The federal government is seeking at least $125 million in damages from two defense contractors to pay for a massive environmental cleanup at a Cold War-era Atlas missile site near Mead.
The lawsuit, filed last September in U.S. District Court in Omaha, alleges that General Dynamics and Dow Chemical are responsible for spilling trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical degreaser, into the soil and groundwater at the former site of the Nebraska Ordnance Plant.
In the seven months since the suit was filed, the companies have exchanged claims and counterclaims and engaged in discovery. No trial date has been set.
In the late 1980s, TCE and the residue from explosives was detected in the soil and groundwater. Plumes of contamination stretched southeast from the property.
TCE has been linked to liver and kidney cancer and diseases of the immune system. It can interfere with fetal development in pregnant women. It’s the chemical that contaminated the drinking water at the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, from the 1950s to the 1980s, leading to an avalanche of litigation — and TV advertising for lawyers.
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The Environmental Protection Agency declared the Nebraska property a Superfund site in 1990. The Superfund law, passed in 1980, allows the federal government to take over badly contaminated sites, clean them up, and recover costs from those responsible for the pollution.
Government, companies spar over responsibility
The government alleges the spills at Mead occurred between 1960 and 1964, when Convair, a General Dynamics subsidiary, was urgently building Atlas missiles — the nation’s first nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles — for the Offutt-based Strategic Air Command, as well as the missile sites to support them.
Dow is alleged to have provided the TCE that General Dynamics used at the Mead site.
“Defendants have not reimbursed any of the costs incurred by the United States responding to the release of hazardous substances at the site,” government lawyers said in the lawsuit filed Sept. 22, 2023.
In its response, General Dynamics contended that TCE was used at the ordnance plant during the years between 1942 and 1956, when it was producing bombs for the U.S. military.
The company also said the federal government was in charge of the Atlas site during the time it built and operated the Mead facility, and it was following the government’s orders in the use and disposal of TCE at Mead.
“General Dynamics did nothing more ... than carry out the Government’s directives,” the company’s lawyers said in a legal response to the lawsuit. “The Government, not General Dynamics, should bear the clean-up costs for which it is responsible.”
General Dynamics also said it jumped in to install the Atlas missiles at a time of national emergency, when the United States was deploying Convair’s Atlas ICBMs in a furious nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Contracts, it said, called for speed and held the company harmless for damage caused in the development and deployment of Atlas missiles.
“Convair performed its work at (the Nebraska Ordnance Plant) under the threat of nuclear war,” General Dynamics argued in its brief. “(T)he United States promised Convair that by agreeing to perform this critical but dangerous work on behalf of the Nation, it could do so without fear of liability.”
In its own response, Dow Chemical also cited the government’s own “unclean hands” in managing, directing and controlling the site. Dow blamed the contamination on unnamed third parties with which it did not have a contract.
“Dow exercised due care in light of all relevant facts and circumstances and took precautions against foreseeable acts or omissions of third parties,” the company argued in its response.
It also said the government was too late in filing its claims.
Mead was munitions site in WWII
The Mead site’s use for military purposes dates to 1941, when the federal government selected it as one of 27 locations around the country for production of munitions ahead of World War II. (Two others were in Hastings and Grand Island.)
About 3,000 workers (most of them women) assembled bombs at the Nebraska Ordnance Plant in four widely separated load lines. Nearly 3 million bombs were produced during the war.
Bomb-making ended with Japan’s surrender in 1945, and the plant was put on standby status. Dow contends TCE was used to clean and preserve equipment at the site.
Production resumed in 1951 during the Korean War and was shut down in 1956, this time for good.
Three years later, after the Soviet Union startled the world by launching the Sputnik space satellite, SAC scouted the country for sites to place nuclear-tipped Atlas ICBMs, which had been in development for more than a decade.
The majority were deployed in the southern Plains, including 15 Nebraska sites mostly in the southeast corner of the state. Three Atlas D missiles were placed at Mead, in horizontal above-ground “coffins” instead of underground silos.
They didn’t stay long. Within five years the liquid-fueled Atlas missiles were retired in favor of solid-fueled Minuteman ICBMs, which were deployed elsewhere. The site now belongs to the State of Nebraska.
A U.S. Army study in the late 1980s confirmed that TCE and explosive residue had leached into the soil and groundwater on and around the site.
During the 1990s, more than 400 monitoring wells were dug in an effort to map out the underground spill. The contamination was found to cover about 6 square miles south and east of the site, the direction that underground water flows in the area. Separate plumes flowed from each of the ordnance plant’s four bomb lines, court documents show, and another one is near the location of the former Atlas missiles.
For Mead, ‘bad water’ stigma lingers
The cleanup operation has grown more complex in the decades since and has so far cost about $185 million, according to a court document.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished removing and replacing nearly 1,600 tons of contaminated soil in 2012, the Associated Press reported at the time.
The cost of filtering tens of billions of gallons of contaminated water has proved far more complicated — and expensive. Water from the plumes, each 2-3 miles long and up to half a mile wide, is removed through 16 wells and is pumped to four treatment plants.
General Dynamics argues that cleanup is ineffective and too expensive.
The nearby village of Mead has been lucky — sort of.
While some private landowners had their wells contaminated (and have been receiving free bottled water for decades), Mead’s municipal wells are north of the former ordnance plant and out of harm’s way, said William Thorsen, chairman of the village’s board of trustees.
“It didn’t impact us at all, except that (people said) ‘Mead’s got bad water,’” Thorsen said.
Over the years, attention faded. Then in 2021, the AltEn ethanol plant south of Mead was shut down after millions of gallons of toxic runoff flooded off the site, threatening nearby streams and wells.
Again, Thorsen said, the village’s wells are unaffected. But the stigma remains.
“It kind of went away, and then AltEn happened,” he said. “Now they’re saying we’ve got bad water again.”