Families near an Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, have spent 10 years worrying since the city declared a state of emergency from toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating their drinking water.
That base was scheduled to hit an important cleanup milestone this month. Instead, those neighbors will wait decades more.
The Pentagon announced Sept. 2 that it is again delaying cleanup of forever chemicals at hundreds of military sites, including bases whose schedules had already quietly slipped for years or even decades. Altogether, USA TODAY's analysis of newly updated military records found the Pentagon has delayed its cleanup timelines nearly 1,250 times over the past five years.
These schedules are meant to address PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl
and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which the military has used for decades in firefighting foams. The chemicals can then leach into groundwater and have been linked to cancer and other health problems.
MAP: Have military sites near me delayed PFAS cleanup?
If you cannot see a graphic, click here.
How has the Pentagon changed its approach?
Until a USA TODAY investigation this summer, the Pentagon had been quietly updating a chart buried behind a link on its website to announce the delays. This approach earned the agency angry letters from dozens of lawmakers for what one senator called “a violation of trust between military leaders and their surrounding communities.”
This time, the Pentagon emailed members of Congress directly on Aug. 31 to notify them of the additional delays.
Two days later, the Pentagon updated its PFAS website to prominently describe “frequent” timeline changes as a routine part of the multistep Superfund program that directs how they clean up environmental contamination.
“Adjustments to these schedules reflect a commitment to doing the job correctly – ensuring visibility into current estimated timelines, incorporating evolving PFAS science and changing regulatory standards, and seeking public input,” the freshly updated website reads.
The Pentagon website also now lists counts of sites delayed in the latest update and the general reasons for these changes, blaming more stringent drinking water standards the Environmental Protection Agency approved in 2024 and pointing to a need to prioritize resources for more contaminated sites.
A Pentagon spokesman did not respond to USA TODAY’s questions in time for publication.
Which sites are most affected?
Delays have occurred across all branches of the military, but the longest are at Air National Guard bases, which on average are set to hit cleanup milestones more than 30 years later than originally promised.
The Air Force’s National Guard bases often sit adjacent to major civilian airports like those in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix, Arizona. Of the 40 Air National Guard sites delayed, all have been pushed back repeatedly in the Pentagon’s last three timeline updates.
For example, a cleanup milestone once expected last year at the Air National Guard base in Peoria, Illinois, now sits in 2065. Successive Pentagon updates first added six years to the timeline, then 15 more and, most recently, another 19 years. That pushes the milestone four full decades beyond its original target.
The military’s chart explains nearly all these recurring Air National Guard base delays were meant to prioritize resources “to first address the sites that pose the highest risk to human health.”
For people living near some of those bases with delays, the Pentagon's explanation offers little comfort.
Consider Newburgh, a small town 60 miles north of New York City. The state now subsidizes the cost of piping drinking water through an aqueduct after studies in 2016 discovered firefighting foams from Stewart Air National Guard Base had contaminated the city’s reservoir, nearby Washington Lake.
This emergency connection solved an immediate health crisis, but not the contamination itself, said Jennifer Rawlison, a lifelong Newburgh resident turned clean water advocate.
“The reservoir was a thriving, fully functional resource that was ours autonomously for over 100 years, and we should be able to exist that way again," Rawlison said.
She joined other protesters gathered along the lake’s shores Sept. 4 to rail against the military's quarter-century-long delay in cleaning up the contamination.
Congressman Pat Ryan, a Democrat who represents the district, said he attended the rally to call for accountability and demand answers from the Pentagon.
“Every American – especially our kids – deserves to have clean drinking water,” Ryan wrote in a news release. “We’re still facing a public health crisis in the Hudson Valley, and the federal government should be speeding up the cleanup, not slowing it down by decades.”
At the rally, Rawlison introduced herself at the lectern as a member of a residents’ board that meets regularly with the base’s leaders. Days after a meeting in July where officials assured them cleanup was on track, Rawlison called it insulting to learn of the delays through USA TODAY’s investigation and not directly from military leaders. She said a base official later told her he had also not been informed of the change beforehand.
This month’s Pentagon announcement pushes back the timeline in Newburgh even further. The cleanup milestone originally scheduled for September 2026 now sits in 2051.
For Rawlison and other neighbors, that’s not just a revised timeline. It’s another generation spent waiting.
“With these reckless delays,” Rawlison said at the rally, “my daughter's generation and quite possibly her future children are being handed an inheritance of toxic exposure, elevated cancer risk and lost time, traded for zero assurances from the military.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New delays hold up military's PFAS cleanup. See where on our map.
