World's Biggest Polluter: American Military
The biggest polluter in the world is the U.S. Department of Defense, which generates enormous amounts of toxic waste around the Earth every year through military operations. The military is responsible for more than 39,000 contaminated locations in the U.S. alone, affecting 20 million acres. And even this huge amount of pollution is just a drop in the bucket when worldwide activities are considered, which have spread unbelievable amounts of oil, jet fuel, pesticides, lead and depleted uranium at sites in hundreds of nations. Nuclear waste and radiation are another dangerous global legacy of the D.O.D. and its pathological practices.
75% of EPA Superfund sites (places where toxic contamination has been designated a significant threat) in the U.S. are military facilities, often due to perchlorates from jet and rocket fuel leaching into groundwater. In fact, American military bases at home and abroad never fail to top lists of the world's most polluted and dangerous sites. It would be safe to say that almost all US military facilities worldwide (including those that have been abandoned) have serious contamination issues.
U.S. EPA Superfund Sites.
Personnel and residents around Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina are exposed to acute groundwater contamination that has been responsible for illness and deaths, with the government preventing those affected from making compensatory claims until earlier this year, even though the pollution has been around since the 1950s. Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan poisoned the local groundwater with arsenic, lead, PCBs, asbestos and dioxin through decades of accidents and neglect, jeopardizing the health of service members and civilians alike. Just recently, the U.S. Naval station in Virginia Beach spilled around 94,000 gallons of jet fuel into the Atlantic, though there was little media coverage.
Protesters at US military base in Seoul, South Korea, where massive groundwater contamination was discovered.
Check out Part 2.
i heard that an aunt of a friend of mine who worked for the military was exposed to a certain radiation or something and she was told that she will die in a few months' time. i thought it was like from a movie. such a painful reality! whew!
So true!