Tustin : Water Board OKs Plan to Clean Up Marine Base
The military’s plan to drain contaminated ground water from pits saturated with jet fuel at the Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station was unanimously approved Friday by the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board.
The drainage plan for the 81,000-square-foot area calls for installing perforated pipes along the bottom of three 20-foot-deep and 600-foot-long trenches to divert the polluted water to a nearby dump. The contaminants will then be pumped into tanks and hauled to treatment centers in San Diego, according to military officials.
Biologists discovered pollutants seeping from the base into the adjacent Peters Canyon Channel in 1983. It was later discovered that the Marines had been dumping jet fuel into 18-foot-deep burn pits for fire training exercises and that thousands of gallons of contaminated water were flushed into the channel about 100 feet away between 1970 and 1983.
The military’s drainage plan has been criticized by the county Environmental Management Agency for lacking contingency measures if the drainage system failed. The EMA had proposed to excavate the contaminated soil and replace it with unpolluted dirt, a plan that would have cost $2 million.
The military’s cleanup project is scheduled to be completed in November at a cost of less than $1 million, military officials said.
The water board met Friday in Riverside.
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