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7 News Investigates: ‘Gone’ Part 3

May 1, 2008

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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7 News Investigates: ‘Gone’ Part 2

April 30, 2008

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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See Jeff Cole’s report:

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

Written by Diane · Filed Under Jeff Cole Investigates Fort Drum Fuel Spill | Comments Off

Feedback: 7 News Investigates: “Gone” Part I

April 29, 2008

7 News Reporter Jeff Cole first went to Fort Drum’s Wheeler-Sack Army Air Field in March, where wells were collecting spilled jet fuel that was flowing in the ground.

Army officials stood their ground, saying that 160,000 gallons of fuel leaked out.

However, we challenged that number by providing Fort Drum with its own fuel inventory records, which tell a very different story.

According to the records, between April 2003 and November 2006, Fort Drum had a leak - at one point going 40 straight months recording a loss.

In 2003, the most fuel lost was almost 17,000 gallons. That happened in December.

The following month, 12,000 gallons leaked.

Another 15,500 gallons seeped into the ground in October 2005.

In February 2006, an additional 18,500 gallons spilled.

After more than three years, almost 345,000 gallons of jet fuel had seeped into the ground, according to the military’s own records.

Fort Drum officials now agree that the new figure is correct.

They admit earlier estimations were calculated incorrectly by an engineering firm it hired.

“It is embarrassing,” said Mike McKinnon, Director of Logistics at Fort Drum.

He’s the man responsible for the people collecting the data we discovered.

“There are a lot of people that have responsibility in this. There certainly were organizational failures in many different areas, but to say that one individual has responsibility for this is not really possible for me to say,” he said.

McKinnon blames the government for not providing enough training for workers at Wheeler-Sack who were using new technology at the airfield to monitor fuel usage.

He argues that with better training for workers, the leak could have been discovered sooner.

McKinnon says while Fort Drum was recording three year’s worth of fuel losses, his workers didn’t think one of the Army’s most modern airfields could have sprung a leak.

Instead they concentrated on other possibilities, including missing fuel receipts, human error in measurements and not adjusting numbers for cold temperatures.

“They discussed the possibility of leaks. It seems like everyone was looking in the wrong direction. But I don’t want to leave the impression that the people here just nonchalantly recorded and reported and drove on,” said McKinnon.

The failure to recognize the leak goes higher up the chain of command.

The Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, oversees military fuel use.

Colonel James Meyer is the director of operations. He puts the blame on policies, not people.

“Through the spill here at Fort Drum, clearly identified not only Fort Drum level, but our level at corporate level DESC, that our systems, our processes, our policies, weren’t precise enough to be able to raise that red flag that seems should have been raised,” said Meyer.

A simple policy designed to expose problems - not an environmental mess.

“That represents a large quantity of fuel, represents a large amount of taxpayer dollars and that is of great concern to us because of our duty and our desire to make sure that we are trustworthy stewards of the government’s resources,” said Meyer.

A criminal investigation by the federal and state governments has been completed and officials say no one will face charges.

On Wednesday, 7 News will take a look at how Fort Drum’s policies were supposed to work, how they failed and how the massive fuel leak has sparked worldwide change.

Visit this story’s homepage for a full archive and list of resources.

See Jeff Cole’s report:

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