Scare of Radioactivity at Navy Base Construction Site Turns Out Unfounded

Officials suffered a scare this week when excavation workers at the 32nd Street Naval Station uncovered a 4-foot-square concrete vault with a sign reading: “Restricted radioactive pit.”

Usually such excavation turns up nothing more interesting than chunks of concrete foundations. This find was a bit more electrifying.

“It looked real enough so we couldn’t take any chances,” said George Winnett, facility planner for the Naval Station, which has about 50,000 employees and services 70 ships.

Winnett consulted his maps and records of the station since its inception as a destroyer base in 1922. None of the records indicated any activity involving radioactive materials, he said.

The area was cordoned off and an expert was summoned to test the area for radioactivity. When tests were negative, a bulldozer removed the vault top Wednesday afternoon. Inside the vault were coils of barbed wire, which were tested and also did not register any radioactivity.

Excavation workers had dug down about a foot before finding the vault.

“If it had been me who found the box, I would have been scared,” said Cathy Cook, spokeswoman for the Naval Station.

The crew, however, was more concerned about whether the project would be delayed than the question of whether they had been contaminated, said Winnett, a former Navy man.

The expert took two hours to arrive from the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park to the Naval Station--a trip of less than 15 miles--because he got lost on the way. The delay gave Winnett time to worry about the possible cost of cleaning up a radioactive find.

When two Geiger counter readings came up negative, he and others were visibly relieved. The area was declared “clean,” the crew resumed work and crushed the vault and wire.

Officials with Rice King, a restaurant that will open at that site on the base in two months, kept the sign. The base is at Ward Road and Vesta Street.

“It appeared to me like 30 years ago, somebody laid a sign there as a prank for the future,” Winnett said.