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