For over sixty years the Navy used the Eastern part of Vieques as their Live Impact Area. Everything from Napalm to Agent Orange to Depleted Uranium bullets were released on this eastern part of the island. The western part of the island was where these bombs and weapons were kept in bunkers. Vieques being located off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico has always had a predominant westerly wind coming off the Atlantic. The Viequense people have the good fortune of being squeezed in between the bombing range and the bunkers, meaning that any contaminants or debris released into the air by the bombing were immediately transported by the wind over the rest of the island.

This contamination had severe repercussion for the inhabitants of this island. There are the usual high levels of contaminants in the water and soil on which the Viequense are dependent. Mercury, Lead and Cadmium all known to cause cancers or other ailments of the body are in abnormally high supply on the island, and they have left their imprint on the people. Perhaps even more sobering than the higher rates of cancer, are the increased death rates from cancer. When compared to their countrymen on the mainland of Puerto Rico, the Viequense people have a 116% better chance of having epilepsy, 50% higher probability of intestinal disturbances, 28% of diabetes, 35% of hypertension, and a 28% higher rate of cancer.  Viequense cancer patients have a 55% better chance of dying from their cancer. Although I’m sure some of this has to do with the types of cancer one gets from exposure to depleted uranium, another source of the high death rates could be a lack of medical facilities provided.

It’s a complicated mix of government agencies now responsible for the state of Vieques. On May 1st, 2003 the Navy officially pulled out of Vieques and handed control of their land over to the Department of the Interior’s Fisheries and Wildlife Department. However, responsibility for the clean up of the island still rests with the Navy through the Department of Defense, even though the actual clean up task has been contracted out to CH2M Hill, which is a huge corporation with offices and contracts in over one hundred countries. The EPA is then responsible for regulating the entire clean up process. An already complicated web of agencies has been spread here, and this is before the stipulations of the Legislative Branch of the U.S. government or the Puerto Rican Government are included in the mix.

The U.S. Congress decided that although the island of Vieques was bringing in 98 million dollars a year in rental fees while it was being rented out to other country’s military forces, it’s clean up would be done in the most frugal manner possible with a total price tag of 200 million dollars. Even though the military budget just recently exceeded a trillion dollars a year, there seems to be no room to clean up their past environmental and health infractions. A vital measurement tool for this shortage of funding is the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe, where in 1990 a 460 million dollar clean-up effort was undertaken, only to have 29% of the unexploded ordinances still on the ground three years later.

To accommodate the small budget, CH2M Hill has decided that they will not be able to use all of the technology at their disposal in the clean-up of the island. In particular they are unable to use the Donovan Blast Chambers, which can contain any contaminants released in the removal of unexploded ordinances. These shortcuts mean that Vieques is today further contaminated by these bombs that didn’t explode the first time they were dropped by the Navy. Since August 14, 2005 the CH2M Hill has had fourteen different demolition events where 310 bombs have been exploded into the atmosphere.

The island should be cleaned up, there is no doubt about that, but should it be at the expense of the health of the island’s inhabitants, who will never gain control of the land as long as it is Fisheries and Wildlife Property?