The US Federal Claims Court has decided that the Air Force must pay companies that built homes on the former Lowry Air Force Base in Denver around $9 million—the amount it cost them to clean up asbestos left behind when the service demolished buildings on the Lowry redevelopment site. The Rocky Mountain News reports that the Denver law firm representing the homebuilders during their two-year legal battle says the court’s decision provided the “first judicial decision in the country” addressing Section 330 of the 1993 National Defense Authorization Act, which offers a “broad indemnity from the military to parties who purchase former military properties for all costs incurred as a result of environmental contamination caused by the military’s historic activities on the property.”
The Air Force’s nascent KC-Z program, aimed at developing a next-generation family of systems for aerial refueling, will look to launch its analysis-of-alternatives study in 2024, years earlier than originally planned. Originally, the analysis of alternatives for KC-Z was set for “maybe in the 2030s,” Paul Waugh, program executive officer…