The National Guard Knows Its Armories Have Dangerous Lead Contamination, Putting Kids and Soldiers At Risk

The matches came in rapid-fire succession on four pitches squeezed next to each other beneath a cavernous roof. Five boys per team, four matches at once, each 18 minutes, with only 90 seconds between them. Twelve hours later, the boys were gone, but the games went on. Eight teams, four fields, a sea of bouncing ponytails.

It was peak soccer simultaneity. A vicious shot hit the crossbar on one pitch; on the next, a midfielder streaked past defenders on a breakaway; a corner kick on the third field; and on the fourth, a straight shot found the back of the net. In the stands, cheers went up for “Dani!” and “Ari!” and “Kylie!” and “Amber!” And as the night wore on, more and more of these young women stood with flushed faces and hands on hips, breathing deeply whenever a stoppage gave them a chance.

The Soccer Coliseum bills itself as the “leading youth soccer arena in America, attracting more teams … than any other indoor facility.” Since 1996, this fútbol mecca — which rents space inside New Jersey’s Teaneck Armory — has offered youth soccer programs, including tournaments, classes, and camps, for kids as young as 3, introducing a generation of children to the beautiful game.

Under the 35,000 square feet of red, artificial turf and the site-mandated rubber-soled shoes, however, lurked a hidden danger. The basement had housed an Army National Guard indoor firing range, or IFR, for decades. Each time a citizen-soldier fired a rifle or pistol, it emitted an extremely dangerous form of lead: toxic dust that research shows is frequently tracked around armories on soldiers’ clothing and dispersed through ventilation systems.

Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept show that the Army National Guard knowingly endangered the health and safety of soldiers and civilians at armories — also known as readiness centers — across three, and possibly 53, states and territories. A Soccer Coliseum director told The Intercept that he was never informed about a potential source of lead contamination in the basement below the playing fields.

The soccer fields at the Teaneck Armory in early 2024. Photo: Nick Turse for The Intercept

Despite being aware of the public health threat posed by lead-contaminated indoor firing ranges, the Army National Guard “didn’t take required action to remediate lead hazards from readiness centers with IFRs,” according to a 2020 Army audit of more than 130 armories that was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. “ARNG, States, and territories potentially put Soldiers and family members health at risk from lead exposure.”

At least 600 and possibly more than 1,300 National Guard indoor firing ranges may still pose a threat.

An investigation by The Intercept finds that nearly 50 years after the U.S. government sounded the alarm about the “potential health hazard” of IFRs, almost 40 years after the National Guard admitted most of its indoor ranges were “unsafe,” and more than 25 years after a Pentagon study urged decontamination of National Guard indoor firing ranges due to “lead hazards,” at least 600 and possibly more than 1,300 National Guard IFRs, from coast to coast, may still pose a threat. Additional armories may also be falsely counted as safe; an untold number that have undergone remediation may still pose health risks. But exactly where citizen-soldiers and civilians are most endangered remains a mystery. National Guard officials admit to flawed recordkeeping and say they do not have a ready list of sites that they call “high-risk IFRs.”

“There ought to be congressional action. And the Secretary of the Army should immediately order the clean-up of these 600 sites. They should be cleaned up in a hurry,” said Ruth Ann Norton, a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee and a leader of Lead-Free NJ, a collaborative focused on addressing lead hazards in the state. “It’s worth the cost, the return on investment, in terms of preventing the health impacts — kidney malfunction, hypertension, stillbirths, miscarriages, cardiac issues, neurological dysfunction — not to mention the moral imperative not to put people at risk.”

Teaneck’s Soccer Coliseum is not mentioned by name in the nearly 50-page audit which obscures even the names of the states where the armories are located, but a picture of the enormous facility, with its distinctive red turf, unique windows, and high arching roof, as well as the audit’s description of the site, leaves no doubt. “Soldiers, civilians, and the public had unrestricted access to two centers with three IFRs in State C,” reads the 2020 audit, noting, in understated fashion, that one of those centers in State C — which the Army confirmed is New Jersey — “hosted an indoor soccer league.”

A photo from the 2020 audit of Army National Guard armories. U.S. Army Audit Agency

A National Guard official told The Intercept that their database lists the Teaneck Armory as “cleaned and remediated” according to a November 2019 “final clearance document.” But the 2020 audit states that while New Jersey’s armories with IFRs were remediated from 2017 to 2019, the remediation was done with “a high-pressure power wash system” that is barred “because it may embed lead throughout a readiness center and generate large quantities of hazardous waste.” The audit further revealed that “soldiers and civilians used the basement — a former IFR — as a storage room” and that the room still contained “lead-contaminated sand” from its days as a firing range.

“You can’t take a power-washer and use it to clean a facility. … It’s just going to spew lead everywhere.”

“You can’t take a power-washer and use it to clean a facility. That’s prohibited. It’s just going to spew lead everywhere — and it embeds it in all kinds of places and then it comes back out,” said Maria Doa, the senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund who spent more than 30 years at the EPA. “The federal government should know its own regulations and abide by them. Not doing so seems criminal.”

The Intercept spoke to Yas Tambi, a director of the Soccer Coliseum, about the findings of the Army audit. Tambi, who said he has been with the organization for 29 years, could not recall receiving any information from the State of New Jersey, the Army, or the National Guard concerning lead dust or lead abatement, including during 2017 to 2019 when power-wash remediation efforts reportedly took place at the Teaneck Armory. “It wasn’t on my radar. Even if remediation was mentioned, I would think, ‘OK, they’re doing their job,’” said Tambi. “If we heard about any kind of contaminants in the building, we would be the first to complain about it.”

Tambi stressed that, to his knowledge, longtime staff suffered no health effects, and that no complaints had been made by members of the public. “If anyone got sick, I would know,” he told The Intercept.

The Soccer Coliseum referred The Intercept to the New Jersey National Guard for answers to additional questions. “We’ll have a response for you by the end of the day today,” Maj. Amelia Thatcher, a spokesperson for the New Jersey National Guard told The Intercept on Tuesday. After the deadline came and went, Thatcher said her promise of a comment had been “optimistic.”

The Teaneck facility was one of more than 130 armories where the Army National Guard put people at risk, according to the audit. In three states — New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio — National Guard personnel did not properly report whether armories with IFRs were active; restrict public access to sites when lead levels were unknown; or conduct thorough lead abatement, jeopardizing the health and safety of soldiers and civilians. 

“State ARNGs didn’t thoroughly remediate lead hazards from readiness centers with IFRs and certify results before converting IFR space to other uses (such as storage area, classroom, or office space),” reads the September 2020 report, which goes on to note that IFRs that haven’t been remediated — such as those in New Jersey — “pose a significant risk” if public access isn’t restricted. The audit also questioned the efficacy of the ANRG’s ability to manage almost $200 million spent on lead dust abatement measures. Almost four years after the audit’s release, the Army National Guard still has not followed through on the auditors’ recommendation that the director of the National Guard compel personnel in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio to perform the required in-depth evaluations to identify the full extent of lead contamination levels and conduct required remediation at 73 armories with IFRs, according to Matt Ahearn, an Army spokesperson.

“It’s stunning,” said Eve Gartner, director of Crosscutting Toxics Strategies at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that uses the courts to protect the environment and the public’s health. “We’ve known for 100 years that lead is a toxin that has very serious health effects especially for developing fetuses, children, and pregnant women, but we’ve really dropped the ball as a country in truly protecting people from exposure.”

New Jersey Army National Guard Soldiers with the 508th Military Police Company and 143rd Transportation Company at the Teaneck Armory on March 19, 2020. Photo: Master Sgt. Matt Hecht/U.S. Air National Guard/DVIDS

From its opening in 1938, lead dust accumulated in the Teaneck Armory — as it did for decades in readiness centers across America. Whenever a National Guards member pulled a trigger, the bullet’s explosive primer, which ignites the gunpowder, released a tiny amount of lead; additional lead then flaked off as the bullet raced down the weapon’s barrel; and still more was released after it tore through its target, slammed into a backdrop, and fell into a sand pit. Across the U.S., this toxic dust was tracked into armories’ common areas on shooters’ clothing and was sucked into ventilation systems and spread throughout facilities.

There is no known safe level of lead exposure according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A heavy metal that is highly toxic when ingested or inhaled, lead is particularly dangerous to children and causes permanent damage to the brain and nervous system, resulting in stunted mental and physical growth. Even low levels of lead in the blood can reduce a child’s ability to concentrate and negatively impact academic achievement. Damage caused by lead poisoning is irreversible.

In adults, lead exposure increases the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, and kidney damage. Pregnant women exposed to high levels of lead are more likely to suffer miscarriages and stillbirths. According to a 2023 Lancet study, worldwide lead exposures may have contributed to 5.5 million adult cardiovascular disease deaths and 765 million lost IQ points among children under 5, in just one year.

The danger of lead, especially to children, was becoming clear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and several European countries banned or restricted the use of lead paint. Concerns over the toxicity of leaded gasoline were raised in the 1920s. But the U.S. would not ban lead paint until 1978, and leaded gas was not completely phased out until 1996. 

Ignoring lead hazards has been a reoccurring theme in America. And over the last several decades, hidden dangers of lead have been revealed in myriad contexts, including in hundreds of neighborhoods around the U.S. where lead factories, known as smelters, once stood; in drinking water from lead pipes in places like Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey; and in paint found in an estimated 29 million older homes.

The hazards of lead-contaminated shooting ranges have been studied since the 1940s, and in the early 1970s, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health conducted surveys of IFRs — most of them in basements or sub-basements similar to those in Teaneck and other armories — and discovered “a potential health hazard due to inorganic lead exposure existed at each range.” In 1979, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration finally established standards for airborne lead exposure in the workplace, including indoor firing ranges.

Since then, 45 years of official reports, media investigations, and failures to act have followed. In the 1980s, National Guard requests for funds to upgrade indoor firing ranges were met with rejections from the Army for failing to specify which IFRs were selected for renovation. 

In the 1990s, the Defense Department’s inspector general investigated indoor firing ranges at National Guard and Army Reserve facilities and found hazardous levels of lead dust in 12 armories, noting that a number had converted firing ranges into storage and office space without decontaminating them. As a result, all ARNG indoor ranges were mandated to “fully comply” with health and safety standards, with the completion date scheduled for February 2010.

Two contractors shovel the bullet catcher material that lies in the “hot zone” behind the targets at an indoor firing range in Belgium on May 2015. Photo: Visual Information Specialist Pierre-Etienne Courtejoie/U.S. Army/DVIDS

In 2016, an investigation by The Oregonian, based on tens of thousands of pages of official records from 41 states, found that hundreds of armories were still contaminated with dangerous amounts of lead dust.

In 2015 and 2016, the Army National Guard directed all 54 states and territories to report on the operational status of readiness centers with IFRs, determine remediation requirements, restrict public access, and fully remediate all lead dust contamination by the end of 2022. All IFRs were shut down, according to National Guard Bureau spokesperson Paul Swiergosz, with about 1,300 identified as “needing remediation.”

Congress also stepped in. “Nearly 20 years after a military audit urged a cleanup nationwide, the lawmakers said it’s time to make the nation’s armories safe,” reads a 2017 press release from 10 senators who called for lead remediation in National Guard armories. 

But when the Army Audit Agency investigated readiness centers from 2018 to 2020, it found the same systemic problems that had persisted for decades. The audit discovered that in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio, 73 of 83 IFRs — nearly 90 percent of those analyzed — were not thoroughly remediated and the required in-depth lead evaluations were not conducted. Those 73 armories with IFRs also didn’t restrict public access when lead levels were unknown.

North Carolina performed “routine housekeeping cleaning” of its 29 IFRs but not the areas outside of ranges where personnel may have tracked lead. It also failed to remediate lead from bullet traps, vents, and heating and ventilation systems. Ohio focused its lead dust remediation efforts on its 24 IFRs but neglected the rest of those facilities. Its armories did not clean or replace the heating and ventilation systems, and the audit found it was “likely that lead contaminants spread throughout the center when the system was operating.” A different 2020 audit, this one by New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, noted that while New York IFRs had not been used in more than 20 years, decades of accumulated lead dust had been tracked around armories on soldiers’ shoes; dispersed through the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems; and spread by weapons cleaning, maintenance, and storage.

In 2015 and 2016, 35 of 42 New York armories were found to have excessive levels of lead dust on surfaces. As part of the 2020 audit, investigators visited 12 armories that were undergoing remediation and found lead levels still exceeded the acceptable threshold at four of them: Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, which houses an arts institution and a women’s homeless shelter; the Jamaica Armory in Queens, also home to a women’s shelter; the Saratoga Armory, which contains a museum; and Manhattan’s Harlem Armory, home to the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose youth programs include “Parent and Me gymnastics for toddlers” as well as basketball, dance, and soccer.

Bullets and rubber cleaned from an indoor firing range on Chièvres Air Base in Belgium on Dec. 6, 2017. Photo: Visual Information Specialist Pierre-Etienne Courtejoie/U.S. Army/DVIDS

Despite assurances by New York State’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs that it had posted warnings (“Danger — Lead Hazard Area” and “Pregnant Women Not Permitted”), the comptroller’s office found no such signage at any of the four armories with dangerously high lead levels. “None of these armories disclosed these excessive lead levels to the public and this is unacceptable,” said Stephen Lynch, New York’s assistant comptroller for state government accountability who spent a combined 30 years in military service, including the Army Reserve and National Guard. “There needs to be improved oversight.” 

Lynch’s personal experience highlights the risk to current Guard troops as well as the plight of generations of veterans and former members of the Guard and Reserve who were exposed to toxic lead dust in armories. Toward the end of his service, while drilling in an New York armory, Lynch saw a memo directing that no civilians or pregnant women should enter the facility because of lead contamination. “It was,” he said, “concerning for many reasons and begs the question, ‘What about military members or civilians working or training at the armory?’”

The fallout of exposure to toxic lead dust to millions of military personnel across parts of three centuries has been mostly overlooked.

The number of military personnel and citizen-soldiers potentially exposed to lead dust in armories since the 19th century is astronomical. By the early 1900s, a significant percentage of “organized militia” in various states were using “indoor target galleries.” And since 1916, all Guard units have been required to “assemble for drill and instruction, including indoor target practice, not less than forty-eight times each year.” That year, there were 132,194 members of the Guard and militia. By the 1950s and 1960s, the average number of Guard members had ballooned to more than 360,000, and even off-duty marksmanship training at indoor ranges was being officially encouraged. By 1988, there were 455,182 Guard members, and between 1990 and 2023, alone, more than 2.8 million military veterans served in the National Guard or Reserve. The fallout of exposure to toxic lead dust to millions of military personnel across parts of three centuries has, however, been mostly overlooked.

Doa, a top official in the EPA’s Science Policy Division until 2021, said that the threat posed by lead has long been given short shrift. “Lead does such horrible things to people and — I saw this when I was working on lead at EPA — it just was not taken as seriously as it needed to be,” she said.

“The Army National Guard should go in and clean up these facilities following best practices for abatement. They should get down to EPA’s more protective proposed lead dust standards,” Doa told The Intercept, referring to changes which would classify any level of lead dust greater than zero as a hazard.

Since New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio didn’t conduct the necessary lead dust remediation, it was, according to the Army audit, “highly likely that other states and territories may have done the same,” and the problem “likely exists ARNG-wide.” There is good reason to believe it. 

The Intercept requested the status of 27 armories. The National Guard provided information on 13 and failed to locate two in their database. The Guard refused to search for information for 12 other armories because it was “taking up too much bandwidth of the environmental team,” according to Swiergosz, the National Guard spokesperson. He instead recommended filing Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents. The Intercept is still waiting on remediation documents requested via FOIA in 2023. 

The Intercept found discrepancies in the National Guard’s own data, resulting in the continued use of facilities that may still be contaminated with lead dust.

In New Hampshire, the Manchester armory’s IFR has been “closed” but has not been remediated, according to the National Guard. The armory has continued to host military personnel and civilians. In February, the facility was packed with National Guard members returning from the Middle East as well as their families, including a sizable contingent of children, according to photos published in Stars and Stripes.

New Hampshire Guard members reunite with friends and family at a “welcome home” ceremony Feb. 8, 2024, at the armory in Manchester, N.H. Photo: Master Sgt. Charles Johnston/U.S. Air National Guard/DVIDS

The National Guard told The Intercept that according to its national database, known as PRIDE, the armory in Hernando, Mississippi, is listed as “closed,” but the National Guard found no mention of a final clearance document. “Closed” status means an IFR has been shut down and the area certified as having acceptable surface lead levels. The Army audit, however, discovered that ARNG personnel could offer “no assurance” that any of the 797 IFRs listed as closed in PRIDE “met the criteria for being successfully cleaned and converted.” The audit found, for example, an armory in North Carolina that hosted “ARNG family members” had a “fully functioning” IFR littered with bullet fragments but was nonetheless listed as “closed” in PRIDE. 

The armory in Waterbury, Vermont, was cleaned in 2017 and is listed as “closed” in PRIDE. Decommissioned in 2022, it is now the site of a Federal Emergency Management Agency Disaster Recovery Center; was used this summer as the site of a youth camp for the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian auxiliary to the U.S. Air Force, hosting about 75 tweens and teens; and has also been talked about as a future homeless shelter. The IFR at an armory in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, was listed as having been “cleaned, tested, and closed in 2017” in PRIDE, but the National Guard offered no additional information about remediation or a final clearance document. Last December, the armory hosted a Toys for Tots event. 

ARNG personnel could offer “no assurance” that any of the 797 indoor firing ranges listed as closed in PRIDE “met the criteria for being successfully cleaned and converted.”

The Army Audit included 12 recommendations, including that armories in the states examined perform evaluations to identify the extent of lead contamination and that the ARNG ensure the accuracy of its database. Ahearn, the Army spokesperson, told The Intercept the critical recommendation that the states perform the required evaluations and IFR lead dust remediation efforts in accordance with ARNG guidance has not been met, although 11 other recommendations had. The Army National Guard’s ability to verify its compliance is, however, questionable. 

The National Guard press office told The Intercept that “it is impractical for ARNG to travel to each site to verify completion” of remediation projects and that the Guard instead relied on self-reported data entered into the PRIDE database by the 54 individual states and territories.

Two sources within the ANRG, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that even basic information about lead abatement in armories was inconsistently tracked and stored — one of the 11 issues supposedly addressed following the 2020 Army audit. Both expressed skepticism that lead contamination data was accurate. Swiergosz admitted as much in an email, noting that while he was no expert, it appeared “there are inconsistencies in how the data is entered into the database.” (He declared this was “off the record,” apparently without realizing that this stipulation is not achieved by unilateral decree.) These findings echo the Army audit which discovered proper documentation was often missing and basic information was lacking. “The data wasn’t complete or accurate,” the auditors wrote of PRIDE. “We couldn’t validate the reliability of facility and IFR data.” 

“We have laws and rules about lead in residences but much less so when it comes to public buildings.”

Experts say that the Army must provide definitive answers about the safety of armories and concrete proof of remediation. “Our laws are very under-protective,” said Earthjustice’s Gartner. “We have laws and rules about lead in residences but much less so when it comes to public buildings — even more so when it comes to a hybrid military and public facility.”

The Army National Guard said it had “addressed” lead threats at around 710 IFRs, as of December 2023. These sites have been “repurposed” and are now “no longer a threat.” Swiergosz told The Intercept that the Army and the National Guard prioritized “high-risk IFRs” and, since 2017, allocated $205 million toward those projects. But when asked for a list of such sites, Swiergosz said they “really don’t track sites that way” and could not provide it nor an inventory of remediated armories.  

In 2019, the PRIDE database listed 1,324 IFRs and 2,911 total armories, but investigators wrote that “ARNG personnel couldn’t tell us if IFRs existed at the remaining 1,587 centers.” The Army audit found that four states over- or under-counted a total of six IFRs and the operational status of another 25 was inaccurate in PRIDE. The auditors also identified one state, which was not in their review, that failed to report any IFRs in the PRIDE database but nonetheless conducted 29 lead remediation projects.

Remediation is also no guarantee of safety. New York’s Whitestone Armory began serving as a community center in the 1980s and, by the early 2000s, was offering programs for children and seniors, including aerobics, arts and crafts classes, basketball, and line dancing. Information from the New York State Comptroller’s Office shows a $1.6 million contract, mostly for “lead mitigation” at the site, was awarded in 2017 and ran until 2020. The next year, however, New York’s Army National Guard informed the state’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs of excessive lead levels there. It was the same for the Orangeburg and Staten Island armories which were remediated under contracts issued in the late 2010s but were also, the comptroller’s office told The Intercept, found to have unacceptably high lead levels in 2021.

“It is a known problem that armories across the country have been found to be contaminated with high levels of lead,” DiNapoli told The Intercept, noting that while New York’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs had taken steps to remediate the lead hazards, more was needed. “If testing is not done consistently and safety standards are not enforced, then unsafe levels of lead could have serious health effects on people using armory facilities.”

While some National Guard armories became community centers decades into their existence, the Teaneck, New Jersey, site was never intended to be a purely military facility.

As its basement began accumulating toxic dust, the Teaneck Armory became, according to the Bergen Record, the “Madison Square Garden of Bergen County.” Beginning in 1938, spectators crowded in to watch amateur boxing and, over the ensuing decades, dog shows, bingo, roller derby, professional wrestling, professional tennis, a rodeo, the crusade of evangelist Billy Graham, performances by entertainers from Frank Sinatra to the Ronettes, and a speech by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. In the 1960s, the armory even briefly became the home of the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association. (Today, they are the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets.) The armory eventually became a movie soundstage for films like the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” before becoming home to the Soccer Coliseum.

One morning earlier this year, girls from NJ Crush Football Club, New York City Football Club, and other teams sprinted back and forth on the Soccer Coliseum’s red turf. As the hours evaporated, goals added up and wins and losses mounted. In the stands, players’ younger siblings climbed over the folding seats, sat transfixed in front of iPads, or wolfed down baggies of snacks.      

For years, scenes like this have played out weekend after weekend, adding to the hundreds of thousands of people — soldiers and civilians, children and adults — who have visited the armory over its long tenure as a sports arena, concert hall, and community hub. Much the same can be said for other National Guard armories from coast to coast that have opened their doors to members of their local communities. The number of those potentially exposed to lead dust over more than a century is staggering — and so are the potential costs.

“Lead poisoning doesn’t stop when a child turns 6, the risks continue: kidney impacts, hypertension, cardiac arrest, and a 46 percent increase in early mortality,” said Lead-Free NJ’s Norton, the architect of the State of Maryland’s effort to reduce childhood lead poisoning. “But this is so fixable. It’s just a question of whether we make the moral and political choice to fix it.”

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