Dean Naujoks was relieved when, earlier this month, the U.S. Naval Support Facility in Dahlgren, Virginia, agreed to get a pollution discharge permit for its weapons testing on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. The Navy has been testing weapons there since World War I.
It took almost seven years of legwork and a lawsuit for Naujoks and other advocates to get the U.S. Navy to acknowledge that the missiles and other projectiles it had been firing into the river could have an impact on the water quality and the aquatic life, including species listed as threatened, such as the Atlantic sturgeon.
“This is just the first good step and a lot would depend on whether the Maryland Department of the Environment include adequate protections in the permit,” said Naujoks, a 58-year old environmental advocate who works at the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit working to protect rivers and habitat in Potomac and Shenandoah watersheds from pollution.
He remembered telling his colleagues back in 2017 about hearing “scary loud explosions” along the east side of Potomac River in southern Maryland, where he was investigating suspected pollution discharges from the coal-fired power plant near the Nice-Middleton Bridge connecting Maryland’s Charles County and Virginia’s King George County.
The source of the rattling explosions turned out to be the Naval Surface Warfare Center, operating out of the U.S. Naval Support Facility Dahlgren on the western shore of the Potomac River, 53 miles south of Washington, D.C. It was established in 1918 as Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground.
The center has been testing weapons and munitions, including unmanned aerial vehicles and an electromagnetic railgun that fires projectiles using electricity, in the area designated as the Potomac River Test Range. Stretching over 51 miles, from the Nice-Middleton Bridge south into the Chesapeake Bay, the Navy describes the area as “the nation’s largest fully instrumented over-water gun-firing range.”
The Navy’s own estimates, cited in the court filing, suggest it discharged around 33 million pounds of munitions into the Potomac River in the first 90 years of the facility’s operation. Those estimates included 255 tons of various explosives, 225 tons of the toxic heavy metal manganese and 15,000 tons of iron. In addition to carrying out around 200 detonations annually, the Navy fired 4,700 projectiles a year on average into the river using land, sea and airborne platforms such as boats, drones and gun batteries.
From 1918 to 2007 “the Navy fired nearly 70,000 rounds of ammunition per nautical square mile” in a 2.3 square mile area of the testing range called the ‘dense zone’—just downstream of Swan Point, Maryland and Colonial Beach, Virginia,” according to the court document Potomac Riverkeeper and its co-plaintiff, the National Resources Defense Council, submitted, quoting estimates in the Navy’s 2013 Environmental Impact Study (EIS).
The study listed cadmium, chromium, lead, manganese, TNT and cancer-causing ethylbenzene among the 50 metallic and chemical constituents of the projectile fired into the Potomac River for a near century-long operation. “The munitions contain toxic metals, solvents, explosives, and other potentially harmful constituents. The testing takes place on land, in laboratories and in the Potomac River itself,” the plaintiffs said in the court filing.
On Jan. 10, the Navy agreed to apply for a pollution discharge permit from the Maryland Department of the Environment within 30 days under a consent decree approved by the U.S. District Court for Maryland.
A spokesperson for the Navy, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Keiley, said in an emailed response that the Department of the Navy is committed to environmental stewardship and looks forward to working with the Maryland…
This article was originally published by a insideclimatenews.org . Read the Original article here. .