdeen alone is expected to exceed more than a billion dollars. But the military budgeted less than two billion dollars for environmental clean-ups for the ENTIRE country. So Aberdeen is likely to be cleaned by the twelfth of never.

In fact, the state of Maryland alone has 855 waste sites needing clean-up on current and former military bases. One near Washington D.C. was turned into a wild-life refuge used for hunting, more than a dozen years ago. But it turns out the area is still full of grenades, mortar shells and rockets. A recently closed base, Fort Ritchie, in western Maryland, is the site of new housing. It was quite a shock for the families living there when grenades, mortar shells and even a bazooka rocket were found in a field nearby.

At Fort Detrick in Maryland, the military has been developing biological weapons, including anthrax of the type used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. The cost for cleaning up there has more than doubled since at least 100 vials of dangerous bacteria were found in its dump last year.

The military claims it has been following the rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency since the early 1980s.

That’s strange, since the military regularly asks for exemptions from the EPA rules.

The cost we pay for the military is not only the terrible possibility of the deaths and destruction of the young people serving, nor the financial burden.

The world’s most powerful military not only destroys people in other countries, it slowly poisons people here.Super military mess in Maryland

A test on ground water this past December in Harford County, north of Baltimore, found water contaminated by perchlorate, a military rocket fuel. The county is the site of Aberdeen Proving Ground, a 72,000 acre base where chemical weapons research has been done for decades.

Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is also loaded with buried bombs and deadly nerve agents and cancer-causing solvents; it is so damaged it has earned a place on the Superfund list. If and when the clean-up is finished over the next 30 years, the cost for Aberdeen alone is expected to exceed more than a billion dollars. But the military budgeted less than two billions dollars for environmental clean ups for the ENTIRE country. So Aberdeen is likely to be cleaned by the twelfth of never.

In fact, the state of Maryland alone has 855 waste sites needing clean up on current and former military bases. One near Washington D.C. was turned into a wild-life refuge used for hunting more than a dozen years ago. But it turns out the area is still full of grenades, mortar shells and rockets. A recently closed base, Fort Ritchie, in western Maryland, is the site of new housing. It was quite a shock for the families living there when grenades, mortar shells and even a bazooka rocket were found in a field nearby.

At Fort Detrick in Maryland, the military has been developing biological weapons, including anthrax of the type used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. The cost for cleaning up there has more than doubled since at least 100 vials of dangerous bacteria were found in its dump last year.

The military claims it has been following the rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency since the early 1980s.

That’s strange, since the military regularly asks for exemptions from the EPA rules.

The cost we pay for the military is not only the terrible possibility of the deaths and destruction of the young people serving, nor the financial burden.

The world’s most powerful military not only destroys people in other countries, it slowly poisons people here.