‘Complete Waste’: Army Corps Flushed $5.4M on ‘Unusable’ Trash Incinerators, Probe Finds

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paid $5.4 million for shoddy trash incinerators that were delivered years behind schedule and never used, leaving soldiers at an Afghanistan base with no other option than to keep burning waste in open-air pits, according to an internal probe.

The report from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko was released Monday. It found the failure to complete the trash incinerators left soldiers exposed to potential health hazards from the burn pits, and taxpayers, once again, with nothing to show for a multimillion-dollar investment.

“This project appears to have been a complete waste,” Sopko said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “Even worse, the open-air burn pit used instead of the incinerators put the health of our troops at risk.”

The base where the units were sent — Forward Operating Base Sharana in southeastern Afghanistan — was turned over to the Afghan government in October. According to the report, officials now expect the unused incinerators to be salvaged for “scrap.”

Sopko’s scathing report, the latest in a series of critical findings on Afghanistan spending, accused the Army Corps of paying the contractor in full for incinerators that were not only finished more than two years behind schedule but riddled with operational problems that rendered them “unusable.”

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