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Fort Detrick had a tour this past week to show off the capping of a waste disposal area that should have been done 20 years ago. Yet it has not eliminated the polluted groundwater hazard in that area. Too little, too late.

Joseph Gortva, restoration manager for Fort Detrick, said the way things were done in the past was, "just dig a hole and bury it in unlined ditches."

But he didn't tell the group that when I was mayor 18 years ago, the city tried to persuade Fort Detrick to begin immediate cleanup based on polluted residential wells on Montevue Lane and Shookstown Road. You could smell it.

Detrick's position was to first deny it was the cause, then provide bottled water to the residents or pay for connections to the city water system. It began digging test wells on its property which indicated pollution. Their response was to dig more wells.

In 2000, a Detrick safety chief said they had tested 43 private wells and seven had shown pollution in excess of the 5 parts per billion level allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

A spring that runs across Detrick, three years before, showed pollution off base of 5,000 parts per billion of trichloroethylene and 20,000 ppb of tetrachloroethylene, vastly unsafe. A test well in Area B found pollution levels between 60,000 to 120,000 parts per billion.

Yet Detrick made no effort to rush a cleanup. At a public meeting at Waverly Elementary School, a Detrick handout indicated no clear evidence that TCE could cause leukemia or cancer in humans. But the Department of Health and Human Services in its report on carcinogens two years earlier had said, TCE is "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen."

Detrick officials ignored the cancer clusters that existed just off post, and continue to.

Despite the fact they knew there was a problem, they dragged their feet, regardless of the potential public health hazard, due to the lack of funding. Apparently, the funding has been available for millions in new facilities, but not for cleanup of hazardous wastes.

Only 10 years later, after test wells showed pollution was about to move off post into the creek, did Detrick decide to cleanup part of the problem and avoid a public relations disaster.

It was the same response that USAMRIID key personnel got when a leaking laboratory sewer line was only repaired. About 1994, the line was declared so fragile it was to be replaced immediately. But it was not replaced, merely spot repaired, as it ran the length of the post. USAMRIID officials decided to patch it since a new building was being designed and upon completion, the problem would be resolved.

Groundbreaking for that new building just occurred, 15 years later, prolonging any pollution problem.

In 2005, Detrick ignored the facts when it had a boiler blowout covering some neighboring properties with soot to a one-quarter inch deep, including mine. It said the blowout lasted 10 minutes, when it was really four hours. It claimed that trash was being burned when insider information indicates the material may have been toxic. Detrick made no effort to contact affected property owners to tell them the truth.

Meanwhile, Area B remains listed in the EPA Superfund because a hazard remains, while Detrick continues to deny potential hazards exist.

Paul Gordon is a local historian, and was mayor of Frederick city from January 1990 to January 1994. His column appears weekly. You can reach him at prg202@comcast.net. To submit a letter to the editor in response to this column, log onto www.gazette.

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