Today's Fox News article on the Army switch away from lead in ammunition,
brought to the attention of this forum by Doug Romm, contained this nugget:

        In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Army's
Massachusetts Military Reservation to stop all live-fire training after a
study showed lead and other toxins seeping into Cape Cod's underground water
supply.
The assertion that lead from bullets is the cause of elevated lead in Cape
Cod water, should it be true, offers all kinds of interesting possibilities
for a follow-up story. I haven't checked out the source of the claim, but
based on previous investigation I did looking for such instances, I'm
skeptical. Long-time forum participants may recall the abandoned lead mine
that is now being used to train scuba divers. The lead content in this water
is quite low. Also, municipal water suppliers measure lead in the water at
the customer's faucet and adjust the pH to control it. They do not seem very
concerned about the levels of lead they see in the water that they start
with.

Why would the lead in water be high just in Cape Cod? As the article points
out, there are lots of places where lead bullets have been used for
training. If the claim is true, then the Army ought to be performing a
comprehensive review of lead in water at all of those places, too. Maybe
some environmental group would like to take this on as a project. I just
hope that if such a review is performed, the results, positive or negative,
are publicized.

Everyone favors being good stewards of the environment. The question that
needs to be addressed is, are we going to make our decisions based on public
sentiment, intuition, and urban legends, or are we going to use data? Apart
from the claim about Cape Cod's water supply, I didn't see any other
reference to how the spent bullets in the ground are causing a problem for
anyone. (I know about lead shotgun pellets affecting waterfowl, but if
that's relevant to this situation it wasn't mentioned.) It's worth
remembering that the ground there, as everywhere else, contains lead left
over from the decades during which tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline. If
lead in the surface layers of the earth were an environmental hazard, we
could regard the entire earth as one vast Superfund site. (Bruce Euzent's
comments about wheel-balancing weights contaminating San Francisco Bay fits
in here, too. Where are the data showing that these wheel weights cause an
elevated lead level in bay water?)

Stopping the use of lead bullets cannot possibly have a measurable effect on
the amount of lead in Cape Cod's water. Everyone knows how it is still
common to find bullets left over from the Civil War. They are still there
after 135 years or more because they don't dissolve (or dissolve very, very
slowly, and precipitate as lead carbonate or lead sulfate very close by).
I'm sure that buried bullets from the Revolutionary War still exist
undissolved, too. Does the Army intend to remove all the bullets in the
ground at the Massachusetts Military Reservation? If not, how can the EPA
think that they have accomplished their objective? What will they do when
they discover that the lead levels in Cape Cod water are not dropping as a
result of their order? How many cases of elevated blood lead levels are
being found in Cape Cod compared to other places around the country? The
data that I've seen all indicate a drastic reduction in blood lead levels in
the US since the cessation of use of lead-based paint and lead in gasoline.

How many lives does the Army or the EPA think that they can save by taking
such measures? No one ever says. It's just "good environmental stewardship",
with no cost-benefit analysis. The real basis for deciding to make the
switch from lead to tungsten composite should be a simple cost trade-off
between the extra cost per bullet and the money saved from reduced barrel
erosion, plus the benefit of improved target accuracy. The rest is just
political correctness. Irrational, but it makes some people feel good.

Gordon Davy

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leadfee Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Leadfree
To temporarily stop delivery of Leadree for vacation breaks send: SET Leadfree NOMAIL
Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives
Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional
information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------