Navy Base Expansion Draws Fire

The community around the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station roared like seldom before with the unveiling of a $200-million plan to expand the coastal base. Everybody, even conservative Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, seemed to agree: bad idea.

Surf would be ruined. Beaches would be eroded. Ocean views would be pockmarked by more ships. More missiles could mean greater chances of accidental explosions. And for the first time in years, there were even whispers of dread about nuclear weapons--rumored but never proven to be stored here.

Southern California’s only naval weapons depot had rarely drawn such large-scale ire, traditionally attracting more attention for endangered species on its pastoral national wildlife refuge than for safety concerns.

Then came the September derailment in Westminster of a train carrying thousands of rounds of live ammunition from the sprawling station, causing no injuries but raising concern about what kinds of explosives might be traveling through suburbia.

Long the Sleepy Hollow of military bases, Seal Beach was thrust into the news at the same time the base’s 46-year sweetheart relationship with neighbors was strained because of a proposed wharf expansion.

“We’ve lived in harmony with the Navy and the base for decades because it hasn’t intruded into our community,” said Gwen Forsythe, one of the five Seal Beach City Council members who voted to oppose the expansion. Her home is 300 yards from the depot’s entrance. “Now we have something that will intrude.”

“We think the base has been a good neighbor,” added Gordon R. Labedz, a Seal Beach physician and a leader of Stop the Breakwater, the umbrella opposition group representing residents, surfers, realtors, environmentalists and even a few developers.

“You’d hate to think what might replace this place,” he said. “But if they approved this whole plan, I think there would be a big move to shut the base down.”

The bombing of Pearl Harbor that killed 3,700 people and destroyed 18 ammunition-laden ships prompted construction of America’s five naval weapons bases: Seal Beach and Concord on the West Coast; Charleston, Earl and Yorktown, the nation’s busiest, on the East Coast. Their function: to store and test weapons, and to load and unload ammunition before ships enter the naval harbors, thereby avoiding a repeat tragedy when much of America’s naval might was docked and stored in one place.

The Seal Beach depot was built the same year America suffered its worst home-front disaster of World War II, a July, 1944, blast that killed 320 servicemen and civilians and injured another 400 at Concord.

But Seal Beach has never had an explosives-related death or serious injury like that at Concord, when a peace protester’s legs were torn off in 1987 by a train that failed to stop in time.

That, the Navy and base detractors agree, is why the 30,000 residents of Seal Beach have largely lived peacefully with the military installation.

Situated on 5,000 acres fronting the Pacific Ocean and home to 222 sailors and 917 civilians, the Seal Beach base wraps around the heart of the city on the north and east. It is bounded by the San Diego Freeway at the north, Seal Beach Boulevard to the west, and Bolsa Chica Road to the south. At its southwest border, beachfront homes sit 30 yards from the base. More than half of the land is open space, from the 1,000-acre national wildlife refuge with its wetlands and endangered wildlife species, to the 2,171 acres of farmland where numerous crops are grown.

It is the Navy’s chief southern West Coast port for storing tons of ammunition and weapons--from .45-caliber bullets to 2,700-pound projectiles fired from battleships--and loading them onto vessels home ported at Long Beach and San Diego naval bases. The Navy won’t say exactly how much is being shipped yearly from the base, although a 1983 General Accounting Office Report stated 42,000 gross tons annually were then being handled there. Repair work on surface missiles and anti-submarine combat systems plus hundreds of weapons components also is done at the depot.

There are actually two other sites under the command of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station: The Navy’s Gage and Standards Center in Pomona, and a Fallbrook annex beside Camp Pendleton, which stores and repairs air-launched weapons and acts as the chief provisioner of conventional ordnance to the Marine Corps. Neither has a wharf.

An estimated two-thirds of the Pacific Fleet’s ships in the continental U.S. are based in San Diego and Long Beach, so Seal Beach has an active loading wharf, servicing an average of 365 ships yearly. Operation Desert Shield has stepped that up, requiring “a substantial amount of overtime,” according to one Navy source.

Most of its ordnance is transported from the base by truck rather than by ship, or train, Navy officials say.

The base also tests ammunition and weaponry delivered by makers like General Dynamics before the Navy accepts ownership, then issues it to the Pacific Fleet. Like a warranty service, the ordnance is also periodically tested at the base during its life span.

So how safe is the base?

According to Lt. Dane LaJoye , a spokesman for the Navy in Washington, Seal Beach’s safety record, like the country’s other four naval weapons stations, has been judged “excellent.”

Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, parts of inspection reports by the Department of Defense Explosives Safety Board from 1986 through 1989 indicate there have been violations, although none considered by experts to be alarming for an ammunition depot.

The reports summarized findings, many of them with partial omissions. A 1986 inspection, for instance, cites a leaking roof near a testing cell on a building used for Standard missile maintenance; improperly stored paint and solvents; testing of anti-submarine missile motor control circuits in a windowed building within 100 feet of a lightly traveled street, and outdoor storage at the Fallbrook annex of 21 million pounds of Vietnam-era napalm, some of it leaking from canisters.

By spring of 1989, however, when inspectors visited the Seal Beach base, it got a clean bill of health, the safety reports indicate. This year’s study was not available.

The Navy’s LaJoye said there have been no injuries resulting from ordnance accidents in the past two years at any of the nation’s five naval weapons depots, and overall accident rates were deemed by the Navy to be “consistent” with those in private industrial-type work.

The last time an employee was severely injured by a detonation at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station was in July, 1969. A fuse prematurely fired, injuring a worker’s hand. In 1987, a container carrying a rocket motor slipped off the tines of a forklift, pinning a worker to the wall of a bunker and fracturing his pelvis.

Even with strict safety rules, handling the sheer volume of deadly weapons and explosives poses a potential danger, as the Navy itself illustrated.

In announcing a 1988 review of all railroad operations at the country’s five Navy weapons depots, Naval Sea Systems Cmdr. Robert Ailes said the Concord tragedy, in which the peace protester lost his legs, and a December, 1987, train-truck crash at the Seal Beach station prompted the examination.

“I am becoming increasingly concerned with our railroad operations. The accident investigation information provided to me from the Concord and Seal Beach mishaps shows that several basic operational procedures were violated,” the admiral wrote.

The investigators’ report, dated July, 1988, revealed a variety of inconsistencies in policy and operational safety of the railroads, from lack of posted speed limits to an absence of guidelines for where to permit operation of radios that create electromagnetic fields that might detonate ordnance. The findings, however, were not linked to specific bases. Whether the problems have been corrected remains unclear.

In the case of Seal Beach, which has 65 miles of railroad track, the accident involved a security guard who inadvertently backed his truck onto the tracks. Fog was heavy and the guard pulled off a base road until it was safe to drive again. He told investigators he did not hear the train’s horn until it was too late to move his truck, which was struck and dragged about 30 feet. The guard was not injured.

Capt. Stephen Holl, commander of the Seal Beach depot, and other base officials say trains are seldom used to transport cargo from the base--perhaps no more than six times a year and that trucks are used to move cargo and ordnance.

But with increased demands on trucks during the Persian Gulf crisis, some of the load has been shifted to trains, said James Grill, director of the base’s explosives safety division.

As for nuclear weapons, the government’s longstanding policy is to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at its installations. However, the Navy said seven years ago that it lacked the storage capability for nuclear warheads and only anticipated keeping such weapons in the event of an emergency.

Even Greenpeace, the international environmental organization currently involved in a large-scale campaign to rid the seas of nuclear weapons, says there are none at the Seal Beach site.

If the nuclear issue has failed to spark interest locally, it has been just the opposite with the ambitious expansion plan, which many Seal Beach residents view as no less than the beginning of the end to tourism and property values, the environment and small-town charm of their community.

The plan calls for building a 4,000-foot extension of Anaheim Bay’s east jetty, where large warships that presently won’t fit in the port could load and unload ammunition. Holl has argued that the new breakwater will act as a barrier against sand erosion in the Sunset and Surfside beach areas, plus offer limited storm protection.

There are three alternatives to the $200-million project, the most extensive of which would create an L-shaped jetty in front of the Surfside Colony beachfront.

That configuration, the most staunchly opposed, would allow much larger ships to unload, thus potentially doubling the number visiting the base, base spokesman Tom Thomas said. A bigger port would also accommodate three new rapid-load supply vessels, the huge AOE-6s, only one of which has been completed.

Because the Navy now shares its Anaheim Bay ocean entrance with Huntington Harbour pleasure boaters, for years it has been granted waivers allowing shipment of explosives closer to populated areas than otherwise allowed by the government.

If approved, the Navy’s plan to change the mouth of Anaheim Bay would provide a separate, more secure entrance for naval ships. The Navy also argues that it would be a more efficient way to operate by allowing entry for ships that now have to be loaded and unloaded by barge three miles offshore, because they are too large to safely enter the bay.

An environmental impact report is now under way studying effects the expansion might have, and if Congress approves it, construction would start in 1993, with completion by 1997.

Rep. Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach), a surfer who rides the Sunset Beach waves when he’s in the district, has already vowed to oppose the plan.

“The impact on the whole coastal area is just too great compared with the benefits to the Navy that would slightly improve their operation,” Rohrabacher said.

Holl admits the plan is a hard-sell locally and he recently faced a hostile crowd of 100 people with normally disparate interests who turned out at a public hearing in late August.

An unlikely coalition of environmentalists, peace activists, rich homeowners, surf riders and local merchants have banded together to fight the project. Sometimes their only shared interest is their opposition to the expansion.

Environmentalists believe the shoreline will be altered by sand erosion and lack of waves that ordinarily cleanse the beach of debris carried to the sea by the San Gabriel River. No one argues that the surf would be eliminated because the jetty would create a protected bay.

Realtors believe property values would plummet with the sight of big warships floating at the jetty a mile offshore. Business owners say the elimination of surf would diminish the town’s allure to tourists.

“There is no way they will build that breakwater,” said longtime resident Labedz. “It’s an environmental nightmare, and for the first time there would be a total revolt about the base. Nobody wants to see that, though, because we’ve always got along with the base. . . . People worry about it but they kind of accept the idea that there might be a few nuclear weapons there. But nobody will accept this.”

Times staff writer Ralph Vartabedian contributed to this story.

Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach

Behind the forbidding fences of the ammunition depot is a world of juxtaposed cohabitants, at once bucolic and industrial. More than 130 ammo-filled bunkers, the low-slung buildings you see while whizzing by the base on the I-405 Freeway, share the base with a 1,000-acre federal wildlife refuge. The mission of the base: loading and unloading Pacific Fleet vessels entering Long Beach and San Diego ports and weapons testing. Inert Operations

These buildings, now mostly empty, originally were used to assemble ammunition for WWII.

Class Yard

All ammunition-laden trucks or boxcars entering and leaving the Naval Weapons Station are inspected in this area.

Ammunition Storage

Storage buildings vary on the type of ammunition they will contain. This one has three separate rooms, each strongly shielded from the others to prevent a chain reaction in the event of an explosion.

Temporary Storage

In the event a boxcar is loaded from one of the storage areas but can’t be unloaded to a naval vessel, it will be stored temporarily in a large barricade like the one shown here to confine it in case of a mishap.

Wildlife Refuge

The Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge is the only one in the country sharing space with a military installation. Established in 1973, the refuge is home to at least five endangered species--the least tern, light-footed clapper rail and Belding’s savannah sparrow among them.Red foxes have gravely reduced the least tern population. The Navy has been trapping, removing or killing the foxes as per a federal environmental report. Animal rights activists continue to oppose it.

Proposed Wharf Expansion

The Navy’s $200-million plan would extend the east jetty of Anaheim Bay, enabling larger ships to dock. Barges must now ferry ammunition and weapons from the base to those larger vessels about three miles offshore. The new breakwater and its wharf would further distance explosives from surrounding community. A. Existing Wharf: This wharf is currently used to load ammunition onto the barges that supply ships anchored offshore.

B. Proposed Wharf: Large vessels that are not able to dock at the current wharf in Anaheim Bay will use this wharf if it is built.

C. Access to Huntington Harbor: If the jetty is expanded, a separate ocean entrance to Huntington Harbor would be created for pleasure boats, making the rest of the bay safer for the Navy.

Source: Naval Weapons Station--Seal Beach