contracts awarded to clean up massive agent orange spill at airbase inmiddle of highly populated area. work ongoing, all pits open and exposed tryign to get work compelted and sealed up before monsoon season. work halted, contracts cancelled, payments for work completed stopped. wth MAGA..do better this has the makings of an environmental disaster ready shoot aim..again and again and again Trump Halted an Agent Orange Cleanup. That Puts Hundreds of Thousands at Risk for Poisoning. Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind. And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies. Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million. “Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.” They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation. Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.
Americans who served in Vietnam (not the ones with bone spurs) suffered greatly, but the Vietnamese continue to suffer with serious birth defects.
