Postscript: Marines Await Tests on Cleanup of Creek Spill

The trail of murky green liquid was spotted in the San Diego Creek in Irvine by a passer-by.

When traced to its source 4 1/2 miles upstream last Easter Sunday, the pollutant was found to be a petroleum-based detergent and degreasing agent used to wash helicopters at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station.

By the time it was discovered, more than 40,000 gallons of contaminated water had overflowed from a catch basin near the aircraft wash racks, backing up into an unlined ditch on the Tustin base and ultimately into the main tributary to the Upper Newport Bay ecological preserve.

Base officials, found negligent in the illegal April 7 discharge but spared fines that could have totaled $150,000, now are awaiting final test results expected to show that a $600,000 cleanup has removed the contaminants.

In the course of removing 1,800 cubic yards of dirt and vegetation laced with the detergent, workers found other contaminants, including copper and zinc, a state water quality official said.

“We found residual contamination from previous uses of the channel, things that could have come from the Marine base but also from a lot of other places, too,” said James Bennett, supervising engineer for the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board.

“We can’t really pin the blame for that on anyone,” Bennett said. “But we’re very confident that the (spill) problem was abated.”

Navy Capt. J. Brian Leap, who oversees facilities and construction at the Tustin base and El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, said he got immediate approval from the Navy’s West Coast commander of facilities to spend $600,000 on cleanup.

“All indications are that the cleanup was totally successful,” Leap said. “We are just waiting for the soil sample tests to come back.”

Base officials have said that one of two helicopter wash racks was shut down in January and the second had yet to be connected to a sewer line. An overload at the second wash rack, where about 80 helicopters a week were sponged with cleaner and sprayed, caused the spill.

Water board staff members had recommended civil penalties of up to $25,000 per day of discharge, saying that base personnel knew, or should have known, of the problem in time to prevent the spill.

Also, base officials did not remove polluted water in the ditch as ordered until three days after its discovery and only after water board officials issued an ultimatum and threatened legal action.

In a separate case, the water board has given Tustin base officials until this fall to take steps to prevent further seepage of jet fuel residues from the soil into the nearby Peters Canyon Channel.

Bennett said the area saturated with jet fuel now appears to be 65% larger than originally thought, and covers the equivalent of a football field at a depth equal to a seven-story building.

Bennett said Leap received verbal approval on Friday to proceed with a plan to line portions of the Peters Canyon Channel with Gunite and install an underground barrier of the same concretelike material to prevent seepage into the stream.

Meanwhile, Leap agreed that in retrospect the April chemical spill was “a serious problem.” But, he said, the incident also produced “some knee-jerk reactions on the part of some agencies about what we ought to do and how we ought to do it.”

Helicopter washing, curtailed for more than two months despite rules that each aircraft be cleaned every 14 days whether it needs it or not, has resumed.

But now, Leap said, the runoff is going where it belongs: down the sewer line to be treated with the rest of the waste water.