What's that funny taste in the water?

That's toxic waste!

Chemical weapons dump poses aquifer threat
Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO -- A chemical leaking from an Army base landfill in South Texas has contaminated a portion of the Trinity Aquifer and could seep into the Edwards Aquifer, where it would threaten the drinking water supply of about 1.5 million people, officials said.

It's believed only a few hundred gallons of trichloroethene, or TCE, are responsible for the pollution at Camp Bullis Military Reservation near San Antonio.

Experts said while no drinking water wells have tested positive for TCE, the chemical could spread because of the geography of the region, including underground caves that could connect the two aquifers.

Ingesting high levels of TCE can cause nervous system effects, liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and possibly death, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Hundreds of homes that rely on the Trinity Aquifer lie south and southeast of Bullis, but officials said there appears to be no near-term threat to users.

"The contaminants are moving south along a fault below Lewis Creek Valley," George Veni, a hydrogeologist hired by the Army to assess the threat to the Edwards Aquifer, wrote in a May 1999 report obtained last month by the San Antonio Express-News.

"The groundwater is definitely impacted, as well as a nearby creek, and they haven't yet adequately defined the extent of the chemical plume," said Maureen Hatfield, who oversees the Bullis cleanup as project director for the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.

Soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Sam Houston buried hundreds of sealed-glass vials containing deadly mustard gas and other chemical weapons in trenches at Camp Bullis in 1938, three years before the United States entered World War II.

The weapons were used to train U.S. soldiers on how to survive a poison gas attack.

In disposing of the weapons, the military doused the vials with a chemical decontaminating fluid that was set afire. Barrels of the unused fluid then were buried alongside the vials.

Experts said the decontaminating fluid, not the weapons, was responsible for the TCE, which has been detected at levels far above drinking water standards in four of 11 Army-installed groundwater monitoring wells.

"The theory is that the TCE is most probably a result of the breakdown of the decontaminating fluid," said Phil Reidinger, a spokesman for Fort Sam Houston.

Reidinger said the landfill was discovered in 1995 when digging equipment at the base unearthed 33 bottles of mustard gas, phosgene, chloropicrin and other incapacitating gases.

He said the landfill has sat virtually untouched ever since while further tests are conducted. A cleanup operation is set to begin this fall.

"Are we contaminating the Edwards Aquifer?" Reidinger asked. "That, of course, we can't answer, because we don't know where it's going or how it got to where we know it is," Reidinger said. "We're pretty far away from the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, but I don't want to mislead anyone, because we have so many recharge features out there with these huge caves. A cave might go right into the aquifer."

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How the hell should I know why God would allow the Holocaust. I don't even know how the electric can opener works. - from Hannah and Her Sisters