7 News Investigates: ‘Gone’ Part 2

Fort Drum officials blame failed policies for the leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet fuel that leaked into the ground at Wheeler-Sack Army Air Field.

During a four-month investigation, 7 News Reporter Jeff Cole uncovered information that the spill is much worse than first thought and that it went undetected for years.

Workers at Wheeler-Sack keep track of how much jet fuel is delivered and how much is used on a daily basis.

If the numbers don’t match up, there’s a problem.

The problem is at Fort Drum the numbers didn’t match up for three years.

The airfield racked up 345,000 gallons of fuel losses.

Fort Drum’s inventory records clearly show these losses were recorded into the airfield’s computer system.

It was definitely a red flag that something was wrong. So why did it take three years to figure out?

“I absolutely do not believe that anyone did anything to try to cover this up,” said Mike McKinnon, Director of Logistics at Fort Drum.

Each month, Fort Drum’s fuel inventory is sent to the Defense Energy Support Center in Virginia.

Fort Drum’s leak stayed under the radar because the center doesn’t read each installation’s data separately.

Instead, it looks at data from all 600 fueling points it controls across the globe - added up into one set of numbers.

The center’s director says this policy failure at Fort Drum is changing military operations worldwide.

“We’ve now put system changes into our automated systems to help support trend analysis and if we have a location that shows three months consecutive of a loss or a gain, something out of tolerance either way, then that will trigger communication from us at the corporate level to that installation,” said Colonel James Meyer, the Defense Energy Support Center’s director of operations.

A simple solution that begs the question: Why couldn’t someone at Fort Drum realize after three months, or one year, two years, or even three years, that there was a major spill?

“Unfortunately I can’t answer the question why that wasn’t. I wish it had been. It was not. Had it been brought to the proper levels of attention, I would hope that it could have been discovered sooner, but it wasn’t,” said McKinnon.

Fort Drum stores its jet fuel above ground in white storage tanks.

The fuel is then piped in underground to the airfield.

In 2006, when a worker discovered 3,500 gallons of jet fuel inside a man hole, Fort Drum officials knew they had a problem.

The leak was caused by a faulty valve in the underground piping system, which revealed another failure.

Our investigation found out the system was rarely inspected.

The failure lead to another policy change at Fort Drum.

“There’s so much going on out here and there’s only so many people chasing it. Our staff

keeps getting smaller and smaller up here and this one here fell through the cracks in a lot

of ways,” said Fort Drum Director of Public Works James Corriveau.

Instead hundreds of thousands of gallons sit underground at Fort Drum.

The environmental mess has left Army officials embarrassed and taxpayers holding the bag.

On Wednesday 7 News takes a look at the cleanup cost.

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