Corps Defends Tustin Base Cleanup : New Criticisms Leveled at Marines Over Pollution

Despite claims by the U.S. Marine Corps that it is cleaning up a contaminated four-acre area of its Tustin helicopter base, officials of three more government agencies sharply criticized the corps Tuesday for failing to move quickly enough.

Although there is no evidence that jet fuel contamination of the Peters Canyon channel has harmed wildlife or underground water supplies, it has posed a potential health hazard since it was discovered more than two years ago, according to officials of the state Department of Fish and Game, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the Orange County Environmental Management Agency and Orange County Water Control Districts.

“I didn’t think this would be such a long, drawn-out battle,” said Nira Yamachika, a specialist with the county environmental agency. “If this was a private company instead of the Marine Corps, this problem would have been solved a long time ago.

“How do I feel? Frustration. That’s the word.”

But Marine officials who took reporters on a tour of the contaminated area Tuesday afternoon said they have taken several steps to alleviate contamination in the channel since they first learned of the problem in February, 1983. Jeff Simko, a civilian environmental engineer for the Marines, said there has been no seepage into the channel since 1983, when the U.S. Geological Survey installed recovery wells to draw oil from the contaminated area.

Simko said the contaminated channel, which runs to the San Diego Creek channel and eventually to Upper Newport Bay, poses no threat to water, fish or wildlife.

Seepage of jet fuel and other contaminants from the base into the tributary to the Upper Newport Bay was first detected by county officials in February, 1983, Yamachika said. Although the Marines have excavated soil along the channel, dug an oil recovery well, diked and sandbagged the waterway and conducted soil tests, Yamachika said the area remains seriously contaminated.

A five-foot layer of clay about 20 feet below the ground will probably keep soil saturated with jet fuel from contaminating underground water supplies, said Robert Holub, a senior engineer with the state Regional Water Quality Control Board. “But there remains a potential threat to the ground water,” he said.

‘Progress Too Slow’

Holub said his office sent a letter to the Marines last month requesting that further steps be taken to eliminate soil contamination along the creek. “In our opinion, progress has been too slow,” he said. “We are scheduling a meeting with the Marines within the next two weeks. We’re optimistic that something will finally be done.”

Simka said the Marines are planning to use a process known as bacteria degradation to treat the contaminated site. The process involves digging at least three feet down and spreading nutrients which eventually neutralize petroleum pollutants.

The bacteriological process would take about two years and is the best long-term solution to the problem, Simko said. Excavating and removing contaminated soil to a landfill “would not take the problem away,” Simko said. “We’d just send it up to Northern California. It’s my engineering judgment that we should eliminate the problem through degradation.”

Both Holub and Yamachika said bacteriological treatment of the contaminated area may take from one to 10 years before the soil is cleaned of pollutants. They also said the treatment method would only alleviate about half the existing pollutants.

Major Pollution Source

State and county officials believe the major sources of pollutants are two rings about 50 feet in diameter and about 100 feet west of the channel which for at least 30 years were saturated with jet fuel and set ablaze to train Marines in firefighting techniques. Over the years, the jet fuel thoroughly saturated the soil and seeped into the channel.

“When we found out about the problem associated with the burning, we shut down operations (at the pits),” Simko said.

The Marines hired the Wilmington-based IT Corp. in October, 1983, to dig down about 10 feet and haul off a portion of the soil between the two rings. But Yamachika said the contaminated soil extended at least 15 to 20 feet below the surface and covered a much wider area than that which was dug up.

Yamachika and Holub said the Marines should have dug down to the five-foot layer of hard clay. The U.S. Geological Survey hired by the base to handle the problem reported that the contamination was “15 to 20 feet deep,” she said. “The area they dug up was just a smidgen of the total area of contamination.”

No Harm to Wildlife

Simko said he was angry at a state Department of Fish and Game press release issued Monday which stated that a detergent spill from the base into the San Diego Creek channel on Sunday was “just one of the latest (pollution) problems” associated with the base.

State and local environmental groups said the spill caused no noticeable harm to fish or wildlife either in the San Diego channel or Upper Newport Bay.

Seepage of jet fuels into the channel has not caused any “major” contamination in Newport Bay, Simko said.