7 News Investigates: ‘Gone’ Part 3

There’s no denying that Fort Drum is now faced with cleaning up one of the worst environmental messes in its history.

Fort Drum officials will spend the next decade concentrating 44 feet beneath Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield, where 345,000 gallons of spilled jet fuel needs to be recovered.

The fuel is worth more than $1 million.

Cleaning it up could cost 10 times that.

“It’s expensive. There’s no doubt about it. To date out there we’ve spent close to $2 million and we’ll be at this a long time. There is no real good long term cost estimate, but if you want ballpark numbers it’s probably something like $10 million in ten years,” said Fort Drum Director of Public Works James Corriveau.

Other estimates could have the cleanup costs at $40 million.

Corriveau is in charge of the cleanup operation and his workload just doubled in size.

In March, Fort Drum said 160,000 gallons of jet fuel were in the ground.

But, 7 News obtained the airfield’s own fuel inventory records - showing month after month the airfield had a leak totaling 345,000 gallons.

Fort Drum now acknowledges engineers miscalculated the spill, and our number, from their data, is accurate.

“Whether that calculates out to be 100,000, 200,000 or 350,000, is - I don’t want to say irrelevant - but in the vast scheme of things we want to clean it up until it’s all recovered,” said Corriveau.

But will the military clean up its operations?

The leak went undetected for three years, not only at Fort Drum, but by those in charge at the Defense Energy Support Center in Virginia.

“This one just showed a big spotlight on where we were seriously lacking in our capability to add precision to our analysis and precision to our ability to track these types of losses,” said Colonel James Meyer, the Defense Energy Support Center’s director of operations.

State and federal investigators have determined no one will face charges in relation to the spill.

Colonel Meyer says no one did this intentionally.

With a failure of this magnitude, the military looks at the overall picture instead of singling out one or two people.

“It’s an institutional problem. It’s an organizational problem and we accept the responsibility for having those organizational issues that led to a failure of this nature,” said Meyer.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation is overseeing the cleanup.

DEC officials know what they’re up against.

“You know you’re in it for the long haul. You know that it’s going to be expensive. You know that it’s going to be technically challenging. It’s going to require a lot of resources of time and money,” said Gary McCullouch of the DEC.

The cleanup has begun.

So far, 31,000 gallons of fuel have been recovered - that’s about 400 gallons a week.

At that rate, it’ll take 17 years to get all the fuel.

This summer though, recovery operations will be stepped up.

Ten more recovery wells will be set up.

As much of a mess this is, the good news is that the fuel is staying put.

While Fort Drum’s water wells are shut down, other drinking water supplies won’t be affected.

See Part III of Jeff Cole’s report:

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Read Parts I and II at the story’s homepage and also find a full archive and list of resources.

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