Environment and Security

I have not blogged very frequently in 2014 and thus have a big stack of magazine clippings surrounding my desk. One story that caught my eye this past year was authored by journalist Sharon Lerner in The Nation back in November. It concerned alleged links between local pollution from a defense contractor and a cluster of pediatric brain tumors in a small Florida community called The Acreage.

This paragraph caught my eye given that I often work on both environmental issues and national security topics:

“If Al Qaeda sent a team of sleeper cells to poison our groundwater and release toxic materials into the air, people would go nuts. It would be an act of war,” [Law Professor Stephen] Dycus [at Vermont, the author of National Defense and the Environment] notes. “But if we do it to ourselves in the name of national security, in preparation for war, that seems to be sort of OK.”

These are the key paragraphs about the pollutants and area in question:

...the plaintiffs’ attorneys have been constructing their case based on the defense contractor’s well-known history of involvement with projects that involve radioactive materials. Since so many of its operations are top secret, it is difficult to disprove the company’s claims that it has never worked on nuclear planes or spacecraft in Florida. But documents from the 1960s through the ’90s show that Pratt & Whitney had licenses to use at least a dozen radioactive substances [PDF], including radium D and E, thoriated nickel and cesium-137, in Florida. The plaintiffs’ lawyers also unearthed company correspondence indicating that some of these radioactive materials wound up outside of their proper storage places. In court filings, Pratt & Whitney denied having any “contaminations” beyond “properly stored chemical compounds.”

In fact, there is a clear documentary record, stretching across many decades, of Pratt & Whitney contaminating its Florida environs with a variety of toxic materials, both radioactive and nonradioactive. According to a 1985 Department of Environmental Regulation update, the company had soil on its property that contained PCBs—chemicals that have been linked to brain cancer—at more than 200 times the maximum level now allowed even in fenced-off, nonresidential areas. PCBs were also found in fish [PDF] that swam in ponds on the company’s grounds, at more than 7,000 times the safe level set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for human consumption.

Jet fuel, which was the suspected cause of another cancer cluster in Fallon, Nevada, may also have played a role at the Acreage. A mixture of chemicals that can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause cancer in mice, jet fuel was found at the Pratt & Whitney facility in Florida. According to a 1983 report, there were three plumes of jet fuel totaling some 53,000 gallons beneath the company’s property, and a layer on top of the groundwater in certain places as well.

 In 1979, just one year after the Acreage Homeowners Association formed and began constructing a system of canals to make the area habitable, 2,000 gallons of trichloroethylene (TCE), a carcinogenic solvent, leaked into the groundwater and surface water on Pratt & Whitney's campus, as the company later admitted. 

The entire article is worth your time.

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.