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Complex, Costly Cleanups May Snarl Base Closings

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Presidio looks more like a park than a military base, with towering eucalyptus and cypress trees shading lush lawns and creeks winding through 1,800 hilly acres above the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean. In fact, it soon will be a park: The Army plans to move out in 1995 and turn over the nation’s oldest fort to the National Park Service.

Yet, beneath the Presidio’s greenery lie the products of decades of spills, leaks and ill-planned dumping of poisonous chemicals. An estimated 200 fuel tanks, many thought to be leaking, are buried at the base. There are three known sites of PCB spills as well as several uncharted landfills, their contents unknown.

The Presidio is emblematic of the government’s legacy at hundreds of federal facilities across the country, from Energy Department nuclear weapons laboratories and assembly plants to abandoned mines on Department of Interior land.

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Uncle Sam, who is supposed to enforce the environmental laws, is the country’s worst polluter.

“People don’t understand their taxpayer dollars being used to create pollution,” said Rep. Dennis E. Eckart (D-Ohio). “You have to end the federal government’s attitude of ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ ”

The price of cleaning up toxic wastes at federal facilities nationwide--perhaps a 30-year task--has been estimated at between $140 billion and $200 billion by the White House budget office. The Presidio cleanup alone is expected to cost $10 million to $80 million. At California’s heavily industrialized military shipyards, air bases and weapons depots, the cleanup bill may climb into the billions.

Now, with the Pentagon studying closure of more than 120 domestic bases, pressure is building to speed investigations of the military’s toxic problems and correct them before the facilities are transferred to civilian use. The trick will be finding the cash to do it.

“It is a problem of major proportions that has not been faced,” said Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), whose district includes the Presidio. “We have to clean up our mess and we have to do it before we close these bases.”

Nowhere are the numbers worse than in California. The Environmental Protection Agency’s list of Superfund sites includes 17 Defense Department or Energy Department installations in California--more than in any other state. Among them: the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, which made the list in February.

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The Superfund, a federal program set up in 1980 to pay for cleaning up the most dangerous hazardous-waste sites, identifies places that represent the greatest risk to public health and the environment.

By September, EPA officials hope to decide whether to propose adding the Presidio and 23 other federal installations in California to the Superfund sites. A further 154 federal facilities in the state must produce detailed reports on their toxic problems. The reports will be reviewed as the first step toward determining whether the facilities should be on the Superfund list.

Wastes present at these facilities run from radium (a radioactive substance used for illuminated dials) to solvents, pesticides, coolants, paint scrapings and old fuel. Waste from these bases has flowed into waterways, settled into ground water and drifted into drinking water wells.

“There is so much left to be done before we have a complete picture of the contamination,” said Julie K. Anderson, of the EPA’s western regional headquarters in San Francisco.

Tests at El Toro have shown that a carcinogenic grease-cutting agent has seeped into ground water. So far, the contamination has not been found in wells used for public drinking water. But the Orange County Water District has discovered a narrow stream of ground water 3 1/2 miles long stretching from the base to a point between Jeffrey Road and Culver Drive in Irvine.

Federal and state officials will begin a two-year study in November to determine the extent of the problem at El Toro and devise a cleanup plan. Besides the grease solvent, early studies have uncovered evidence of jet fuel and paint thinners dumped in several pits at the base.

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Although private corporations spent much of the 1980s trying to clean the nests they had fouled, the military only now is coming to terms with decades of environmental abuses and neglect.

The delay is due in part to the Defense Department’s long-standing insistence that it was not subject to EPA regulation. That position changed in 1986 when Congress, over the Ronald Reagan Administration’s objections, decided that contamination from military sources was, indeed, the EPA’s business.

The Pentagon lost that fight but continues to oppose congressional efforts to give state regulators the authority to impose fines and penalties on federal agencies that violate environmental laws. Pentagon officials argue that giving the states such power would inject politics into highly technical decisions and skew cleanup priorities toward those states with aggressive, publicity-seeking attorneys general.

As the severity of the problem becomes more and more apparent, the Pentagon lately has made some concessions to California. The Defense Department recently agreed to pay the state Department of Health Services to monitor military anti-pollution efforts.

The fee will be only 1% of the cost of cleaning up the military installations, but the dollar amount could be large. The cost of removing toxics from 11 Northern California naval bases alone will be $702.8 million, according to the Naval Facilities Engineering Command in San Bruno. That estimate could be “low,” Randal A. Friedman, who is coordinator of cleanup efforts at Navy bases in the Bay Area, warned.

Cleaning up Hunters Point naval shipyard, a Superfund site in San Francisco, will cost $94 million. At Moffett Naval Air Station in Mountain View, also on the Superfund list, the job is expected to cost $113 million.

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At McClellan Air Force Base outside Sacramento, officials have detected in ground water the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected carcinogen, in concentrations up to 13,000 times the maximum safe level. The Air Force expects that cleanup bill to reach $100 million by 1992.

TCE has also seeped into ground water below Norton Air Force Base at San Bernardino, one of the bases being considered for closure. “The question is not whether (TCE) will pollute additional wells but how long will it take for it to get there,” said Lt. Mark Wright, chief of environmental planning at Norton. The Norton cleanup is expected to cost $44 million or more and take decades.

State toxic waste regulators doubt that any of the military bases in California conceals an environmental horror story on the order of Love Canal or the Stringfellow Acid Pits, but officials have discovered that finding and fixing contamination at a military installation is more complex than at most private sites.

“(Bases) are basically like small cities. They handle everything. They have sewer systems. They have underground tanks. They have landfills,” said Donald Dawlke, chief of the toxic cleanup division the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.

There are also more types of pollutants. While a company may pollute ground water with pesticides, PCBs or solvents, military bases used, slopped and dumped the whole spectrum of all-too-familiar toxins along with other, more exotic poisons.

At Hunters Point, for example, asbestos, heavy metals, radioactive radium dials and sand and paint chips from the sandblasted hulls of ships were dumped to fill in 20 acres of tidal lands in San Francisco Bay, in the next cove over from Candlestick Park.

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The Navy left Hunters Point in the mid-1970s and contracted out its ship repair business to a local company, Triple A Machine Shop Inc. The San Francisco district attorney is prosecuting Triple A on 16 felony counts of illegal dumping at Hunters Point.

Today, the Navy is back, embarking on an ambitious plan to clean the base. But Friedman, the coordinator of the naval cleanup in the Bay Area, said that EPA cleanup procedures are cumbersome.

“The amount of study you have to do is incredible,” Friedman said. “The process is inherently slanted to the conservative side. You don’t want to remove 15 feet of dirt and find out a few years later you should have removed 20 feet.”

Atomic Fallout Waste

Meanwhile, Boxer has called on the EPA to investigate what may be a byproduct of the problems left by Hunters Point. In the years after World War II, ships contaminated by fallout from atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll were cleaned at Hunters Point.

Each year in the 1950s, sandblast waste, paint chips and other radioactive trash were encased in concrete-lined drums, shipped 50 miles off San Francisco on barges and dumped into the ocean near the Farallon Islands. Now, the drums are feared to be leaking into what has been a rich fishery.

Military waste is not confined to federal bases and dumps. Over the years, the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Services has sold old chemicals as surplus. In several instances, chemicals bought for a few cents on the dollar have come to haunt local officials.

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At a congressional hearing earlier this year in Sacramento, Los Angeles officials told of their continuing efforts to reclaim port-owned land in Wilmington where a local businessman stored 40,000 gallons of stale solvents, paints, batteries and decontaminants used on chemical warfare components. Some of the materials were sold by the El Toro Marine base.

David McKenna, a deputy Los Angeles city attorney, estimated that the city has already spent $650,000 on the Wilmington cleanup. If the chemicals seep into ground water, the cost could exceed $1 million.

Solano County is prosecuting a man who bought 35,000 gallons of highly poisonous and explosive chemicals at military auctions, starting in 1976, in the hope of reselling them. They were stored in a barn near Collinsville, on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The chemicals, discovered last year, came from nearby military installations. The cost of cleaning up the site topped $1 million, Solano County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mark Pollock said.

California has sued to force compliance with state laws in the handling of toxic substances at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, near Vallejo, and at Ft. Ord, near Monterey. But courts have ruled that the state cannot collect money from federal facilities that mishandle toxics.

Still, the state Department of Health Services has the authority to inspect federal bases and issue citations. Health officials have found that some military officials still have not learned any lesson from the past.

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In a series of actions that ended in March, the state Department of Health Services cited Mare Island Naval Shipyard, a submarine repair base at the northeastern tip of San Francisco Bay, for sloppy handling of wastes.

State inspectors found 13 violations. Two concrete tanks holding 525,000 gallons of toxins were leaking. A barge held 20,000 gallons of waste oil. If the drums ruptured, there was nothing to keep the waste from flowing into San Francisco Bay. Perhaps most troubling was that the tanks had been in place without proper permits for 13 years and may have been leaking all the while.

Base Closures

As the Defense Department studies closing 121 bases around the country, the issue of toxics at military bases will loom ever larger. And, if the past is a guide, the cost of decontamination will be dear.

In the Marin County town of Novato, two developers in 1985 agreed to pay $45 million for 400 acres at Hamilton Field, used over the years by the Navy, Air Force and Army. But escrow has not yet closed because a 26-acre toxic dump at the center of the 400 acres has not been cleaned up.

In the end, Boxer said, those 26 acres most likely will have to be fenced off and abandoned.

The news that Moffett Naval Air Station, in Silicon Valley, might be closed was cheered not only by peace activists (who said it could prove that closing a base could benefit the local economy), but by developers also. They saw the land reborn as a meticulously planned community with trails fronting San Francisco Bay, reclaimed wetlands, a space museum and affordable housing.

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But toxins buried at Moffett threaten to delay any such conversion. The Navy’s preliminary assessment is that wastes probably have leaked into the ground from unlined holding ponds and cracked fuel tanks. Several landfills also contain hazardous materials.

Just outside Moffett’s fences is another Superfund site, one polluted by semiconductor manufacturers. These companies say that efforts to clean the plume of contaminated ground water have been stalled, first by Navy reluctance to acknowledge that it contributed to the problem and now by the Navy’s lengthy study process.

“We’re ready to start (the cleanup) right now,” said Charles Bostic of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. Until Moffett identifies its pollution sources, however--a process that may take two or three years longer--the companies will not begin a cleanup for fear of aggravating a problem.

Of all the bases being considered for closure, none holds more promise than the Presidio. Most of the complex will be left as a park. It is unclear what will become of the grand officers’ quarters, golf course and tennis courts, but among the suggestions is one that part of the grounds be leased to a university.

The military museum probably will remain and perhaps be expanded. The Presidio was first held by the Spanish in 1776, then by Mexico and, finally, by the U.S. Army. As the oldest military base in continuous operation in the United States, much of its history is clouded and details of its waste problem are not known. For example: There are three Nike missile silos on the base, but their contents are unknown. The doors are welded shut.

Although transforming the garrison into a park is “the chance of a lifetime,” said Brian O’Neill, director of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the official in charge of planning the Presidio’s future, the Army must first clean it up. He said the issue is “at the top” of his concerns.

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Presidio Time Bombs

Studies conducted at the Presidio last year by Argonne National Laboratory and the Army Toxic and Hazardous Materials Agency found “no imminent or substantial threat to human life or the environment.”

But the reports went on to say there are more than 200 underground fuel and storage tanks at the base, that the locations and contents of many of them are not known “with any reliability,” and that some of them probably are leaking.

Polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), a suspected carcinogen used widely to cool electrical transformers, was spilled in at least three spots, and soldiers dumped trash at some landfills not yet identified. A 1984 Army study found TCE and other chemicals suspected of causing cancer or congenital defects in ground water beneath the Presidio.

The worst known contamination is at and near Crissy Field, where San Francisco holds its Fourth of July celebrations. The Argonne report predicted that toxins under the old landing strip will not reach the drinking water supply, but it warned that the “ultimate discharge point of this ground water is San Francisco Bay, and marine organisms are thus threatened.”

Saul Bloom of the Arms Control Research Center, a private group that advocates converting military facilities to civilian use, said of the Presidio: “We might have the first national park listed on Superfund.”

CALIFORNIA’S MILITARY AND ENGERGY DEPARTMENT SUPERFUND SITES

Navy-Marines Moffett Naval Air Station, Santa Clara County

Treasure Island Naval Station at Hunters Point,

San Francisco

Barstow Marine Corps Logistics Base

Camp Pendleton Marine Base, Oceanside

El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, Orange County

Air Force

Norton Air Force Base, San Bernardino

George Air Force Base, Victorville

March Air Force Base, Riverside

Mather Air Force Base, Sacramento

McClellan Air Force Base, Sacramento

Travis Air Force Base, Solano County

Castle Air Force Base, Merced

Army

Riverbank Army Ammunition Plant near Modesto

Fort Ord, Monterey

Sharpe Army Depot, Stockton

Sacramento Army Depot

Energy Department

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,

Livermore.

PROPOSED FOR SUPERFUND STATUS

Edwards Air Force Base, Kern County

Concord Naval Weapons Station, Concord

Tracy Defense Depot, Tracy

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Site 300,

outside Livermore.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

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