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Burn-pit stonewalling

Military regulations state that open-air burn pits should be used only as a short-term waste disposal solution in forward areas until cleaner-burning, but costlier, incinerators can be brought online.

But more than eight years after the start of the Afghanistan war and almost seven years after the start of the Iraq war, 84 burn pits still operate in the war zones.

Mounting anecdotal evidence suggests that these open-air burn pits are making troops sick, and it’s not hard to connect the dots.

The pits have consumed well over a million tons of plastics, paint, fuel, medical waste and a wide variety of other hazardous materials.

They produce a persistent, potentially toxic haze that hangs over troops’ living and working spaces — a likely cause, experts say, of rising numbers of active-duty respiratory and neurological disorders since 2001 to levels above the norm for such a young and fit population.

Even so, it took until this month for Pentagon officials to soften their long-held insistence that burn-pit smoke carries “no known long-term health effects.”

Not that they are copping to a problem, mind you. But they are, at last, acknowledging that the pits may cause “untoward health effects” in some deployed troops.

That’s progress of a sort, even if it is long overdue.

The Pentagon’s long, sorry history on environmental health issues remains a cause for concern, however.

Congress should demand a full accounting of all existing environmental test data related to burn-pit plumes in Iraq and Afghanistan — and an explanation of why, after years of combat deployments, burn pits still outnumber incinerators by a ratio of more than 3-to-1 on U.S. bases in the war zones.

DISCUSS: Burn pits