EPA says proposed gun range at Joint Base Cape Cod could contaminate drinking water

A truck drives past a welcome sign to Joint Base Cape Cod, Monday, Sept. 22, 2014, in Sandwich, Mass.

Cape Cod’s drinking water comes from one giant underground reservoir — the Cape Cod Aquifer — which makes it especially vulnerable to contamination. EPA Regional Administrator David Cash said that the proposed 138-acre gun range would use more than a million bullets a year, releasing metals and chemical propellants into the environment, including copper, nitroglycerin, manganese and strontium.

"It's our job to make sure that when you turn on the tap and you're giving your kid a glass of water, you're not worried about what's in that water. And this would have threatened that." "Water is everything to Cape Cod. If we don't have clean water to drink, we don't have anything," said Andrew Gottlieb, the executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, an environmental advocacy group.

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Guard scales back machine gun range plan on Joint Base Cape Cod, but EPA isn't convincedThe Massachusetts Army National Guard's new, scaled-back proposal comes as a response to a critical Environmental Protection Agency draft report released a year ago, which found the range could contaminate drinking water and create a significant threat to public health for hundreds of thousands of year-round residents on Cape Cod.
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