EPA Cites Marines for Waste Handling : Environment: Air stations in Tustin and El Toro violated federal law through sloppy maintenance and record keeping of hazardous materials, agency says. Compliance is demanded.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has cited the Marine Corps air stations in Tustin and El Toro for sloppy, illegal handling and storage of hazardous materials, EPA officials said Wednesday.

Although most of the violations involve inadequate record keeping and maintenance of the chemicals, the EPA found the problem serious enough to demand compliance, said Al Zemsky, a spokesman for the agency’s regional office in San Francisco.

“They (violations) don’t pose an imminent health threat,” Zemsky said. “They do pose a potential problem.”

The Marine Corps bases, which use a wide variety of fuels and powerful solvents, are by far the largest producers of hazardous waste in Orange County, according to county health records. They create as much as some cities, disposing of several thousand tons of toxic sludge per year, county health records show.

The bases are also two of the most polluted sites in the county. The El Toro air station is included on the EPA’s Superfund list of the nation’s worst toxic-waste dumps because of widespread dumping of chemicals on the base.

The air stations violated several provisions of the federal law that regulates the treatment, storage and disposal of hazardous wastes, EPA officials said.

The notices of non-compliance, listing 11 counts for each air station, were received Tuesday by the Marine Corps after routine inspections of the facilities in June, Zemsky said.

The Marine Corps is required to respond within 30 days, indicating how it plans to bring the air stations into compliance with federal law, Zemsky said. The notices carry no fines.

“We are going to be working closely with the EPA to ensure that all of the violations are properly addressed,” said Lt. Gene Browne, a spokesman for both bases. “I really can’t overemphasize our efforts at protecting the environment. It’s a serious process.”

EPA inspectors cited the Tustin air base for inadequate waste containment, such as the storage of materials in improperly labeled containers; insufficient security, including inadequate training of guards at the storage facilities; and deficient closure and contingency plans, including a lack of an outline of how repairs to storage facilities would be made.

The Tustin station was also found to be operating an unauthorized storage unit and keeping inadequate records.

At the air station in El Toro, violations included an inadequate permit application; failure to properly identify wastes; inadequate waste analysis of what the base creates and handles; incomplete record maintenance; and inadequate waste containment, including the storage of wastes in a building that has cracks.

In addition, the EPA found some hazardous materials at both stations not listed on their permits, Zemsky said.

The Tustin base did not list such hazardous wastes as corrosive paint and solvents, he said. The El Toro base failed to list such wastes as petroleum-tainted ignitable rags, corrosive paint sludge, ignitable waste paint, waste acid, solvents and cadmium batteries, he said.

The bases were given a schedule recommending that each count be corrected in anywhere from 30 to 120 days, Zemsky said.

Browne said that the Marine Corps would be meeting with the EPA soon to work out a compliance schedule. He added that several of the violations already have been corrected, including paper work required to obtain proper permits.

In addition to the EPA, local authorities also have recently found violations at the two bases.

At El Toro, an inspection last October by county health officials found several minor violations of hazardous-waste storage laws. At the Tustin base, a July, 1989, inspection showed that the Marines were improperly labeling some wastes and storing materials in containers that were in poor condition.

Still, health officials said the Marines’ handling of hazardous waste has improved over the past few years.

“They have been pretty attentive and cooperative,” said Bob Merryman, Orange County’s director of environmental health. “Violations like these can be taken care of by better supervision and comprehensive training, but it’s hard on a base that uses so many hazardous materials not to have any violations.”

The main reason the El Toro base has made the nation’s Superfund list is that trichloroethylene, or TCE, a cancer-causing solvent used to degrease aircraft engines, has seeped into ground water.

Orange County water officials say the chemical, detected about five years ago, has spread underground, creating a 3-mile-long plume that has contaminated three agricultural water wells in Irvine.

At least 14 areas of the El Toro base and 11 at the Tustin base are contaminated with hazardous materials, including jet fuel, acids, waste oils, PCBs and toxic solvents, according to the EPA.

Zemsky said that the new violations are not related to the Superfund cleanup but to currently handled hazardous materials. He added that these were the first notices of non-compliance that the EPA has issued to the bases since they were first granted permits to handle the wastes in 1980.