Babauta presses DOD to clean up Tanapag

CNMI Resident Representative to Washington Juan N. Babauta has pressed the U.S. Department of Defense to include in the cleanup a ravine area in Tanapag village where 55-gallon drums of unidentified chemicals have been leaking in the nearby water system.

In a letter to Defense Secretary William Cohen, the Resident Representative noted that this abandoned military materiel pose health and environmental risks to the community.

Due to the recent discovery of used chemicals in Tanapag, Babauta underscored the need for a comprehensive inventory of the sites abandoned by the U.S. military as these substances left in the environment have harmful effects on the public’s health.

The Defense Department through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is tasked to undertake the cleanup of sites identified and prioritized under the Defense Environmental Restoration Program-Formerly Used Defense Sites (DERP-FUDS).

DOD, however, has denied ownership of the leaking 55-gallon drums saying there was no record to prove that the area was a former military dumpsite. Aerial photographs taken during the military occupation do not indicate the presence of a dumpsite in the area, said Raymond J. Fatz, deputy assistant of the Army, in a letter to Babauta.

Fatz said the U.S. Army Corps in Honolulu, which has responsibility over the Northern Marianas, has reviewed the records, interviewed the residents and visited the ravine area.

“While the site has metal debris scattered throughout the area including some which may have originally been associated with the U.S. military presence on Saipan, no evidence has been found to show that this was a former military dumpsite,” according to a report made by the U.S. Army Corps.

DOD has yet to conduct a thorough cleanup of Tanapag village, which has been contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls since the 1960s. The cancer-causing PCBs were contained in the ceramic capacitors shipped to Saipan by department.

Based on the investigation conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency, these ceramic capacitors were manufactured by Cornell-Dublier Electronics as part of the Defense Department’s Nike-Zeus contract for its ballistic missile early warning system radar installation.

However, the Division of Environmental Quality was only informed about the presence of these capacitors in Tanapag in 1988. At that time, the capacitors already spread in the village as they were being used as barricades, boundary markers, road blocks for driveways, windbreaks for barbecue sites and headstones.