What you write is well and good, but it is most applicable to the private sector. KAFB is a government entity, and it is run by the military which has only six month to four year tours of duty at KAFB. Military personnel have the goal of protecting our country from enemies from the outside. Housekeeping duties, like the inventory of jet fuel and record keeping, is not their specialty nor is it their concern. Civil Service personnel have a narrow focus of job duties and concern themselves with nothing else. Besides, KAFB is run by the military which focuses on the broader goal of the defeat of our enemies.

The current base commander wasn’t on site when all that fuel was leaking. He was certainly not there when the problem began. He probably wasn’t even in the military. He may not have even been born. It is wrong to focus on blame, and just get at the business of cleaning the stuff up. I am with the base commander since his command began well after the problem, and his command will likely end long before the problem is solved, and the mess is cleaned up. The solution will likely involve the set up of permanent personnel, probably civilian, with the appropriate organization which has the on-going responsibility of monitoring the hazardous substances on the base, but this oversight must come the highest levels of command in the Pentagon itself working with the appropriate regulatory agencies, like EPA, OSHA, and NIOSH all of which are government agencies within the executive branch of the government. Give the base commander a break. He may not have been born when the problem started. He is likely almost as much out of the loop as the meeting participant. Line career officers on the base merely concern themselves with spending the money to get their job, that is defense goals, done. Permanent oversight of the base in regards to environmental matters must come from the highest level in Washington.

Yes! Someone had to know, and most probably did; but that someone is probably serving somewhere in Timbuktu with only vague memories of Albuquerque and its problems, if, indeed, he remembers at all. Cut the blame, and just clean up the mess. Everyone who has ever served on KAFB, every citizen who has ever lived near the base and enjoyed its benefits, and every traveler who has flown through the Sunport shares some of the blame. It is impossible to pinpoint it to one individual. Just clean up the mess, and put in place preventative measures to prevent it from happening again at least in that magnitude and over that duration. Waste and negiligence will happen again because waste and negligence is distinctly a part every military organization, particularly one which is centered on research and development. For every project that generates new and useful weapon systems, there are at least nine that are abandoned as unworkable, unuseful, too expensive, or for some other reason; but each yields useful knowledge that affects the one that makes it.