Chris Francescani of ABC News's tough-sounding Law and Justice Unit reported Thursday on the FUDS clean-up project. FUDS stands for Formerly Used Military Defense Sites:

In 1986, when the Department of Defense established the FUDS program, the Army was charged with going back through all available military records to determine when and where the D.O.D. caused contamination, via unexploded munitions, or chemical contamination through the use of compounds now known to be carcinogens, such as trichloroethylene, known as TCE, which was widely used to degrease fighter jets and missiles during the Cold War.

More than 9,000 sites were identified, according to Addison D. 'Tad' Davis, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and occupational health. He said that at least 2,700 sites around the country have been identified as needing a cleanup...

While much of the article focuses on the impact of unexploded munitions, a portion of it addresses TCE:

Another problem the military faces is detecting chemical contamination. Sites that were tested and rendered safe 20 years ago are being revisited, in light of more advanced scientific information.

[...]

"[I]n the past 10 to 15 years, TCE was found to be a carcinogen, so TCE is now very much a priority,'' [Davis] said.

(Yeah, yeah we know. TCE has been a known poison for decades, but this is not the time to quibble with the man's sense of history. He agrees its remediation is a priority, that's what matters here.)

How did all this happen? So glad you asked:

"How it happened is very simple," said Candice [a.k.a. "Candy"] Walters, a spokeswoman for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which has been tasked by the Department of Defense with surveying and cleaning up the sites.

"Since the American Revolution on forward, the U.S. military has trained it's troops to fights wars. And part of that training is training with live ammunition,'' which, Walters said, included firing ranges, aerial bombing, and even cannon practice.

The military bought, rented or leased thousands of stateside properties over the years, she added.

"At the end of the wars, there wasn't a need to have the [military training] installations anymore, so they closed them down and either gave them back to the property owner, or back to the state or county.

"They did what was environmentally acceptable at the time, which was, they dug a patch and buried them,'' Walters said. "They'd sweep up what they could see on the ground, and collect and dispose of them underground.

"What they tried to do when they gave back the land was to say that, in some cases, there could be unexploded ordnances underground. But much of this was farmland, forests, places where no one ever thought people would ever build a housing project there."

We have been saying for some time that states must follow in New York's and New Jersey's footsteps and re-open old, previously-thought-closed site investigations to account for landscape-changing knowledge (like our evolving understanding of vapor intrusion risk). Nice to see the military at least taking steps in this direction.

Read the full ABC report here. For an interactive map to find the closest FUDS site to your hometown, click here.