CASCADE, Md. - A recently closed Army base might not be everyone's idea of paradise, but Sharon Garcia saw enough to like about Fort Ritchie and its picturesque mountain setting to move her family here a few years ago.

The place grew on her. She bowled in a league at the Sunshine Lanes. Her neighbors came to her door with cookies. And her son Jonathan found friends among the children settling with their families into the modest townhouses that once housed soldiers.

Then the base's past intruded. In late 2001, Army crews discovered grenades, mortar shells and a bazooka rocket in a field 250 feet from the houses.

The Army had assured a developer three years earlier, before the base in Washington County closed, that the houses were safe to rent to the public. Now it was telling Garcia and 110 other families that their houses may have been built atop projectiles from World War I and World War II firing ranges.

The Army ordered Garcia and the others to find new homes, so that it can start searching lawns for buried explosives as early as this summer.

"Nothing was explained to us about the potential dangers," says Garcia, 44, who wonders why weapons that old are being discovered only now. "All these years, no one ever said anything."

Nearly 30 years have passed since the military vowed to clean up the toxic waste it buried decades ago on bases across the country. But today, as many bases are poised to declare the cleanup job complete or to start new lives as parks and housing subdivisions, there is fresh evidence of just how much the military has missed.

The pollution includes leaky underground fuel tanks, pesticides, buried chemical weapons, experimental bacteria, radioactive waste and live explosives. Much of it is now spreading through soil and ground water, sometimes into public water supplies.

Although the military is making measurable progress, it is still stumbling across decades-old dump sites, raising questions about the thoroughness of its earlier investigations.

From 1994 to 2001, the tally of known waste sites on current and former military bases in the United States rose from 24,898 to 28,538, and from 720 to 855 in Maryland.

Belated - and often accidental - discoveries of toxic sites are so routine at some bases that one military official says the cleanup work seems cursed by Murphy's Law, the notion that whatever can go wrong will.

"We've been struck by Murphy a number of times, which has caused the cost and duration of the project ... to obviously rise," says Lt. Col. Donald F. Archibald, the chief environmental officer at Fort Detrick in Frederick County, where a $46 million cleanup is under way.

In Maryland alone, the cleanup job is expected to cost $1.3 billion - enough money to buy 52 F-16 fighter planes, or about two Navy destroyers. But after nearly three decades, the work is just about half-done and will likely stretch well into the middle of this century.

The environmental issues here are among the nation's most complex, in part because Maryland is home to the military's primary research centers for chemical and biological weapons: Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Detrick.

The menu of lethal refuse at Aberdeen - buried bombs, deadly nerve agents, cancer-causing solvents - forms the nation's third most expensive military cleanup. Only the cleanups at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado and McClellan Air Force Base in California will cost taxpayers more.

Of the 18 places in Maryland on the federal government's Superfund list of the most hazardous waste sites, eight are military posts, including Aberdeen, Fort Meade and Andrews Air Force Base, the home of Air Force One.

Critics say that the environment has always been a back-burner issue for the military, one of the nation's biggest polluters and an organization geared to fight wars, not waste. The government's own studies have faulted the military cleanup program for sloppy record-keeping, slipshod investigations, and the absence of quality controls. On at least one installation, the military fired its environmental official for reporting a dump to state regulators.

And nearly two decades after two San Diego boys were killed by a World War II-era tank shell in their residential neighborhood, the military has yet to complete a plan to clean up millions of acres of former firing ranges.

Even as the number of known sites of pollution has climbed, the military's cleanup budget has fallen, from $2.5 billion in 1994 to $1.9 billion last year. This year, the Pentagon plans an aggressive campaign on Capitol Hill to win exemptions from key environmental laws, including those dealing with toxic cleanups.

The Pentagon's top environmental officials say the military has acted immediately to address the most serious threats to human health.

Since 1984, they point out, the Defense Department has spent $18.6 billion to clean up hazardous waste at more than 11,000 current and former military sites. Of the $31 billion of work remaining, Pentagon officials have set a goal of addressing all of the highest-risk sites by 2007.

"Cleaning up the environment is a priority for the Department of Defense," says Raymond F. DuBois Jr., the department's deputy undersecretary for installations and environment. "First, a healthy and productive environment is a key element of national power. Second, environmental restoration is good management of the scarce resources entrusted to us by the American people. And third, environmental restoration is a reflection of the high ethical values of our men and women in uniform and the nation they represent."

Even so, he says, budget limits force the department to prioritize cleanups. Some waste sites have gone undetected for years because the military kept spotty records of how, when and where it handled dangerous waste in an era before strong environmental laws.

"We're trying to characterize events which arguably took place in the hoary mists of time," DuBois says.

There are no known clusters of cancer cases in Maryland of the sort confounding neighbors of fouled bases in Cape Cod, Mass., San Antonio, Texas, and Fallon, Nev.

According to Maryland county health officials and neighborhood watchdog groups, a few people living near bases have fretted about whether their health problems may be linked to tainted water. But the validity of such fears is hard to verify, in part because no public health studies have been conducted.

In the meantime, Marylanders living near bases grapple with unsettling questions about their land and water.

"What else is there we don't know about yet?" asks Ruth Ann Young, 62, a retired school guidance counselor living near Aberdeen Proving Ground who has avoided tap water since the discovery last year of a rocket fuel ingredient in some city wells. "What else is there to learn that we don't know about yet that could be harmful to us?"

There could be a lot, according to The Sun's review of hundreds of documents and its interviews with dozens of military and environmental officials, lawyers, experts, and people who live near bases.

At Fort Detrick in late 2001, workers in protective suits launched a multimillion-dollar cleanup of what they thought was a chemical waste dump. But within a few weeks, shovels were churning up not only cancer-causing chemicals, but also vials of bacteria - including nonvirulent anthrax - apparently left over from biological weapons programs. More than 100 vials have been found to date. What had begun as a $10 million, six-month cleanup is now expected to cost $20 million and take at least twice as long.

At Aberdeen Proving Ground, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 1993 that off-post drinking water wells "were not likely to become contaminated in the future." But last year, the chemical perchlorate, a rocket fuel ingredient linked to thyroid disorders, turned up in the city of Aberdeen's tap water. The Pentagon has balked at cleaning it up, saying there is little proof that perchlorate is harmful.

Despite two decades of environmental surveys at Aberdeen Proving Ground, officials suspected no serious problems in a field of marsh grasses near the Gunpowder River. But in 1997, a freak brush fire revealed an enormous dump. As of late last year, cleanup workers at the site had removed 12,700 cubic yards of waste, 325 explosives, and 7,680 pieces of inert scrap from explosives.

"We discovered the extent of what's out here by accident," says John T. Paul Jr., the base's manager of environmental risk.

At the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center in Charles County, the Navy conducted extensive studies in 1983 and 1992 to identify waste sites. Somehow, both missed a plume of ground water tainted with cancer-causing solvents that was draining into Mattawoman Creek, a popular fishing spot. The plume was discovered by chance in 1994, when a state inspector noticed a strange smell wafting from a manhole. A $1.3 million cleanup of the solvent-laced ground water is expected to begin within a year.

As early as 1991, Fort Meade had records showing high levels of fuel-related chemicals in the soil at the base's Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office. Without doing extra tests recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency, base officials began building a warehouse on the site. Only then, in 1995, did construction workers discover 267 buried drums of fuel, oil and solvents that had leaked into the soil and ground water.

Although the Pentagon largely dismissed a report that Washington's affluent Spring Valley neighborhood had been a chemical weapons test site during World War I, a contractor digging a utility trench stumbled across chemical shells in 1993. After an emergency cleanup, the Army pronounced the area safe.

In 1998, after a review by local officials raised questions about the cleanup, the Army returned and found what it had missed: high levels of arsenic in front lawns and nearly 300 explosives buried in pits and trenches, including two pits in the South Korean ambassador's back yard. A $70 million cleanup is still under way.

Military officials also found evidence that chemical weapons tests linked to Spring Valley had been conducted at a farm in Berlin, Md., a former Johns Hopkins lab in downtown Baltimore, and what is now the Bethesda Country Club.

'Nobody suspected'

Nestled in the Catoctin Mountains about 75 miles northwest of Baltimore, Fort Ritchie was a firing range for soldiers and the Maryland National Guard that doubled as an Army intelligence post. To prepare for the base's closure and eventual transfer to the private sector, Army officials were required by law to clean up its buried waste. They pored over musty maps, memos, and secret histories spanning the base's earliest days to 1951, when the firing ranges closed.

But it was after 1951 that records first indicated a problem with the land beneath the townhouses. Aerial photos from the 1950s suggest that a contractor scooped up soil from the firing ranges and used it as fill for the housing site. The Army didn't examine those photos until three years after it had declared the townhouses safe for rent to the public.

"Nobody suspected there would be ordnance in this area of the installation," says William D. Hofmann, the base's environmental coordinator, referring to the belated discovery of mortar shells and grenades near the homes.

Alexis Gregson, 27, a college student, moved into a townhouse at Fort Ritchie with her husband and son a few months after the base closed. She wishes she had known about the buried munitions when, pregnant with her second child, she dug holes in her yard for a fence and some horseshoe pits.

"Would we have gone and dug all those holes if we knew there was a bomb in the back yard?" she asks as Nicholas, 4, naps peacefully in front of a TV set. "It irritated me that one moment, I sign my lease and everything's OK. The next thing I know, we have to move."

At Fort Ritchie last year, the Army asked residents to leave their homes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. while technicians dug for explosives in nearby fields. School buses take special routes into the former base. And the wooded landscape is pocked by small craters where Army technicians have disposed of shells by exploding them in place.

"The bombs make a big hole, like a giant gopher dug in it," says Jonathan Garcia, 6, eyes widening as he tramps through his house in a Power Rangers shirt. Jonathan says he is not frightened when the windows rattle from the explosions, except "when they're, like, really, really loud."

His mother, Sharon, a notary, had to sit him down for a talk one recent afternoon after he returned home with a handful of small colored flags - the ones that technicians use to mark suspected sites of buried ordnance. It is just one of the new rules residents have learned to live by.

"You can't plant flowers, you can't go out and dig, and you can't have your kids go out" at certain times, she says. "If you want to garden, you have to provide a garden box. The kids shouldn't be playing near the creek. They shouldn't dig in playgrounds or back yards."

The Army says it will offer the displaced residents housing elsewhere on the base, but it has not yet decided whether it will pay for their moving expenses.

Marylanders who live near other bases are making similar adjustments.

In the neighborhoods around Aberdeen Proving Ground, the discovery of perchlorate in the tap water has persuaded many families to buy bottled water.

"The last time I was over at Wal-Mart half their shelves were empty," says Glenda W. Bowling, a retired bank teller who leads the Aberdeen Proving Ground Superfund Citizens Coalition, a community watchdog group.

In nearby Edgewood, the federal government spent $1.1 million to shield a group of public schools from an accidental chemical release. Principals lead students through "chemical stockpile emergency" drills in which students hole up in airtight gyms. Red telephones connect to emergency operations centers, and roof-mounted machines can raise indoor air pressure to keep chemical clouds from seeping into the schools.

Meanwhile, in the city of Frederick, the Army has spent $113,000 over the past decade to supply households around Fort Detrick with bottled water, or to connect those on well water to the city water supply.

When Robert C. Richey, a bakery warehouse manager, moved his family to a house across from the base nine years ago, he didn't know it was just down the road from a chemical dump known as Area B-11.

He found out when Army engineers showed up one day to test his well water for toxins. Now, Richey says he wouldn't drink water from his faucets "for all the money in the world."

Every month since 1997, a Roaring Spring truck has dropped off nine 5-gallon bottles of Pennsylvania spring water, courtesy of Fort Detrick.

"It's not a bad deal," says Richey, 52, who lives with his wife and two adult children. "My main worry is you still have to wash your clothes in the [tap] water, you take a shower in it, you brush your teeth in it."

Cleanup programs

Maryland's 149 military properties - from postage-stamp ordnance depots to colossal troop training bases like Fort Meade - were once turbines of the state's economy. At their peak, during World War II, Fort Meade employed nearly 70,000 people and Aberdeen Proving Ground more than 30,000.

But as priorities shifted after the Cold War, Congress began shutting bases across the country and slashing military payrolls. In Maryland, 47 of the original 149 defense properties remain active. And eight of those are preparing to close.

The military launched its cleanup program in 1975. Congress toughened and broadened it in 1986, ordering the Pentagon to abide by the same cleanup standards as the nation's worst industrial polluters.

Cleanups were a growing priority in the 1980s as the military prepared to turn over closed bases to local governments and developers for reuse as parks, schools and subdivisions. But by the early 1990s, Congress was losing patience with the pace of cleanups, a concern that still troubles some lawmakers today.

"Go to any military post and it is contaminated beyond belief," says U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman from 1981 to 1994 of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees hazardous-waste laws.

"They don't know how to deal with it, they don't have any disposition to deal with it" he adds. "They give general evidence of not giving a damn about the situation."

In the 1990s, the Pentagon took steps to improve, adopting a formula to rank sites so that the worst risks to health and the environment were cleaned up first. But to clean up those sites, the military has to know about them.

"I am troubled by situations like Spring Valley," says DuBois, of the Pentagon. "But to again be perfectly blunt, I suspect there are other Spring Valleys in this country. It's a big country."

Buried, burned

What passed for waste disposal in the days before environmental laws would make most people today cringe. Cans of degreasing solvents were toted out of buildings and dumped into the ground. Workers got rid of chemical warfare agents meant to choke, nauseate or blister an enemy by burning and then burying them in unlined trenches near waterways. The dumps went by names - "riot control burning pit" and "VX burning pit" - that seem drawn from the netherworld.

"We buried stuff - all sorts of stuff," says Kenneth P. Stachiw, the environmental chief at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where a $741 million cleanup is expected to last into the 2030s. "Bombs, trucks, animal carcasses, radioactive materials, bombs that had chlorine gas in them - you name it, it's there."

Officials at Maryland military bases say that despite efforts to catalog likely sites of pollution through archival records, aerial photographs and interviews with retired workers, the historical record is riddled with holes. Many retirees have moved or died. And the memories of those still around have dimmed.

In the late 1980s, Gary R. Nemeth led one of the first efforts to map pollution at Aberdeen Proving Ground. He offered retired workers anonymity in exchange for details of where they buried waste, but still had to deal with the absence of good records to confirm or rebut their accounts.

"Hey, people put something in the back of a truck and they go out and dump it somewhere - there's no documentation of that," says Nemeth, an environmental engineer at the base from 1976 to 1993. "It's a puzzle to pull together."

And not everyone in the know wanted to tell. Shawn Jorgensen, the environmental engineer at the Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center, says that in the 1980s former workers resisted saying anything that could be construed as self-incriminating. "People were going to jail for releasing chemicals," Jorgensen says of penalties for environmental crimes gaining publicity in the 1980s. "A lot were just nervous and perhaps scared to say anything."

Further complicating matters is the volatility of military waste. In 1994, officials at Aberdeen Proving Ground told congressional investigators that the risk of contact with buried explosives and chemical agents "severely restricted" their ability to size up the scope of pollution.

Other cleanup officials note tensions between their responsibility to the environment and the agenda of the base commander. At the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Bayly E. Smith Jr., the chief cleanup official, has rushed to deal with polluted areas that the base commander wants for helicopter operations, fuel storage, and a national guard facility. But those areas do not necessarily pose the highest risk to health or the environment.

"It's a balancing act," Smith says, "to keep the high-risk areas cleaned up first and also be cognizant of the commanding officer's requirements for the land that he needs."

Low priority

Critics of the military's environmental record speculate on less benign reasons for the gaps in knowledge. They point to the military's efforts to seek exemptions from environmental laws and say that cleaning up polluted bases is a low priority for an agency whose mission, before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, is national defense.

"The federal government has shoehorned these environmental cleanup responsibilities into a department that's not built to do those things," says Steven D. Taylor of the Military Toxics Project, a nonprofit group that aids neighborhoods near polluted military bases. As a result, "environmental surprises are pretty much ubiquitous at military sites. Many of the initial investigations have not been thorough, much less comprehensive."

In some cases, environmental compliance officials have faced retaliation for reporting problems, says a former Navy lieutenant, Daniel P. Meyer, who is general counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a whistleblower group in Washington. In 1998, the former environmental engineer at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., won more than $130,000 in a lawsuit alleging that the school fired him for reporting a toxic waste dump on school grounds to state and federal authorities.

In other cases, the military overlooked the obvious. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, recently studied 3,840 cases in which the Army Corps of Engineers concluded that former defense sites - many now parks, schools and homes - did not require cleanup. In 38 percent of those cases, the corps never looked for or ignored readily available maps, photos or records of likely pollution, the GAO found.

In 1992, for instance, the corps declared Puerto Rico's Camp O'Reilly free of pollution. But according to the GAO, the corps never reviewed archival records or even contacted the site's current owners, the University of Puerto Rico. Five years later, the university uncovered what the corps had missed: three underground storage tanks, a 12,000-square-foot dump and an area near a drinking water source tainted with oil byproducts. All were leftovers from the post's operations during World War II.

The cleanup could last as long as 10 years, says Robert C. Bridgers, who will manage it from the Army Corps' office in Jacksonville, Fla. But Bridgers says that nearly six years after the pollution was discovered, the corps' regional office in Atlanta has yet to approve his cleanup plan. What's more, he says, he has no money for the work.

"We'd like to do more quicker, and we can't because of funding," he says. "I've got live bazooka rounds in a suburban neighborhood in Brooksville, Florida, that I can't get to because I need $11 million, and I can't get it."

He is not sanguine about his chances in the current political climate. "With the war on terrorism now, environmental restoration may be less of a priority in Congress."

Experts say that another factor behind the tardy discovery of decades-old toxic sites was reforms to the federal Superfund program in the 1990s intended to speed cleanups. The changes came after criticism that many cleanups seemed mired in the investigative phase. But by allowing cleanups to begin even before crews had grasped the full scope of an environmental problem, EPA officials now say, the reforms may have inadvertently allowed some toxic waste to escape notice.

Stachiw, Aberdeen's environmental chief, said that 350 historic waste sites have been identified at the base, up from the 318 found in the first survey in the 1980s. "I'm not expecting to find another 300, but we could find 20 or 30 more, and they could be significant," he said.

At the Patuxent Research Refuge, a former Fort Meade firing range, hikers and anglers occasionally discover what Army cleanup workers missed. Today, the 60,000 visitors to the refuge each year must sign waivers at the gate promising not to sue if something explodes.

"It's for their protection and ours," Nell Baldacchino, a spokeswoman for the refuge, which the Army turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991. "Even though they've done a sweep, we can never guarantee that, through erosion or whatever, stuff won't come to the surface."

Such former defense sites pose a far greater risk to the public than active bases, where access is often restricted.

But while the military has passed the halfway mark in cleaning up active bases, it is just one-tenth of the way toward a full cleanup of former defense sites, according to the Pentagon's financial figures.

Sherri W. Goodman, the Defense Department's deputy undersecretary for environmental security under President Bill Clinton, says she found no support within the Pentagon or Congress for her pleas to raise the budget for such cleanups. "It's often easier to find some more urgent need for today's troops than to find money for cleaning up old bombs."

She says the Clinton administration was concerned enough about the military's ability to mop up its own messes that it considered creating an agency to manage cleanups of both military and Department of Energy sites. But the proposal never got off the ground.

She says frustration in Congress over the pace of cleanup led to the decline in funding for the military's environmental programs during the 1990s.

Lots of unknowns

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has studied health risks at Maryland's most polluted bases. But in reports over the past 15 years, it has sounded few alarms other than to avoid eating too many fish from base ponds and to keep off areas littered with unexploded bombs.

In its study of Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1993, the agency reported that Maryland has had the nation's highest cancer mortality rate for decades. It found no cancer clusters around Aberdeen and noted that Harford County had lower cancer death rates than much of the rest of the state. But the study deemed the public health risks from Aberdeen "indeterminate." In other words, scientists didn't know.

"There is not enough data (with respect to the scope of the installation)," the agency's scientists wrote, "to indicate whether humans are being or have been exposed to levels of contamination that are expected to cause adverse health effects."

A sprinkling of cancer cases and neurological disorders among residents near the base prompted the Aberdeen Proving Ground Superfund Citizens Coalition to consult a toxicologist about conducting a health study in the early 1990s. But the group dropped the effort because of concerns about the cost, complexity and often inconclusive results of such studies.

"It wasn't clear what was getting off base or the different ways people could have been exposed," says Dr. Katherine S. Squibb, the interim director of toxicology at the University of Maryland and a consultant to the citizens group. "The people were so spread out around such a wide area, it would be hard to" pin a particular illness on a particular source of contamination.

Now the base's neighbors want a kind of early warning system - a ring of test wells around the base's perimeter that would alert officials to hazardous chemicals before they spread into neighborhoods.

At Aberdeen as at other bases, the likelihood of contact with military toxins has grown as houses and roads have crowded around a base that the military had originally located in the middle of nowhere.

"There is always going to be another issue," says Cal Baier-Anderson, another University of Maryland toxicologist advising the citizens group. "The bigger question is, over the long term, how do you manage it?"

At Fort Ritchie, Sharon Garcia and her husband, Chris, have their own solution: to simply move away. She sits down with the newspaper every afternoon now, studying the classified ads for houses elsewhere in western Maryland. She is still troubled that her decision to live on a former military base may have put her family at risk.

"I was beginning to become alarmed that we all may pick up something in our water or something in what we were breathing or some long-term ill effects," she says. "You just never know."

Sun staff researcher Jean Packard contributed to this article.

Coming tomorrow

At Aberdeen Proving Ground, the military is using advanced technology - and fish - to deal with an imposing array of pollutants that includes chemical weaponry.