When Hurricane Helene ripped up the East Coast in the fall of 2024, water from the New River flooded towns and destroyed bridges across parts of West Virginia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

In Radford, Virginia, floodwaters crested at 31 feet. Just downstream, the river surged into the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, tearing through warehouse doors and washing out more than a dozen storage containers with thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals inside.

The Army didn’t warn residents until weeks later about the containers filled with dibutyl phthalate, a key component of rocket propellant that has been linked to cancer and reproductive problems in humans—along with hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel and more than 100,000 pounds of wastewater contaminated with calcium sulfate—that had been washed away in the flood. Officials said later that they assumed the containers would sink to the bottom of the river and floodwaters would dilute any chemical leakage.

At least one container, however, washed up on nearby land, where it was partially drained. Two years later, three remain unaccounted for, according to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which found that more than 1,500 gallons had leaked into the environment.

Radford Army Ammunition Plant had already been cited earlier in 2024 for discharging excessive levels of pollutants into the New River. It faced a similar penalty in 2023. And in 2022, Virginia environmental regulators listed Radford as the state’s top releaser of toxins.

“They’re constantly being cited for putting excessive levels of lead into the water, or other toxic releases into the air, or burning more chemicals than they’re supposed to,” said Alyssa Carpenter, a founder of Citizens for Arsenal Accountability, which advocates for stronger environmental practices at Radford.

Radford is also a critical part of the nation’s munitions supply chain: It is the only domestic producer of certain types of propellant used in artillery and rockets. As the Pentagon moves to replenish its depleted munitions stockpile and increase production, it is relying in part on a network of aging Army ammunition plants like Radford, several of which have long histories of violating environmental and safety regulations.

Advocates say the military has too often treated those risks as secondary to production, leaving workers and nearby communities to absorb the consequences.

“The track record of the Department of Defense agencies is not good,” said Mathy Stanislaus, who helped oversee toxic cleanup efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration. “It’s always defense. ‘That’s our mission.’ Everything else is secondary.”

Now, advocates worry that pressure to produce more ammunition could intensify the risk to local communities. They argue that the costs of rebuilding America’s arsenal are being borne disproportionately by plant workers and the mostly rural communities surrounding the facilities.

“It’s cheap for the military, but it is very expensive for us, for our entire lives,” Carpenter said. “You can’t increase production without increasing the toxic byproducts that come from that production.”

An Aging Arsenal

As the United States entered World War II, the Army built a network of ammunition plants across the country that became part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy.” Many were decommissioned after the war and more closed by the end of the Cold War.

Today, much of the defense industrial base is run by private companies, but the Army still manages a network of specialized arsenals, ammunition plants, and maintenance depots, many of which help manufacture, test, and repair missiles, heavy ordnance, and their components, handling work that ranges from creating raw explosive chemicals and rocket propellant to loading warheads and artillery shells.

The United States military is running low on several critical munitions. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published this summer estimated that U.S. inventory of Patriot interceptor missiles had fallen from more than 2,300 at the start of the Iran War to around 800 by the end of July. Stocks of THAAD interceptors, which shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, had likewise fallen by nearly half, from roughly 450 before the war.

The strain predates the Iran War, however. U.S. inventories of precision-guided weapons and heavy conventional ordnance stockpiles had already been under pressure from decades of post-Cold War factory consolidation and shipments to allies overseas.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States produced about 14,000 155 mm artillery shells a month. At times, Ukrainian soldiers were burning through that many rounds in just a few days.

And historically, munitions production has often lost out to other priorities in Pentagon budget fights.

“When you’re putting together a budget, you can’t just ask for everything,” said Carlton Haelig, who works on defense strategy at the Center for a New American Security. “When there need to be cuts to pay for an extra squadron [of fighter jets] purchased, another set of transport aircraft, surface ships, whatever, the place that is often considered for making those cuts is in the munitions portfolio.”

In recent years, however, concern about a potential confrontation with China has pushed the Pentagon to expand munitions production. Last year, the Defense Department established a new council tasked with dramatically increasing production of 14 weapons systems, and it has poured billions of dollars toward accelerating production of 155 mm artillery shells.

Environmental advocates worry that pushing more production through aging Army facilities could worsen existing problems with pollution, worker safety, and transparency.

“Measured by the number of sites where hazardous substances have been released into the environment, the military is far and away the largest polluter in the United States,” said Lenny Siegel, an expert on military contamination who leads the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. “I see the simple issue of math. If you’re releasing X into the environment now, you’re going to release 10X when you multiply your production by 10.”

Justine Barati, a spokesperson for the Army Sustainment Command, which oversees these facilities, disagreed.

“The U.S. Army does not, and will never, compromise the safety of our workforce or our surrounding communities to meet production quotas. Protecting our people and the environment is foundational to national security,” she said. “We cannot sustain warfighter readiness without safe, resilient, and compliant installations.”

Barati pointed to a sweeping $18 billion modernization effort across these facilities, saying the Army’s “highest priority” in the modernization is to improve environmental compliance and workplace safety.

But that project is not scheduled to be completed until 2038, and the Army is already accelerating production at some facilities.

“At the same time, the Ukraine war started to get hot and heavy, and we were given the edict that’s like, ‘hurry up and go fast’,” Maj. Gen. John Reim, head of the joint armaments and ammunitions program executive office, told Breaking Defense last year.

EPA records show that all the Army ammunition plants and arsenals involved in producing, testing, or storing weapon components have been cited or flagged for noncompliance by the EPA or state regulators in the past five years. Four of them have been flagged for “significant noncompliance” by the EPA, designating them severe or chronic violators of environmental law. Many of them have also violated state environmental regulations.

EPA records show Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, for instance, which helps forge steel 155 mm shell bodies, was flagged for violating the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act multiple times during 2024 and 2025. At the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in 2023, regulators found workers improperly detonated explosives in a detonation chamber, among other issues. At Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, BAE Systems, which operates the plant, was fined this October by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation’s air pollution control division for improper record-keeping and reporting of data.

Federal and state regulators can inspect and penalize these facilities, but the fines are often small compared with the sheer size and resources of the Defense Department. After EPA inspectors found alleged violations at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, in 2024, the EPA fined the Army and plant operator American Ordnance just under $40,000—compare that with a $53 million Army contract American Ordnance was awarded this year for its work at the plant.

“The biggest problem is that the Department of Defense is effectively self-regulating,” Stanislaus, the former EPA official, said.

“When the rubber hits the road, EPA and state agencies simply do not have the authority to mandate certain activities, everything from preventing harm to doing the cleanup.”

A Whistleblower’s Safety Concerns

The fire that erupted on a July night in Crane, Indiana, burned for 15 hours.

Workers at Crane Army Ammunition Activity, which disposes of old munitions, had been storing mortar rounds outdoors in wooden crates beneath a tarp in the baking sun. Temperatures had climbed into the high 90s for several days.

The rounds contained red phosphorus, which can generate heat and flammable gases as it degrades. On the evening of July 6, 2022, nearly 115,000 pounds of red phosphorus ignited, sending flames and smoke billowing into the sky.

What happened before and after illustrates how difficult it can be to hold these facilities accountable.

Three years earlier, Rick Ward, the newly hired safety chief at Crane Army Ammunition Activity, which is housed at Naval Weapons Station Crane, had concerns with safety at the facility. A safety program for controlling hazardous substances was not fully implemented. Hazardous processes weren’t properly classified. Slings used to move heavy explosives didn’t have current certifications.

Ward pointed to an earlier explosion at Crane, in 2013, that sent five people to the hospital. An OSHA inspection afterward identified three dozen safety violations, and an Army “lessons learned” report cited a lack of clear safety procedures.

Ward worried that the safety culture at Crane hadn’t changed. He began bringing concerns up with his supervisors, according to documents he shared with The War Horse.

“Can you imagine taking over as a safety director and knowing that you’ve been handed 36 OSHA violations that never got corrected?” he said.

The year before Ward arrived, EPA had also cited Naval Weapons Station Crane—the base where Crane Army Ammunition Activity is housed—for improperly storing hazardous waste. But Ward felt his concerns were not being taken seriously. So in 2020, he filed an anonymous complaint with OSHA.

Because of COVID-related restrictions, OSHA asked the Army to investigate the allegations itself. Ironically, Crane leaders assigned Ward to conduct the investigation.

About an hour after Ward submitted his report, he said, he was put on administrative leave. He was fired several months later, according to a statement from his lawyers.

Ward has struggled to find work ever since. Crane barred him from the installation, and the Air Force, where he serves as a reserve officer, revoked his security clearance.

“It’s really hard to get a job when you’ve been on the front page of every newspaper in Indiana,” he said.

Barati, the Army Sustainment Command spokesperson, disputed Ward’s account.

“The Army did not retaliate against Mr. Rick Ward in any form or manner. The Army takes workplace safety very seriously and welcomes safety concern feedback from all our employees,” she said.

Many of Ward’s concerns were later substantiated.

A whistleblower investigation partially or fully upheld five of his eight allegations. Among them: Crane did not maintain an accurate list of locations where hazardous work occurred and lacked a complete safety plan for controlling and handling hazardous substances.

EPA inspections in 2023 and 2024 found additional problems at Naval Weapons Station Crane. Inspectors reported materials were still stored in ways that could create fire risks, hazardous materials lacked proper labeling, open containers held corrosive waste, and hazardous waste was kept onsite for more than three times the legal time limit.

“If you mislabel a particular compound, and you put it into a vessel that cannot handle the corrosiveness of that, then it leaks through that vessel and contaminates the ground,” Stanislaus said. “Terrible things can happen.”

Last fall, EPA notified Naval Weapons Station Crane that it planned to assess nearly $250,000 in penalties for the violations.

That is a significant EPA penalty. But for Crane, it’s barely a line item in the budget.

Toxins in the Air

Not long after Alyssa Carpenter graduated from Virginia Tech in 2017, just a few miles from the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, she had to have her thyroid removed. She was 26, otherwise healthy, and had no family history of thyroid cancer. Doctors told her the gland was covered in suspicious nodules.

Carpenter cannot say for sure what caused her condition. But as a student at Virginia Tech, she had advocated for better environmental controls at the plant, and she worries the chemicals the plant releases into the environment may have played a role in her illness.

For decades, Radford and other military facilities have disposed of old munitions and production waste by burning or detonating them in the open, releasing toxic gases, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds into the air.

The United States generally banned open burning and open detonation of hazardous waste in 1980 but created an exception for explosive waste that could not safely be treated another way. That exception has allowed the practice to continue at military and civilian munition facilities.

In 2025, 45 years after the ban, 64 public and private facilities across the United States were still allowed to burn or detonate hazardous waste.

Residents around Radford have long raised concerns about thyroid disease in the area, though a 2022 review of cancer-registry data by VPM News, a local NPR station, found mixed evidence of unusually high rates. What is clear is that the plant regularly releases hazardous pollutants into the air. According to EPA data, in 2024, Radford released into the air—along with other chemicals—19,000 pounds of ammonia, which reacts with the atmosphere to create a fine particulate matter known to cause respiratory distress, and more than 900 pounds of lead compounds or lead, a neurotoxin with no known safe level of human exposure. EPA requires facilities to report lead emissions if they exceed just 100 pounds a year.

Barati, the Army Sustainment Command spokesperson, said that Radford had reduced the amount of waste treated by open burning by more than 50% since 2017. She also pointed to a new energetic waste incinerator under construction at the facility that will ultimately replace the need for open burning. The incinerator, originally scheduled to be completed in 2025, will not be operational until 2027, Barati said.

Open burns are subject to environmental limits, and facilities are supposed to account for wind patterns and other factors to make burns safer. But those safeguards can be difficult to enforce.

At Crane, for instance, EPA inspectors cited the facility in 2023 for conducting burns when its own records showed weather conditions outside permitted limits. (Crane officials told the EPA weather was recorded at a different time of day and that the weather was in parameters when it conducted the burns).

Technology has changed since the U.S. allowed an exception for the open burning or detonation of military munitions in 1980. Many other countries, including Germany and Canada, have banned open burning and open detonation of hazardous waste, and military munitions are disposed of in contained burn chambers or closed incinerators. In 2024, the EPA proposed new rules that would further restrict the practice and push facilities toward safer alternative technologies. But the rulemaking has stalled. An EPA spokesperson told The War Horse that the agency plans to finalize the regulations by the end of this year.

The military has moved away from open-air waste burning in recent years at overseas bases.

For decades, troops stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries burned everything from medical waste and plastics to old explosives in open burn pits. Military officials defended the pits as a practical necessity in remote war zones.

Like the residents of some communities near ammunition plants in the U.S., service members at bases with burn pits breathed in toxic air containing particulate matter that irritated their throats and lungs, and heavy metals that accumulated in their tissues. When they came home from deployment, they began developing rare cancers and other diseases.

But as veterans reported respiratory illnesses, cancers, and other health problems after breathing in the smoke, public pressure grew. The military eventually curtailed the use of burn pits overseas, and Congress passed the PACT Act in 2022, expanding VA benefits for millions of veterans exposed to the toxic substances during military service—but there are no such benefits for civilians exposed to domestic burn pits.

For Carpenter, that history shows the military can change when the risks become impossible to ignore.

“If it’s toxic for service members, then it’s going to be toxic for community members as well,” she said.

This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.