The matches came in rapid-fire succession on four pitches squeezed next to each other beneath a cavernous roof. Five boys per team, four matches at once, each 18 minutes, with only 90 seconds between them. Twelve hours later, the boys were gone, but the games went on. Eight teams, four fields, a sea of bouncing ponytails.
It was peak soccer simultaneity. A vicious shot hit the crossbar on one pitch; on the next, a midfielder streaked past defenders on a breakaway; a corner kick on the third field; and on the fourth, a straight shot found the back of the net. In the stands, cheers went up for “Dani!” and “Ari!” and “Kylie!” and “Amber!” And as the night wore on, more and more of these young women stood with flushed faces and hands on hips, breathing deeply whenever a stoppage gave them a chance.
The Soccer Coliseum bills itself as the “leading youth soccer arena in America, attracting more teams … than any other indoor facility.” Since 1996, this fútbol mecca — which rents space inside New Jersey’s Teaneck Armory — has offered youth soccer programs, including tournaments, classes, and camps, for kids as young as 3, introducing a generation of children to the beautiful game.
Under the 35,000 square feet of red, artificial turf and the site-mandated rubber-soled shoes, however, lurked a hidden danger. The basement had housed an Army National Guard indoor firing range, or IFR, for decades. Each time a citizen-soldier fired a rifle or pistol, it emitted an extremely dangerous form of lead: toxic dust that research shows is frequently tracked around armories on soldiers’ clothing and dispersed through ventilation systems.
Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept show that the Army National Guard knowingly endangered the health and safety of soldiers and civilians at armories — also known as readiness centers — across three, and possibly 53, states and territories. A Soccer Coliseum director told The Intercept that he was never informed about a potential source of lead contamination in the basement below the playing fields.
The soccer fields at the Teaneck Armory in early 2024. Photo: Nick Turse for The InterceptDespite being aware of the public health threat posed by lead-contaminated indoor firing ranges, the Army National Guard “didn’t take required action to remediate lead hazards from readiness centers with IFRs,” according to a 2020 Army audit of more than 130 armories that was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. “ARNG, States, and territories potentially put Soldiers and family members health at risk from lead exposure.”
At least 600 and possibly more than 1,300 National Guard indoor firing ranges may still pose a threat.
An investigation by The Intercept finds that nearly 50 years after the U.S. government sounded the alarm about the “potential health hazard” of IFRs, almost 40 years after the National Guard admitted most of its indoor ranges were “unsafe,” and more than 25 years after a Pentagon study urged decontamination of National Guard indoor firing ranges due to “lead hazards,” at least 600 and possibly more than 1,300 National Guard IFRs, from coast to coast, may still pose a threat. Additional armories may also be falsely counted as safe; an untold number that have undergone remediation may still pose health risks. But exactly where citizen-soldiers and civilians are most endangered remains a mystery. National Guard officials admit to flawed recordkeeping and say they do not have a ready list of sites that they call “high-risk IFRs.”
“There ought to be congressional action. And the Secretary of the Army should immediately order the clean-up of these 600 sites. They should be cleaned up in a hurry,” said Ruth Ann Norton, a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee and a leader of Lead-Free NJ, a collaborative focused on addressing lead hazards in the state. “It’s worth the cost, the return on investment, in terms of preventing the health impacts — kidney malfunction, hypertension, stillbirths, miscarriages, cardiac issues, neurological dysfunction — not to mention the moral imperative not to put people at risk.”
Teaneck’s Soccer Coliseum is not mentioned by name in the nearly 50-page audit which obscures even the names of the states where the armories are located, but a picture of the enormous facility, with its distinctive red turf, unique windows, and high arching roof, as well as the audit’s description of the site, leaves no doubt. “Soldiers, civilians, and the public had unrestricted access to two centers with three IFRs in State C,” reads the 2020 audit, noting, in understated fashion, that one of those centers in State C — which the Army confirmed is New Jersey — “hosted an indoor soccer league.”
A photo from the 2020 audit of Army National Guard armories. U.S. Army Audit AgencyA National Guard official told The Intercept that their database lists the Teaneck Armory as “cleaned and remediated” according to a November 2019 “final clearance document.” But the 2020 audit states that while New Jersey’s armories with IFRs were remediated from 2017 to 2019, the remediation was done with “a high-pressure power wash system” that is barred “because it may embed lead throughout a readiness center and generate large quantities of hazardous waste.” The audit further revealed that “soldiers and civilians used the basement — a former IFR — as a storage room” and that the room still contained “lead-contaminated sand” from its days as a firing range.
“You can’t take a power-washer and use it to clean a facility. … It’s just going to spew lead everywhere.”
“You can’t take a power-washer and use it to clean a facility. That’s prohibited. It’s just going to spew lead everywhere — and it embeds it in all kinds of places and then it comes back out,” said Maria Doa, the senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund who spent more than 30 years at the EPA. “The federal government should know its own regulations and abide by them. Not doing so seems criminal.”
The Intercept spoke to Yas Tambi, a director of the Soccer Coliseum, about the findings of the Army audit. Tambi, who said he has been with the organization for 29 years, could not recall receiving any information from the State of New Jersey, the Army, or the National Guard concerning lead dust or lead abatement, including during 2017 to 2019 when power-wash remediation efforts reportedly took place at the Teaneck Armory. “It wasn’t on my radar. Even if remediation was mentioned, I would think, ‘OK, they’re doing their job,’” said Tambi. “If we heard about any kind of contaminants in the building, we would be the first to complain about it.”
Tambi stressed that, to his knowledge, longtime staff suffered no health effects, and that no complaints had been made by members of the public. “If anyone got sick, I would know,” he told The Intercept.
The Soccer Coliseum referred The Intercept to the New Jersey National Guard for answers to additional questions. “We’ll have a response for you by the end of the day today,” Maj. Amelia Thatcher, a spokesperson for the New Jersey National Guard told The Intercept on Tuesday. After the deadline came and went, Thatcher said her promise of a comment had been “optimistic.”
The Teaneck facility was one of more than 130 armories where the Army National Guard put people at risk, according to the audit. In three states — New Jersey, North........