Government & Pollution

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Remember Agent Orange: The U.S.’ Own Chemical Weapons History

Remember Agent Orange: The U.S.' Own Chemical Weapons History

www.civilbeat.org

Poised to decide whether to bombard Syria for its purported unleashing of chemical weapons on its people, U.S. policymakers might well remember America’s own deadly use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Laos half a century ago and the international outrage it produced.

“Remember Agent Orange” is especially relevant for Hawaii. Agent Orange was tested under a U.S. Army contract at the University of Hawaii’s Kauai Agricultural Research Station 45 years ago. Several research workers, regularly drenched with the chemical containing dioxin, a dangerous toxin, died of cancer, according to court documents, and barrels of it were buried on Kauai for decades.

Besides Agent Orange, the U.S. secretly dumped 15 million-plus pounds of chemical weapons in Hawaiian coastal waters during or after World War II but these hazards were hidden from the public for half a century.


Puerto Rico’s Vieques still reels from decades of US Navy bombing

Puerto Rico’s Vieques still reels from US Navy bombing

Only 1,600 of the 4,000 hectares suspected of having munitions have been surface cleared, the EPA says.

www.aljazeera.com

From the 1940s until 2003, the US Navy used Vieques as a training ground for war, pummeling the island with bombs as it conducted military training operations.

For decades, munitions, including 900kg bombs were fired from ships, jets, helicopters and tanks, all while the island’s civilian population of roughly 9,000 lived just a few kilometers away.

The Navy has admitted to using napalm, depleted uranium and a host of other toxic chemicals and heavy metals on the island. And while its training officially ended in 2003, the fallout from its six-decade presence is far from over.


Vieques Aftermath

Vieques Aftermath

Will the US Navy break with its long history of environmental negligence?

www.thenation.com

A few years ago, motivated largely by growing health concerns in Vieques, the Puerto Rican government asked the Navy to investigate one particularly littered area of ocean. The site, just off of Vieques’s eastern shore, contained hundreds of barrels of an unknown, leaking material, along with a dilapidated target ship.

The Navy’s conclusions, presented to a Puerto Rican Senate committee in December of 2002, were dismissed by the incensed committee chairman as “defective.” The reason? The study didn’t test the contents of any of the barrels, but nonetheless declared them innocuous. Nor did the Navy mention that the decaying ship, the USS Killen, had been used in atomic tests prior to being used as a bombing target.

The government of Puerto Rico then commissioned a new study of the site, which was performed last summer by Barton and Dr. James Porter, a coral reef expert from the University of Georgia. Their findings, including the results of toxicological tests, will soon be released by the Puerto Rican government.

 

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Vieques - The Navy's Underwater Wasteland

El Andar Vieques

Dr. Porter and his team of scientists from the University of Georgia were shocked by what they found.

The sea floor was littered with an array of Navy junk, some of it under just fifteen feet of water. The team found unexploded live ordnance, 2000-pound bombs, artillery shells, compressed-gas cylinders and bombs leaking toxic material onto the delicate coral reefs.

They also found a mysterious, sunken “barge of barrels.” Dr. Porter says this broken-down, shipwrecked hull contains fifty-five gallon drums “too numerous to count,” but he estimates there are at least 900 to 1,000 of them — contents unknown.

At first, the Navy said the barrels were filled with air. “But air-filled barrels don’t sink,” Dr. Porter points out. “So then they said they contained sand and water.

One consultant for the Puerto Rican government believes they most likely contain “PCBs [a banned pollutant and suspected carcinogen] , transformer oil or other liquid toxic waste.” Because the barrels were in poor condition, any close examination might disturb the contents and cause a dangerous spill if the barrels contain toxic material.

Whatever the contents of the barrels, the potential dangers of the Navy’s dumping ground are multiple: first, toxins leaking from bombs have already begun to seriously damage coral reefs, which Dr. Porter says can take “a half century or more to repair.”