Coronado Is 1st City in California With Check for Radiation

This seaside bastion of Navy brass, active and retired, has become the first city in California--and perhaps in the nation--to make continuous checks for radioactive contamination as part of a new emergency disaster program.

The program is modest. A retired Navy captain has put together the basics in his role as a volunteer for the Coronado Police Department. The equipment is standard civil defense apparatus from the 1960s, not really state-of-the-art for measuring background radiation, and the numbers may be somewhat inaccurate. The procedures aren’t entirely clear on how Coronado would make federal or state agencies aware of any sudden, sustained increase in radiation that its devices showed.

And so far, even the readings on the antiquated equipment--though higher than those on more sophisticated devices--represent no health threat to the 19,700 residents of Coronado.

Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings, radiation monitoring officials say the Coronado idea is a good one, however unusual. Similar monitoring is done by U.S. Customs officials for commercial traffic entering the country along the Mexican border and by the California Highway Patrol at its various highway stations where weight and other safety checks are made on trucks.

“If a city wants to do this, I’d be the last person to say it’s not a useful idea,” said Greg Yuhas, the facilities protection officer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Walnut Creek.

“Spending money on detection devices is not frivolous for a city near (an international) port of entry which perceives potential problems with contaminated materials passing through,” he said.

Yuhas was referring to large batches of radioactive steel reinforcing rods which were trucked from a Mexican steel factory into the United States in the fall of 1983 undetected through the El Paso customs station. Radiation officials eventually tracked down the steel in 33 states, not including California, after one truckload accidentally wound its way through the Los Alamos National Laboratories in northern New Mexico, where the contamination was picked up by devices intended to pick up leaks from lab workplaces.

Customs officials set up sophisticated devices after the Mexican incident.

The Mexican steel contamination was also the spur for retired Navy Capt. Arch Kelley to propose his radiation-monitoring idea to Coronado Police Chief Jerry Boyd. Coronado contractors use substantial amounts of Mexican steel, Kelley said, because of the city’s proximity to the border. City officials wondered whether some of the contaminated steel might have ended up in Coronado and were alarmed that they had no way of detecting such occurrences.

“What really bothered us was that no one around San Diego was doing any monitoring on a regular basis,” said Kelley, an engineer by profession. “Our first efforts--which resulted in finding none of the contaminated steel here--at least reassured people here and put to rest a lot of fears.”

As a result of the initial measurements, the police department asked Kelley to set up permanent monitoring. Kelley rigged up several civil defense Geiger counters, commonly used to measure radiation spills, and attached them to custom-made digital readout devices to record background radiation in Coronado.

Kelley said the measuring has two main goals: to establish the background radiation level in a seaside city such as Coronado, with its large concentration of naval facilities, including nuclear storage dumps; and to alert police officials by registering an alarm if a truck or other vehicle with contaminated materials passes along the city’s main thoroughfare where the devices are located.

“We’ve wondered what the normal background radiation--from cosmic sources, from building materials, from natural airborne radiation and from man-made radiation--is in a place like Coronado,” Kelley said. “Reference books have said that it should be about 10 micro roentgens per hour (abbreviated as 10 microrems per hour), a standard measurement.”

Kelley’s instruments have measured the background at about 25 microrems, on the high side, but still at levels far lower than those presenting even low-level health hazards. But it turns out that Kelley’s instruments are not the most accurate for determining background radiation. More sensitive devices exist specifically for measuring such radiation, according to state and federal officials.

Those devices, when used for a day last week in Coronado, recorded microrem levels at less than half those of the city’s Geiger counters--about five to eight microrems per hour.

But while the sensitive instruments indicate that Coronado has normal background radiation at levels equal to or below general norms, the more primitive Geiger counters are still valuable in measuring a change in levels, such as one caused by a spill or a contaminated truck load.

“They’re not sophisticated, but can give you a good indication of a major change,” the NRC’s Yuhas said. “They would show things such as (contaminated steel bars) going by. You’d see a blip. But the key would be if somebody did something about it.”

Kelley said that Coronado hopes eventually to have portable devices installed in police vehicles so that, for example, a truck could be followed in case of a contaminated load and information gathered on its description. But he said that even in such a case, Coronado isn’t clear whether the state Office of Emergency Services or the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be called.

Jack Brown, senior health radiation physicist with the state Department of Health Services, said his agency can always be called initially, since it has jurisdiction over nuclear materials in the state, and has direct links with NRC and FEMA.