Lead dust danger in Oregon's armories

Oregon armories earn millions,

PART 2

STORY BY

Rob Davis

DEC. 2, 2016

Oregon reaped millions of dollars renting out armories for baby showers, baptisms and bazaars, even though its military leaders knew for more than a decade that lead was contaminating rooms used by young children.

Inspectors sounded continuous alarms, telling the Oregon National Guard that its inaction endangered kids and risked a major lawsuit.

Yet the Guard failed to ensure the safety of thousands of soldiers, civilian employees and Oregonians who used armories for community events. And when the contamination became public, military leaders tried to cover up how long they'd known about it, records show.

The Oregonian/OregonLive spent 18 months investigating how hundreds of National Guard armories across the country became toxic. The armories in Oregon serve as a case study of how a manageable problem spiraled out of control as lead dust routinely spread from indoor firing ranges to other parts of the buildings.

In the last decade, inspectors discovered lead dust in 36 of the 37 armories they checked in Oregon.

Laboratory testing commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that Guard officials passed off the problems to new owners, selling armories where lead contamination persisted decades later.

Toxic Armories

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Oregon military leaders deny that anyone misled the public. They say the Guard was highly concerned about lead.

"That concern transmitted down to the field because it came up so often to the highest level of command," said Col. Todd Farmer, the Oregon Guard's joint logistics director. "Are we 100 percent perfect? Absolutely not. But we were all over this issue for a long period of time."

Oregon Guard officials temporarily closed some armory firing ranges to shooting practice in 2010 and 2011.

But inspectors' pleas for decisive improvements frequently were ignored, according to a review of more than 10,000 pages of previously undisclosed inspection records and internal emails.

Cleanings inside Oregon armories often were left to untrained soldiers who used the wrong equipment, scattering dust rather than containing it.

The Oregon National Guard's armory in Forest Grove – a sprawling beige building defined by little more than its sloping teal roof – exemplifies what went wrong.

By the time the building was eventually evacuated in early 2015, it had become one of the most contaminated armories in the country.

It took a first-of-its-kind, in-depth inspection to turn what had been a problem lurking beneath the surface into something that could no longer be ignored.

The first sign of trouble in Forest Grove popped up in 2002.

Oregon's corps of citizen soldiers used the armory for training activities, but it was also rented out routinely for events like quinceañeras and wedding receptions. The building contained an indoor firing range for target practice.

The firing range posed a major lead hazard. Whenever a soldier fired a weapon, lead inside the cartridge's explosive primer would vaporize and then move around as easily inhalable dust. Tiny shreds of the lead slug would shear off as each bullet left a gun's barrel. Then those slugs had to be cleaned up after smashing into a barrier at the end of the range.

Inspectors in 2002 took a handful of surface samples, finding lead dust heavily contaminated the firing range even after a cleaning. Lead had spread to two nearby rooms. But inspectors didn't check the adjacent drill hall, the main gathering area where kids attended community events. The inspection report deemed the range safe, as long as a custodian thoroughly cleaned it every time a group shot weapons.

Two years passed. A safety team returned in January 2004. Lead was spreading outside the range, the team noted. This time, lead was found in three rooms that children used, including the drill hall floor. The Guard needed to thoroughly examine the building, inspectors wrote, to figure out how the dangerous dust was spreading.

Inspectors warned the Guard: Children visit the building. Keep your firing range clean.

Six years went by. Inspectors were back in 2010 and found the Forest Grove armory looking worse. The range had "serious safety issues," inspectors wrote. What's more, inspectors said the range was putting shooters from outside agencies at risk. Law enforcement and private security guards frequently used the Oregon Guard's indoor ranges.

The range's ventilation system didn't work correctly. It was supposed to pull lead vapor away from shooters, so they wouldn't breathe in the toxic metal. But tables, chairs and cabinets stored behind the firing line blocked the airflow, the inspection report said, allowing lead to hang around shooters' faces.

Basic maintenance was also lacking. Custodians who cleaned the range should have been using a specialized vacuum capable of trapping tiny lead particles. Instead, inspectors suspected the cleaners employed a household vacuum. When inspectors asked the range custodian what the routine cleaning procedures were, the person couldn't explain them.

Inspectors warned that the problems they had identified could "increase safety risks to NG employees and range visitors." They urged the Guard to suspend use of the range.

Records show the Guard did so, temporarily. But an inspection in 2012 found that while some problems such as the blocked air vents had been fixed, lead contaminated the drill hall floor and the hallway outside the firing range.

The drill hall was visibly dusty during an active shooter exercise held in April 2014. Photographs showed bodies of simulated victims leaving trails in the dust as first responders dragged them to safety.

Finally, that July, the Guard conducted the in-depth lead inspection that safety advisers had urged a decade earlier.

A team of inspectors for the first time took hundreds of samples from surfaces in every room, rather than a small scattering. The results were stunning.

Lead had engulfed the armory. Inspectors discovered as much as 1,400 times more poisonous dust than there should have been outside the firing range.

The ventilation system had sucked in lead and spread it throughout the building. The brain-damaging material filled vents, covered floors and coated the roof. It polluted a room where infants crawled. Inspectors found a toy on one lead-contaminated shelf and an Elmo doll on the shelf below.

This time, the evidence seemed impossible to ignore. The inspectors told the Guard on Dec. 19, 2014, to immediately close the facility to the general public. The report quickly went up the chain of command.

"This looks pretty bad to me," Lt. Col. Tim Deckert, the deputy state surgeon, told his superiors in an email. "Sorry to be bearer of bad news."

Yet even then, officials at the Oregon Military Department hesitated. The lead levels were so high that armory maintenance director Roy Swafford didn't believe the inspection report, he said in a later interview. He hired inspectors to sample twice more, finding high lead levels both times.

The armory at last closed to the public in late January 2015, more than a month after inspectors presented the Guard exhaustive evidence that the building posed an immediate danger. Children, those most vulnerable to lead's irreversible harms, were allowed into the armory in the meantime.

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Roy Swafford

Swafford, Oregon Military Department installations director, oversees armory maintenance and rentals.

As Oregon military leaders met to discuss next steps in February 2015, they decided to downplay the problem and conceal how long they had evidence of it, documents show.

The Guard's inspectors had found lead on half of the surfaces tested. Yet at a private meeting to hash out the Forest Grove response, Lt. Col. Verl Miller urged leaders in their public comments to avoid the word "contaminated." (Miller explained in a recent statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive that he didn't want to "create unnecessary panic.")

Meeting minutes show officers prepared a timeline to indicate how long the agency had known about lead problems in Forest Grove. First Lt. Naomi Shantz, a workplace safety nurse, pegged the initial date in 2002. But Swafford said the group should start the chronology recently, in 2012.

The minutes say Swafford warned that the problem had "political attributes," and that the Guard needed to look like it was acting appropriately.

The Guard's subsequent public statements about lead in Forest Grove and in armories statewide closely followed Swafford's suggested timeline.

One community event planner, when provided with details of the closed-door planning session, was not pleased.

"I'm not happy that they knew about it – who would be?" said Linda Frenette, who organized the Mt. Hood Rock Club's shows at Northeast Portland's Kliever Memorial Armory. "When they say they're cleaning it up and it's not bad anymore, I'd like to believe them."

The Oregon Military Department, in a written statement, said that officials "have been completely transparent" about lead contamination and that the agency ensured "everyone involved was appropriately informed."

Swafford, when asked in September why he proposed asserting only a recent awareness of lead, said the older inspections in Oregon were simply snapshots of issues that got fixed.

"You may have lead dust today, it's being cleaned, and then a couple years later it's there again," Swafford said. "That doesn't mean you have an ongoing problem."

How dust spread

The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported about problems in the Forest Grove armory after it closed to the public. The disclosure prompted the news organization to launch a search for inspection records that turned up more than 400 toxic armories nationwide.

The Oregon Guard's failure in Forest Grove played out time after time over the past decade, from Coos Bay to Ontario.

Inspections in 2004 and 2005 found lead contamination in the frequently rented drill halls of 15 armories. Inspectors called it a "major concern" because kids visited.

But no one ensured range cleaners always knew what they were doing.

Lead cleaning protocols advise soldiers to wear full-body coveralls, masks and respirators. Cleaning crews are supposed to use a high-efficiency vacuum or to mop surfaces down with Spic and Span. Rags, gloves and contaminated wash water are supposed to be treated as hazardous waste.

Range cleaners didn't consistently follow these crucial steps. Shortcuts made it worse.

Soldiers sometimes mopped up lead dust, then washed the mop head in the laundry, potentially cross-contaminating clothing. In Coos Bay, soldiers cleaned the range once every two years by scooping up bullet fragments with a garden shovel. In several ranges, soldiers used brooms to sweep up lead dust. Dry sweeping, as it's called, poses a major health risk because it re-suspends the metal in the air, making it easy for people to inhale.

In Bend, inspectors had to tell Guard officials three times – in 2006, 2009 and 2011 – to throw away a lead-tainted broom. Lead dust was spreading beyond the range, they wrote.

Parts of the Bend and McMinnville firing ranges, which inspectors found covered in spent casings and lead residue in 2006, were still visibly contaminated when inspectors returned three years later.

Inspectors arrived at McMinnville's armory in 2009 to discover it had just hosted a child's birthday party inside the firing range, even though the room was covered in lead bullet fragments and didn't have a trained custodian. The inspectors warned that allowing kids into the range exposed the state to the risk of a lawsuit from "uncontrolled exposures." What's more, testing showed contamination escaping to other parts of the armory.

"The persistency of these issues demonstrates a lax safety atmosphere," inspectors wrote after examining the McMinnville armory in 2009. Guard leaders and range operators needed tighter controls "to prevent a catastrophic injury."

The Guard didn't systematically address the problem until 2014, when it ordered firing ranges closed while its armories were thoroughly tested.

Even after the discovery in Forest Grove, the public continued using armories for months in 2015 while the Guard awaited results from inspections in Ashland, Pendleton, Portland, Bend, Roseburg, Ontario, McMinnville, Coos Bay, Springfield, Salem and Baker City.

Closing the armories as a precaution, Swafford said at the time, "would be pretty drastic."

The Guard began to shutter them only after test results came back positive. In every case, lead dust was found outside the firing range.

The income stream

Oregon National Guard officials considered keeping the public out of their contaminated armories years ago, despite the potential loss of rental income. But nothing came of their discussion.

In public, Oregon military staffers advertised the buildings as spotless destinations for large weddings and birthday parties. "Kliever Armory is expertly run and maintained!" a staffer said on Facebook in 2014, giving the Northeast Portland armory a five-star review.

The reality: Inspectors found lead spreading beyond the firing range every time they visited the building between 2002 and 2014.

Top Guard officials as far back as 2010 weighed whether to halt rentals in toxic armories, according to minutes from a meeting that year.

Farmer, the Oregon Guard's logistics director, said in an interview that Guard officials discussed only whether to stop renting out the firing ranges themselves – not the armories that housed them.

But the minutes don't make that distinction. They say inspectors recommended that facilities with indoor firing ranges "should be removed from rental program because they are difficult to keep clean."

Community groups continued holding events in armories after the 2010 meeting, and law enforcement agencies continued using the gun ranges, rental contracts and range logs show.

States rely on income from armory rentals to pay for their upkeep. Rentals have brought in tens of millions nationwide, a review of state budget documents shows.

Oregon has earned $4.8 million from rentals since 2009. Washington took in $1.1 million during the same period.

In Oregon, lawmakers directed the state military department to make as much money as possible from armory rentals, saying the buildings should be rented 60 percent of the time. The department, which owns and operates the facilities, repeatedly told the Legislature it couldn't meet the goal because the armories were in "appalling" condition.

The decision to continue renting toxic armories did little to offset the cost of their maintenance. The military already had a $79 million list of needs in armories. The agency now estimates removing lead and converting firing ranges could cost an additional $21.6 million.

The state has closed some armories to the public in the past year to clean up the contamination. But it continues to allow children to use one building where lead was detected and left in place, records show.

Hotshots Gymnastics pays $1,020 a month to rent the old Ontario armory, where a November 2015 inspection found the former firing range highly contaminated.

Traces of lead were also found outside the range: on floors in the kitchen, birthday room, craft room and drill hall floor, where Hotshots holds tumbling classes for children ages 3 to 13.

The state military department didn't share the results with the gymnastics company until The Oregonian/OregonLive contacted the owner, prompting her to ask officials for the inspection report.

Lead levels in the areas children use, as high as 9.5 micrograms per square foot, were below the Oregon Guard's cleanup threshold of 40 micrograms. But scientists and public health officials say that threshold, adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, is outdated and should be far lower.

Perry Cabot, a Multnomah County Health Department lead risk assessor, said the 40 microgram threshold creates a false sense of security.

"Lead is bad," Cabot said, "and when it's in dust, it's in a nasty form that's especially easy for kids to ingest."

The old firing range has been sealed off, and the Guard cleaned a door that had 56 micrograms of lead on it. But Anna Avera, Hotshots' owner, said in September that the military department hadn't cleaned areas where inspectors found smaller traces of lead nine months earlier.

"They said there was no concern, so I'm not concerned," Avera said. "They said it was super low and I shouldn't worry about it."

Lingering dust

Lead also lingers in armories that the Oregon National Guard decommissioned and sold years ago, The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

The Guard ostensibly made sure most facilities with indoor firing ranges were clean after temporarily closing the ranges in 1984, responding to concerns the rooms were poorly ventilated and threatened soldiers' health. Ranges got power-washed and painted. Lead-contaminated sand was mixed with concrete and turned into flooring.

The cleanings wouldn't have met the Guard's current standards, records show. No one tested the walls to see whether they'd been contaminated by lead. No one looked outside the ranges to see whether lead escaped. The Guard's later testing in some ranges found they hadn't been properly cleaned before being converted to other uses.

Lead testing

How inspections were conducted

The Oregonian/OregonLive offered free lead testing to the current owners of armories that the Guard once operated in Lake Oswego, Eugene, Ashland, Pendleton, Klamath Falls and Portland.

Owners accepted the offer to test for lead in two buildings: the Pendleton Convention Center, which the city owns, and the Historic Ashland Armory, a privately owned office and concert venue.

The results? More lead.

In Pendleton, the city bought the armory in 1990 and converted its old firing range to storage. City officials now use the sprawling, musty basement to keep an old Phoenix Suns parquet basketball floor for state tournaments, piles of removable arena seating and a few fake houseplants.

Six of 13 samples at the Pendleton facility tested positive for lead, including one taken on the main convention center floor. Thousands of people use the floor for community events such as preschool graduations and children's dances.

The testing registered five hits inside the former firing range and on the stairs leading to it. The highest result, 470 micrograms per square foot, was nearly 12 times more than the federal safety threshold for areas used by children. It was found in the part of the range where bullets once struck their targets. Signs in the adjacent bathroom warn rodeo clowns in the annual Pendleton Round-Up: "NO Face Painting in the Building."

Glenn Graham, Pendleton's facilities manager, had thought the range was clean before the test results came back.

"I figured we'd find trace amounts down there, but not heavy lead contamination," he said.

Graham promised to have the building cleaned in April. Seven months later, the city still had not cleaned the armory. Residents were allowed to attend events inside the contaminated drill hall in the meantime.

At the former Guard armory in Ashland, crews have renovated the old firing range. One wall remains pockmarked from bullets 17 years after new owner Alan DeBoer converted the armory into a concert venue.

Among 10 samples The Oregonian/OregonLive took in the building, one contained lead. It was inside a basement storage room that's near the bullet trap of the old firing range. The floor had 180 micrograms of lead per square foot, or 4.5 times higher than the Guard's cleanup target.

DeBoer said he hired specialists to clean the room and repaint the area after receiving the test results.

Tell them what you think

Oregon Gov.

Kate Brown

Brown oversees the Oregon National Guard and state military department.

Lane County, which owns the old Eugene armory, didn't allow The Oregonian/OregonLive to test. But county officials collected samples in the building, now the Martin Luther King Jr. Education Center. They provided test results showing no lead in eight samples.

In Lake Oswego, low levels of lead had been found in the armory before it was sold, remodeled and turned into a private school called the Park Academy. School officials didn't allow the newsroom to test, instead hiring an environmental consultant to do it.

The company took nine samples and found no lead.

The state's first armory, located in Portland's Pearl District, has become the home of Portland Center Stage. The theater company declined to have its building tested. A spokeswoman said crews completely excavated the armory's former basement firing range 10 years ago during a $36 million renovation. Accessing what remains of the basement, she said, would require someone to tunnel through concrete.

The Klamath Falls Police Department, which moved into a renovated armory there, did not respond to calls.

Reaction to scrutiny

Since the discoveries in Forest Grove, Oregon military officials have remained in denial about the risks lead contamination has posed to the thousands of people who've used armories.

Tell them what you think

David Stuckey

Stuckey, Oregon Military Department deputy director, oversees the issue of lead in armories.

David Stuckey, deputy director of the Oregon Military Department, acknowledged that his agency was "inconsistent" in its management of firing ranges "for a great deal of time." He said he didn't know until late 2014 that armory common areas were being contaminated, even though statewide surveys showed widespread lead as far back as 2006.

Stuckey's agency fought to stop The Oregonian/OregonLive from obtaining emails written by Swafford, the official in charge of armory maintenance. The correspondence, which the Oregon Department of Justice ordered released, shows how Swafford reacted to scrutiny.

One email to Stuckey, dated July 23, 2015, showed Swafford spent time poring over minutes of safety meetings in which Shantz, the Guard's workplace safety nurse, urged officers to close indoor gun ranges. They were contaminated, and soldiers responsible for cleaning them weren't being tested for lead exposure. The same warning showed up in meeting minutes from September 2013 and January 2014.

Tell them what you think

Lt. Gen.

Daniel Hokanson

Hokanson is vice chief of the National Guard Bureau and the former top Oregon Guard official. Public Affairs office: (703) 607-2584.

In March 2014, Col. Thomas Lingle ordered all Oregon armory operators to stop using indoor firing ranges. Yet in the months after that order, at least three firing ranges remained open, according to the Guard's own logs. And Shantz continued to urge their closure, meeting minutes say.

Swafford told Stuckey the minutes would look bad for the Guard when they became public.

"We will definitely be open to criticism," Swafford told Stuckey in the email. "It appears that for at least 10 months we did nothing."

The emails also show Swafford knew at least as early as 2013 that inspections routinely found problems with indoor ranges. He told a military leader that using the indoor ranges "has become more problematic than beneficial" because the ranges needed upgrades "which we can't afford."

Yet in an interview last year, Swafford told The Oregonian/OregonLive he was unaware of any significant issues in Oregon armories until the Forest Grove report landed in late 2014.

Even then, he said, he hesitated to call the contamination in Forest Grove a problem. "I struggle with saying 'problem,'" he said.

The Oregon Guard declined repeated requests from The Oregonian/OregonLive to interview Shantz, who appeared to be the first person to sound the alarm. She had pushed her bosses to stop using what she described as "consistently unsafe" firing ranges in 2013, records show.

The Oregon Guard's indoor firing ranges were among the last in the country to shut down in early 2014. Last May, the National Guard estimated it only had 20 that remained open nationwide. Even more have closed since then.

Oregon military leaders initially hoped to resume using some firing ranges for target practice once lead was removed. They no longer plan to do so. Annual weapons qualification has moved to outdoor ranges on military bases, where casual armory visitors can't be exposed to lead dust and soldiers can fire a wider range of weapons.

In 2015, the Oregon Military Department sent a letter to groups that recently rented 12 armories with indoor firing ranges. "Elevated levels of residual lead dust were found in some occupied and unoccupied areas in some of the Armories," the letter said. The results weren't included. They're on file in Salem, the letter said.

Tell them what you think

Maj. Gen.

Michael E. Stencel

Stencel is the adjutant general for the Oregon National Guard. 503-584-3991

Most Oregon armories have reopened to the public, but Forest Grove has remained closed for almost two years to undergo a major decontamination. And repeated cleanings in Coos Bay still haven't removed all the lead.

In an email to Oregon's workplace safety nurse in early 2015, the Guard's top safety inspector ruminated about the ranges' legacy.

"I understand that cleaning and conversion of ranges is costly," wrote industrial hygiene chief Ken Forsythe. The Guard, he said, "invited this problem" because of its reliance on indoor firing ranges to train its troops.

"Now we are left to fix it."

— Rob Davis

PART 1: NATIONAL GUARD INACTION EXPOSES COMMUNITIES TO LEAD

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