Army says Dugway site not hazardous

After 20 years of fighting about how to handle contamination from once-secret arms tests on lands just outside of Dugway Proving Ground, the Army says a new study has found that none of that contamination is actually dangerous.

"The probability that you will walk out of this building and get hit by a car in the parking lot is higher" than anyone being hurt by any old munitions in the "Yellow Jacket" area of the Dugway Mountains, said Jerry Vincent, manager of the Formerly Used Defense Site Program for the Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento District.

He said contamination there now is just old scrap metal from spent rockets, bombs, artillery shells and other munitions — with no intact explosives or chemical agents found. They come from World War II tests that used mines there for research on how to attack cave defenses used by Japanese soldiers.

So the Army is proposing to leave that scrap metal there, and declare the area as having received a "remedy in place" — and to be as safe as humanly possible for mining and other activities.

Area mine owners, state and federal environmental regulators and federal land managers who met with Army representatives last week at the Utah Department of Health are taking the proposal under advisement, along with Army questions about whether also to inspect inside old mines there for possible munitions.

One with concerns is Louise Cannon, who with two siblings inherited gold mines and land their grandfather had purchased in the area — only to find out later it had been bombarded in World War II with thousands of rounds of chemical and conventional arms. That scared off some who were interested in leasing the claims.

Public word of the tests first came in 1988 when the Deseret News obtained Army documents that suspected lands in the area were heavily contaminated.

The Cannons pursued two federal lawsuits (one is still before an appeals court) seeking to force the Army to either buy or clean up the land — and complained they could not sell it or mine it until one action or the other occurred.

She said at the meeting the proposed "remedy in place" may not be enough to convince any mine companies interested in using her family's claims that it is safe. "They are going to have problems insuring their people, and even wanting to go on the property," she said.