Description

Vieques is an island municipality of Puerto Rico that is known for its beautiful beaches and bioluminescent bay. During the 1940s, it was used as a military training site. For a span of 60 years, they tested live ammunition in two-thirds of the island, leaving multiple unexploded artillery in terrestrial and marine environments (Caro, 2008). They openly tested at an average of 180 days per year, being conducted eight miles away from 9,000 to 14,000 of Vieques civilians (Sanderson et al., 2017). This practice left behind an array of contamination of heavy metals and organic compounds. By 2005, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed the Vieques bombing range as a superfund site. One of the most contaminated bodies of water in Vieques is the Anones Lagoon. It is listed in the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List indicating that the contamination poses a threat to human health and the environment (Davis et al., 2007). Moreover, the lagoon is directly connected to the Caribbean Sea, meaning the water’s current can carry the contaminants to open water.

The contamination left behind due to the military exercises has disrupted the ecosystem and biodiversity of Vieques. Species of flora and fauna have presented bioaccumulation of heavy metals affecting the local economy, which relies significantly on its fertile soils and fishing. In open environments, undesirable concentrations of pollutants could be dispersed through multiple biotic and abiotic processes. Contaminated soil with heavy metals has produced excessive levels of trace elements in edible plants cultivated in Vieques, suggesting the cause is due to the military exercises (Massol-Deyá, and Díaz, 2003). In addition, it also poses a threat to the marine ecosystem, particularly in the water and flesh of many living organisms nearby reef sites presenting the presence of explosive residues in these organisms (Porter et al., 2011). After the analysis of possibly hazardous chemicals on drinking water, two carcinogenic substances, hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitroso-1,3,5-triazine (RDX) and 2,4-DNT (DNT), were found in high concentrations in several freshwater sources at Vieques (Caro, 2008).

Currently, human health is at risk since the exposure to these precarious chemicals is not under control. The contamination has been identified in a site at unsafe levels, and it is reasonable to expect that some inhabitants may have been exposed to such contamination (Sanderson et al., 2017). To understand the distribution of the explosive residues to civilian exposure, Figure 1. illustrates the pathway from the explosion test area towards the inhabitants in the civilian area (Sanderson et al., 2017). In the aspect of the cleanup operations, the Navy focused on land-based high amounts of unexploded ordnance (UXO) removal and recently expanded to address UXO in freshwater, and marine environments, including the restriction of access to the contaminated lands, and removal of bombs by open-air denotation (McCaffrey, 2018). The main problem is the open-air detonation practice, resulting in the uncontrolled release of toxic contaminants to the environment, which only aggravates the problem of previously deposited contaminants within the environment.

Figure 1. Pathway from the explosion test area towards the inhabitants in the civilian area (obtained from Sanderson et al., 2017).