Lost Jobs After Reporting Fuel Leaks, They Say : Whistle-Blowing Contractors Claim Navy Bias

Three North County contractors filed suit Tuesday against the U.S. Department of the Navy, charging that they were harassed and then deprived of their jobs after reporting that underground storage tanks at Camp Pendleton had leaked diesel fuel near the base’s drinking-water supplies.

The suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego and seeks $100 million in damages, also accuses federal and state environmental officials of failure to force adequate cleanup of the contaminated area. It contends that the spills threaten the health of Marines as well as nearby residents.

The case focuses attention on what environmental officials say has been a nagging problem of leaking underground tanks at the Marine Corps base. Although the Department of the Navy has removed the tanks cited in the lawsuit, county health officials last spring found evidence that five additional tanks had leaked.

State water-quality officials said Tuesday that they have no evidence that the leaks have contaminated drinking water supplies. However, the water table under Camp Pendleton is relatively close to the surface and the large ground water basin serves both the base and nearby communities.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by Thomas Sylvester and William Toth of Oceanside and Thomas McGough of Carlsbad. The three men say they served as the supervising team on an $8.2-million barracks construction job for the Department of the Navy beginning in early 1984.

Shortly after starting work, they say, they discovered six underground tanks that had been used in the past to supply heating oil to Camp Horno A.

Seeing evidence that fuel had leaked, they say, they immediately notified the base’s construction official as well as the federal Environmental Protection Agency and California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

After that, the lawsuit alleges, the men were harassed by the base’s construction official. Sylvester said Tuesday that monthly payments were delayed, change orders were held up and officials began insisting on excessive adherence to contract terms.

Finally, a new general contractor hired after the earlier general contractors defaulted informed the three subcontracting supervisors that they would not be rehired. They say the general contractor said he had been informed by base officials not to rehire the three men.

“In essence, they wanted us gone,” said Sylvester, 40, who had worked on previous government contracts. “We were thorns in their side. We were the first ones to report this to an off-base agency.”

The lawsuit also accuses the Department of the Navy of skirting a full cleanup of the site. It alleges that the Navy simply removed some of the contaminated soil to a landfill on the base, then backfilled the holes with dirt from another site.

The suit also charges that the base’s own consultant’s report indicates that the soil contamination levels remaining were higher than acceptable. The suit accuses federal and state environmental officials of failing to require the legally mandated level of cleanup.

Finally, it charges that the base has not used the monitoring well system that it was required to install to detect water pollution from the site. The suit alleges that traces of petroleum hydrocarbons have been detected in the water table as far as two miles away.

Camp Pendleton officials declined Tuesday to comment on the allegations.

“As of yet, Camp Pendleton has no record of this complaint being served on the base,” Maj. Tom Mitchell, a base spokesman, said. “Therefore, we have no response to make at this time.”

But David Barker, a senior engineer for the Regional Water Quality Control Board, said his agency’s files indicate that the site was cleaned satisfactorily. He said the base had removed heavily contaminated soil, left the less contaminated soil in place, backfilled the area and installed monitoring wells to detect water contamination.

Barker said that was an acceptable method of cleanup under federal and state law. He said his agency was unaware of any instances of water pollution from the site.

However, Barker said that county health officials last spring found evidence of additional leaks from five other steel tanks that were being removed at the time. Barker said the base has been asked by the board to submit information on the extent of contamination there.

Dale Fiola, the lawyer representing Sylvester, Toth and McGough, said he filed the suit Tuesday under the employee discrimination protection clauses of several federal environmental laws. Those clauses are intended to shield employees from retribution if they report environmental violations by their employers.

The suit also cites the citizen lawsuit provisions of several other federal laws. Those provisions allow citizens whose interests might be adversely affected to sue government officials to force them to act under federal laws.

The suit cites as defendants the Department of the Navy, EPA and the California Water Quality Control Board. It also names two of the general contractors that hired the three men to serve as supervisors on the job.