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Flush with the peace and prosperity brought by the end of the Cold War, the government shuttered military bases across the country. To soften the economic blow, communities were offered the land at little or no cost.

Now those communities, large and small, are waking up to the fact those sites have been contaminated by decades of military use, in many cases limiting future development. And the savings the government hoped to realize in eliminating those bases largely have been offset by the staggering costs of cleaning them up.

In the decade since the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission acted to save the military money by closing more than 100 bases, only a fraction of the land has been handed over to communities.

Critics question the Pentagon's commitment to cleaning up contamination and whether Congress - which recently cut next year's BRAC budget by $150 million - will provide enough money to do the job.

And that doesn't even address the hundreds of former military installations closed outside the BRAC process, many of them already converted to farms, parks, industrial sites and residential areas.

At thousands of such locations nationwide, unexploded ordnance and hazardous chemicals have polluted the soil and groundwater and raised legitimate fears of detonation. A federal official in charge of those sites admitted the program to clean them over the next half-century was "grossly underfunded."

"The U.S. military remains the most committed environmental violator in the country," said Jonathan Turley, director of the Environmental Law Advocacy Center at George Washington University.

Turley said that while the military has made great strides in environmental cleanup in the past decade, there are strong reasons to be skeptical.

Military leaders paid little attention to environmental laws until U.S. Army contractors employed at the Chemical Research Development and Engineering Center at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were prosecuted, Turley said.

Three civilian employees who held supervisory positions at the facility were convicted of environmental crimes after the roof at a plant where hazardous chemical waste was stored collapsed in 1983.

Several drums of dimetheyl polysulfide, an ignitable chemical used in the Army's binary chemical warfare program, were crushed, spilling the chemical onto the floor and into the drains. The waste was not cleaned up until the following year.

After four rounds of base closings, the military has saved an estimated $3.7 billion, said Glenn Flood, a Defense Department spokesman. Savings are expected to rise to $5.6 billion each year after 2003, Flood said.

The Pentagon plans to use that money on weapons and troops. Defense Secretary William Cohen wants Congress to approve two more rounds of base closings, even though he's acknowledged the cleanup costs would far surpass BRAC expenses.

Col. John Selstrom, director of the Defense Department's Environmental Cleanup Program, said the military already has spent $5.6 billion to clean up BRAC property and plans to spend another $3.8 billion before it is through.

"Our desire there is to clean up the property, transfer it to some other entity, and we're able to move on with other possibilities," Selstrom said.

But a Defense Department analysis of closing bases completed this summer reported only 19 percent of all the property at 112 of the biggest BRAC installations had been transferred.

More than 4,800 contaminated sites have been identified on these bases, including contaminated buildings and polluted groundwater, soil and landfills. While half of all sites have been cleaned up, almost 1,500 still are under investigation.

"I think across the country everything has taken more time than most people have expected," said Daniel Pickett, who is researching the execution and effects of U.S. base closings for the International City/County Management Association.

Turley said the military's efforts at cleaning up its messes have been less than thorough.

"The military has an incentive to engage in cosmetic cleanup that removes drums of waste and deals with surface contamination," Turley said. "Even when the military admits contamination, it tends to argue that a cleanup would be too costly or instead would create health hazards."

Harry Kelso, a Virginia attorney and a former federal environmental crimes prosecutor, said that while the military legally is responsible for cleanup, it also tends to try to shed property as quickly and as inexpensively as possible.

"The debate in the environmental community and in the military is, how clean is clean?" Kelso asked. "To what level?"

Communities are eager to redevelop closing bases in order to replace lost jobs, but Kelso wondered how cities and counties would react if a firm called Joe's Industrial Plant or Joe's Armament Plant offered up its property for reuse.

"Beware the federal government bearing gifts of former federal government property," Kelso said.

In 1995, the General Accounting Office estimated the cleanup of known contamination at BRAC bases would cost $11 billion but indicated the price likely would rise as more sites were discovered.

Now, the Pentagon projects it will spend no more than $10 billion to clean closing BRAC property.

Much of the BRAC property - 330,000 acres - will be retained and used by the Defense Department, according to a 1998 GAO report. Of the remaining 464,000 acres, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency and other federal agencies will be the biggest recipients.

Bases that will be transferred to civilians will be prepared largely for industrial reuse. New homes and apartments would not be allowed on severely polluted land.

Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, a group created to monitor the effects of base closings, said the military is falling short of doing what is needed.

"Some of the worst places are where their goal is to leave and where they are unwilling to meet the community's reuse plans," Siegel said.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors took issue with the military's increased reliance on land-use controls that forever restrict redevelopment of base property, calling the practice a "cost-saving substitute for active remediation" in a resolution adopted in June.

Kelso characterized the less than $2 billion the military spends yearly on environmental cleanup - it uses the money not only for BRAC bases but also for existing bases and Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) - as far from sufficient.

One legacy of the Cold War can be found on tens of millions of acres of old firing and bombing ranges and training areas already converted to other uses.

More than 9,000 such sites have been identified, many littered with unexploded ordnance and hazardous chemicals that have polluted the groundwater and soil. The Environmental Protection Agency has started to take notice.

In a draft report released in July, the agency states it has had "increasing concerns with the manner in which environmental investigations and cleanups of privately owned Formerly Used Defense Sites have been conducted."

The EPA is proposing to compile a comprehensive inventory of sites "where a release or threatened release of a hazardous substance may exist" with the help of states and American Indian tribes and force whoever is responsible to pay for the cleanup.

The report states the problems at these sites "are similar to those found at current military facilities" and may include hazardous and solid waste landfills; explosive ordnance; radioactive wastes; and soil and groundwater pollution.

State environmental and health regulators also have accused the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for cleaning up FUDS of improperly clearing sites of the need for additional remediation.

More than half of the 39 states that responded to a survey conducted by the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials indicated they had "reason to believe" the corps "has not made sound environmental decisions."

In a letter to Sherri Goodman, deputy undersecretary of defense, Timothy Fields Jr., a high-ranking EPA official, listed more than a dozen former or closing ranges that are contaminated with unexploded ordnance and "hazardous chemical constituents."

Fields cited Pennsylvania's Tobyhanna Army Depot, where 20,000 acres were turned into a state park, which had to be shut down in 1997 after 54 unexploded 37mm shells were found. Later investigations resulted in the removal of "significant additional" ordnance.

An employee at a salvage yard also was killed when he attempted to cut through unexploded ordnance that came from Tobyhanna and had been mistaken as scrap.

The EPA only once has unilaterally ordered a military base to clean up unexploded ordnance.

In January, the agency directed the National Guard and the Massachusetts National Guard to remove unexploded ordnance at Camp Edwards and clean up contaminated groundwater and soil.

Camp Edwards lies over the most productive part of Cape Cod Aquifer, which is the sole source of drinking water for 200,000 year-round residents and more than a half-million summer visitors.

Unsafe levels of RDX, a hazardous chemical used in explosives and rat poison, were found in 18 monitoring wells near Camp Edwards, and metals above the allowable levels were detected in 40 monitoring wells.

However, the EPA's ability to enforce environmental laws at the military was in jeopardy this year due to a congressional proposal to limit the Defense Department's exposure to lawsuits.

The proposal would have prevented defense funding from being used to pay fines or penalties in excess of $1.5 million for violations of environmental law unless Congress first approved.

The National Association of Attorneys Generals successfully fought to have the measure defeated because they feared it would undermine the ability of states to force the federal government to clean up messes.

Robert Lubbert, chief of the corps' FUDS branch, acknowledged this spring that the military's goal of cleaning up all the old ranges by 2050 was impossible to meet because the program was "grossly underfunded."

Kelso compared the true cost and importance of cleaning up all the environmental contamination at closing bases, FUDS and existing bases to America's Marshall Plan to bail out Europe after World War II.

"This generation, which prides itself as being somewhat environmentally conscious, is going to look pretty silly if we're having debates 30 years from now, because the contamination will have migrated and the health problems will become worse," he said.

A team of reporters spent months examining environmental reports, interviewing residents, military officials and members of the medical community to assess Kelly AFB 's environmental legacy. The staff who worked on the project are: Chris Anderson, environmental writer; Sig Christenson, military writer; Nicole Foy, medical writer; Jerry Needham, water writer; Cindy Tumiel, science writer; Don Finley, specialty writers team editor; Maria Avila, photographer; Anita Baca, photo editor; Mark Blackwell, editorial artist; Robert Zavala, editorial artist; Carolyn Edds, news researcher; Randy Ferguson, page designer; Burt Henry, copy editor.