Marine Corps Agrees to State’s Deadline on Jet Fuel Pollution

Measures designed to prevent jet fuel and other pollutants that are seeping into ground water at the Marine helicopter station in Tustin from contaminating the Upper Newport Bay watershed will be in place by mid-December, a Marine Corps spokesman said Friday.

Capt. Brian Leap, facilities officer for the Marine Corps air stations in Tustin and El Toro, said the Marines “fully agree” and will comply with a state water-quality board’s order, issued Friday, that the project be completed by Dec. 15.

Orange County officials in February, 1983, discovered that several unlined pits, located near Peters Canyon Channel and used to hold burning jet fuel for training exercises, had been contaminating ground water and seeping into the flood-control channel.

A staff report to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Santa Ana Region, estimated that, between 1970 and 1983, as much as 300,000 gallons of fuel may have been flushed from the pits into the channel, just 100 feet away.

Peters Canyon Channel joins San Diego Creek in Irvine, flowing southwestward into Upper Newport Bay.

The water quality board staff said that although the pits are no longer used, rainfall still washes the materials trapped in the soil down to the clay layer.

The Marine Corps’ interim plan to stop the seepage includes installation of a Gunite lining alongside the channel to block the flow of contaminated ground water. The water, believed to extend to a layer of clay at a depth of about 20 feet, will be drained, treated and discharged to the channel.

Construction was supposed to have started after the Orange County Environmental Management Agency approved the project’s design. But that approval didn’t come until Monday, a week after the federal government’s fiscal year had ended.

Written confirmation that the project will be funded in the new fiscal year, which will allow a contractor to begin the two-month project, is expected to arrive next week, Leap said.

The Marine Corps will submit its overall cleanup plan for the site next Friday, Leap said.