Lockheed Excavating Old Toxic Waste Dump at Burbank Plant

Under orders from the state, Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Co. is excavating an old toxic waste dump at its Burbank plant and transferring massive amounts of waste and contaminated earth to a licensed hazardous waste landfill.

The old Lockheed dump, used from about 1940 until the mid-’50s, perches above ground water so polluted by chemical solvents that the city of Burbank has been unable to pump from municipal water supply wells nearby. At the direction of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles, Lockheed began excavating the old dump June 16, a $2-million undertaking that essentially means relocating the dump, load by load, 150 miles to the northwest at the Kettleman Hills hazardous waste landfill in Kings County.

As of Wednesday, about 300 dump truckloads amounting to 5,000 cubic yards of earth had left the yawning cavity at Lockheed’s B-1 plant, said Ron Helgerson, manager of environmental technical services for Lockheed. The dump is south of Empire Avenue and just off Victory Place, nearly two miles southeast of Burbank Airport.

Lockheed soil tests have found that the dump contains high levels of lead and other paint waste, along with construction debris, oils, solvents, cadmium, chromium and low levels of cyanide and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, extremely long-lived chemicals that have been banned.

Additional Tests

By the end of next week, as much as 7,500 cubic yards of dirt and waste will have been removed, leaving a crater covering almost half an acre and up to 30 feet deep, according to Lockheed officials. The company will then have to conduct further soil tests to assure that contaminants have been removed to safe levels.

Until that data is in, “we don’t know what we’re going to end up doing,” one company official said. “Anything from nothing to a lot” more excavation will be required.

Lockheed disclosed the dump’s existence to water quality officials in 1985 during an investigation of leaking fuel and chemical tanks at the massive aerospace complex. Ground water tests since then--conducted by Lockheed under water quality board orders--have implicated the firm as one source of the area’s ground water pollution, which mainly involves the common solvents perchloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE.

Accordingly, Lockheed has installed a ground water treatment system at the plant at a cost of about $4 million. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also is expected to demand that Lockheed help pay for a planned $69-million treatment system to clean up nearby Burbank water supply wells under the federal Superfund program.

It’s uncertain if liquids have leached from the old dump into the ground water, which is at a depth of about 150 feet. David Bacharowski, environmental specialist with the water quality board, said the “verdict is not in” on that question. Helgerson of Lockheed said the potential for ground water pollution remains but that soil tests indicate that dump materials have not reached subsurface waters.

When the landfill was created during World War II, Lockheed was manufacturing P-38 fighter planes in the B-1 plant surrounding the old dump.

Dump Composition

Lockheed data shows that the dump’s composition is 50% to 60% soil, with the rest being debris, metal and chemical waste and moisture. More lead has been found in the dump than any other contaminant, with the most polluted soil sample being 23% lead--or 230,000 parts of the toxic metal per million parts of soil. The highest level of TCE measured in the soil was 23 p.p.m., Helgerson said.

Despite a large amount of construction debris, no asbestos has been encountered, Lockheed engineer Jim Hamilton said.

The excavation is being handled for Lockheed by OHM Corp., a Findlay, Ohio, firm involved in hazardous materials disposal.

Outwardly, the gaping hole appears to contain mostly dirt, with an occasional hunk of pipe or concrete poking through. A huge backhoe and front-end loader crawl about in the pit, with the backhoe tearing off piles of earth and the loader carrying it up the bank to waiting trucks.

A visit to the site Wednesday found equipment operators dressed from head to toe in protective clothing, including full-face respirators and booties. Even the truck drivers wore the gear, stripping it off as soon as they rolled their rigs away from the side of the pit. Every twenty minutes or so, a worker hosed off the excavation to hold down dust.

Air Monitoring

Under air quality regulations, Lockheed officials also said they are doing air monitoring to assure that hazardous air contaminants are not drifting off the site. And Hamilton, the Lockheed engineer, said every fifth truckload of waste is being sampled “to reassure us that what’s going out is what we think’s going out.”

Although intended to eliminate an environmental problem, the work has raised some environmental concerns since it began June 16. Soon after the first loads went out, investigators from the California Highway Patrol’s hazardous waste investigations unit came to call. They were disturbed that manifests--required paper work describing the wastes being hauled--did not fully describe all the wastes. A complete manifest is an important guide for police or emergency response crews in case of a transportation accident involving toxic waste, said Sgt. Lance Erickson, supervisor of hazardous waste investigations for the CHP’s southern division.

Hamilton said that the manifests complied with the law but that Lockheed agreed to enclose a separate sheet with “a more complete” profile of the wastes.

Lacked Permit

In addition, investigators from the South Coast Air Quality Management District discovered June 30 that Lockheed lacked the permit needed for excavation of old landfills, according to Ed Pupka, a supervising air quality inspector. The permit requires that steps be taken to hold down dust and monitor the air for contaminants.

Pupka said Lockheed did have a separate air district permit for excavation of soil containing volatile organic compounds, but had not applied for a permit under the more stringent rules covering landfill excavations.

Pupka said Lockheed since has applied for and received the missing permit. He said the air district has not decided whether to issue a violation notice and seek financial penalties for lack of the permit before.

Lockheed’s Hamilton said the company had understood, based on contacts with the air district, that the permit it obtained was the only one it needed.

“We have to dig the contaminants out of the ground,” Hamilton said. “To do that, we’re following every rule that’s applicable.”