Years of contamination

The Army began its own investigations into Dugway's waste sites in the 1980s, according to Dugway's restoration-program manager, Scott Reed. Even the worst of sites that Dugway termed "high risk" were found to have no threat to human health outside of Dugway boundaries, he said.

"We haven't had any contamination (from waste sites) escape our borders," said Reed, who calls the Army's efforts "proactive."

These days, Dugway is required to remediate its old waste sites in order to maintain its permit to store even more hazardous waste, which comes from Dugway's ongoing chemical- and biological-defense testing.

That means going back over records that date back to the 1940s and 1950s to see what kinds of waste the military disposed of at Dugway and how it was dumped. By today's more stringent environmental standards, those methods no longer pass muster with state officials who took over official oversight at Dugway from the federal government in the late 1980s.

Reed said one of the highest-risk sites, and the first to be cleaned up, contained traces of demilitarized, or decontaminated, chemical nerve agent. That site was 20 miles inside Dugway's border and was believed to pose no human risk off the base, Reed said.

Even so, about 800 people actually live at the remote Rhode Island-size Army base. Risk assessments of sites that are closer to Dugway residents showed a minimal health threat.

"It's very, very minimal, and it always has been," Larsen said.

Sixty years ago, people at Dugway were simply told to stay away from dump sites, some fenced in, that contained demilitarized chemicals and munitions. The same precaution is taken today, Larsen said. Even if someone did come in contact with dirt that contains trace amounts of contaminants, he added, "most likely nothing would ever happen."

Of the 216 sites that he has looked into at Dugway since 1996, only 11 remain that are still being investigated before a decision is made on how to handle them. The rest of the sites have either been cleaned up or are under contract to be remediated.

On the base, Dugway also keeps tabs on about 20 plumes of active, slow-moving waste, or contaminated groundwater, beneath the soil in five regions. Drinking water supplies at Dugway, however, have not been impacted by the plumes, Larsen said.

Dugway officials aren't shy about patting themselves on the back for their efforts. Dugway spokeswoman Paula Nicholson said Dugway is held up as a model for other military installations for its environmental remediation efforts.