A delay in reporting the presence of an aging ammunition dump on Fort Wainwright, near the Tanana River, has led the Army to settle a claim from the Environmental Protection Agency for nearly $60,000.
The EPA announced the $59,220 settlement with the U.S. Army, for two alleged violations of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, in a Tuesday statement.
According to the EPA, Fort Wainwright and its 900,000 acres near Fairbanks have been identified as a Superfund cleanup site since 1990. This year, a partial cleanup of the base by the Army removed nearly 320,000 pounds of "material deemed as safe;" EPA said officials also identified 152 "munitions and explosives of concern," as well as 5,625 unfired and buried .50-caliber rounds.
"Lead, brass, and other heavy metals from the munitions dump were eroding into the Tanana River, and at the time of the initial investigation in 2013, it was unclear if there was unexploded ordnance in the dump," EPA officials wrote.
Under Fort Wainwright's RCRA permit, the Army is required to provide written notification to the EPA of any new dumps discovered -- including an accumulation of discarded munitions and explosives located in June 2013 at the base's Small Arms Range Complex.
"The Army failed to notify EPA within the required 15 days when it investigated the dump and failed to provide a required assessment of the dump," EPA officials wrote. "EPA learned of the dump more than a year later in a technical memo from the Army's contractor."
According to a settlement agreement between the EPA and the Army, the contractor -- Jacobs Engineering -- sent that memo, which had been written in May 2014, to the agency and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation on or about Oct. 14, 2014.
"The Jacobs memo identified a high probability of encountering munitions and explosives at the (Small Arms Range Complex) due to the amount of uncharacterized munitions-related debris," EPA officials wrote. "(It) expressed concern that the nature of these materials eroding into the Tanana River presented an imminent threat to the environment."
RCRA's maximum daily fine of $37,500 for each of the two alleged counts, multiplied by the roughly 470 days between the dump's discovery and the contractor's EPA memo, could have resulted in a theoretical fine of $35.2 million. Skadowski said it's common for EPA settlements to be far smaller than the maximum penalties, however, with each tailored to the situation at hand.
"The fines could always be much, much higher than they are, and there's always a scale-down for the details of each case," Skadowski said. "We work through the case and negotiations and circumstances."
The Small Arms Range Complex site is just one of multiple Superfund cleanup areas on Fort Wainwright, according to the EPA.
"We expect that there's a lot of materials out there, and we forecast that there could potentially be undiscovered dumps, which is fairly common for large military bases," Skadowski said. "We predicted that they could have come across something, and that's what happened here."
Skadowski said the Army's failure to report the case didn't appear to be deliberate.
"It's a large area, there are a lot of people involved," Skadowski said. "For anyone to always be able to follow the letter of everything -- there are oversights, people make mistakes."
More cleanup work is scheduled on Fort Wainwright next spring, Skadowski said. Going forward, the EPA expects the Army to abide by the terms of the settlement agreement, which include a pledge to make timely reports of any future ammunition dumps discovered.
"We assume that they will; they've agreed to that as a part of the settlement," Skadowski said. "We want to be sure that they notify us of these things, so that when they find them we can help them deal with it."
Fort Wainwright officials didn't have immediate comment on the settlement Tuesday, pending a review of the documents involved.