State drops Meade cleanup lawsuit

The state has dropped an environmental lawsuit against the Army, acknowledging that cleanup plans for Fort George G. Meade are finally adequate.

The state had sued the military in federal court to enforce a federal environmental cleanup order.

Before the state intervened with the lawsuit a year ago, the Army and the Environmental Protection Agency had squabbled over the details of cleaning up the post's contaminated sites.

Finally this summer, the Army drafted a 90-page "federal facilities agreement" that lays out cleanup plans that the various agencies agreed to. The agreement was made final earlier this month, paving the way for the state to drop the lawsuit.

"It absolutely resolves that," Fort Meade spokeswoman Mary Doyle said of the disputes. "In fact, most of the back-and-forth was all about getting this done. The EPA, their original order was to get the Federal Facilities Agreement done, and then the lawsuit was about doing what the order demanded us to do."

The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed on Monday, according to federal court records.

"Getting an enforceable and binding commitment for the cleanup in place was the purpose of the lawsuit," said Jay Apperson, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment. "The agreement is now in place and it followed that the suit is no longer necessary. MDE will continue to focus on the cleanup activities needed."

Fort Meade sprawls across more than 5,000 acres in west county, and has been training troops and undertaking military activities since 1917. It's also home to the National Security Agency.

Many environmental problems on the installation were created decades ago, before modern environmental laws.

The post's documented problems include a host of environmental woes, such as:

Old landfills.

A skeet-shooting range that left lead shot in the ground.

An old laundry that used potentially harmful chemicals.

A former Nike missile launch site with arsenic in the ground.

A former vehicle-maintenance site with lead in the groundwater.

Unexploded ordnance on land that has since been turned over to the Patuxent Research Refuge.

A previously unknown landfill near a school was literally unearthed in 2003, when military housing was being built.

More recently, the Army has been providing bottled water to residents near the post out of concern that their wells might be tainted.

In 1998, Fort Meade was named one of the country's worst environmental sites and was put on the national "Superfund" list of dirty sites. Since then, the fort has spent $83 million on cleanup, Doyle said.

There's no timeline for getting the post clean enough to get off the Superfund list, although that is the eventual goal, Doyle said.

While the disputes and the lawsuit filed by the state were ongoing, Fort Meade's staff continued to work on cleaning up the post's problem sites, Doyle said. But it is a relief to have all the wrangling resolved, she said.

"Our efforts were interrupted while all of the legal wranglings were going on, and we just continue to move forward in hopes of one day, down the road, being off this list and continuing to have an effort to ensure that our environment, and that of our neighbors, is safe," she said.