By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
A group of 10 lawmakers Thursday conducted an on-site inspection of environmental conditions at three U.S. military bases recently returned to South Korea. A National Assembly hearing on the issue is scheduled for June 25-26.
The members of the Assembly's Environment and Labor Committee were accompanied by their aides and environmental experts on their trip to the bases _ Camp Edwards and Camp House in Paju and Camp Kyle in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province.
South Korea recently accepted nine more closed U.S. military facilities here as a joint committee under the Korea-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved the base return.
But some environmental civic groups condemned the decision, demanding a full-scale environmental cleanup of the returned bases be paid for by the United States.
Officials at the Ministry of National Defense admit that environmental cleanup of the returned land by the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) has not met Korea's environmental standards.
So far, the USFK has handed over 23 of 59 military facilities to be returned to Korea under a 2004 land swap deal aimed at repositioning U.S. troops south of Seoul.
The USFK said that it has made efforts that ``go beyond'' the SOFA by removing polluted underground storage tanks inside the camps, removing lead and copper left at former firing ranges using an advanced technique called ``bio-slurping,'' treating petroleum-contaminated soil by creating vents in the land and skimming fuel from groundwater.
The SOFA stipulates that the USFK can return land without environmental treatment of pollutants beyond those posing ``known, imminent, and substantial endangerment to human health.''
Earlier this year, Rep. Woo Won-shik of the pro-government Uri Party said some U.S. bases returned last year contain dumped electronic transformers with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) exceeding Korea's environmental standards, citing an Assembly report.
The report said that dumped transformers in Camp Colbern, Gyeonggi Province, have a PCB concentration of 88.16mg/l, 44 times higher than the level permissible of 2mg/l, according to Woo.