This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Under the Defense Environ. Restoration Program (DERP), DoD is responsible for cleaning up 5,400 sites on military bases that have been closed, as well as 21,500 sites on active bases, and over 4,700 formerly used defense sites, properties that DoD owned or controlled and transferred to other parties prior to Oct. 1986. The goals of DERP include: (1) reducing risk to human health and the environ.; (2) preparing properties to be environ. suitable for transfer; (3) having final remedies in place and completing response actions; and (4) demonstrating progress toward meeting program performance goals. This testimony discusses information on: (1) how DoD allocates cleanup funding at all sites with defense waste; and (2) cleanup status.

Environmental Contamination: Information on the Funding and Cleanup Status of Defense Sites

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent agency that works for Congress. The GAO watches over Congress, and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayers dollars. The Comptroller General of the United States is the leader of the GAO, and is appointed to a 15-year term by the U.S. President. The GAO wants to support Congress, while at the same time doing right by the citizens of the United States. They audit, investigate, perform analyses, issue legal decisions and report anything that the government is doing. This is one of their reports.

At hundreds of thousands of commercial, industrial, and military sites across the country, subsurface materials including groundwater are contaminated with chemical waste. The last decade has seen growing interest in using aggressive source remediation technologies to remove contaminants from the subsurface, but there is limited understanding of (1) the effectiveness of these technologies and (2) the overall effect of mass removal on groundwater quality. This report reviews the suite of technologies available for source remediation and their ability to reach a variety of cleanup goals, from meeting regulatory standards for groundwater to reducing costs. The report proposes elements of a protocol for accomplishing source remediation that should enable project managers to decide whether and how to pursue source remediation at their sites.