Chemical Weapons Use Linked to Oxnard Site : Lawsuits: Evidence introduced in waste-dump dispute shows an area now occupied by a shopping center was used for Navy training.

Military maps that show the Navy once trained with chemical weapons on a site now occupied by a shopping center on Harbor Boulevard in Oxnard have become part of the controversy surrounding an oil waste dump buried beneath a beachfront subdivision.

The Navy activity in the Oxnard Shores neighborhood was the prime topic of discussion this week among lawyers involved in a $3.5-million lawsuit filed in 1987 by property owners and renters in the adjacent Oxnard Dunes neighborhood.

The 175 plaintiffs in the suit contend that developers, landowners and the city are liable for failing to disclose the existence of a waste dump buried under the 100-lot Dunes subdivision.

The evidence of chemical weapons training in the nearby Oxnard Shores area was introduced by lawyers for the previous subdivision landowners to show that chemical dumping was a common practice in the Oxnard beach area in past years.

The maps introduced as part of the court record in the case show that an area near Harbor Boulevard and Wooley Road in Oxnard Shores was used by the Navy during both World War II and the Korean War, according to lawyers on both sides.

Glen M. Reiser, an attorney representing the McGrath family, a pioneering farm family that owned huge expanses of land in the area, said the maps provide evidence that the beachfront area in the northwest corner of the city was used for various military, industrial and agricultural uses.

He said he can clear his clients of liability in the suit if he can show that the dumping of oil waste in the Oxnard Dunes site was an appropriate use for the property at the time.

“Everybody who lived in Oxnard knew this,” he said, referring to the Navy activity. “It was no mystery to anyone.”

But Conrad G. Tuohey, a Santa Ana attorney representing the plaintiffs in the suit, said the maps prove that the former landowners and developers also failed to tell the homeowners about the Navy’s activities in the area.

Tuohey said there is no evidence that the Navy’s activities in the area caused any soil contamination.

State officials completed nearly five years of testing at the Oxnard Dunes neighborhood in November and concluded that the dump beneath the subdivision poses no health risk to the residents.

Richard Varenchik, a spokesman for the state Department of Health Services, said, however, his agency has never tested for soil contamination at Oxnard Shores, where the Navy operated a military installation between 1942 and 1956.

A 1945 map from the Office of the Command Historian at the naval base in Port Hueneme shows the Navy practiced chemical warfare in an area where Harbor Boulevard and Wooley Road now intersect, Tuohey said. A small commercial strip mall is near that intersection.

The map also shows the Navy trained with live ammunition in an area where West 5th Street and Harbor Boulevard now intersect. A mobile home park is now located in the area.

Navy officials were not available for comment Friday afternoon.

Lynda Paxton, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she is upset that she and other landowners in the Dunes were never told the extent of the Navy’s activities in the area. “The frustration is that we didn’t know,” she said.

Reiser said the McGrath family is not liable because it disclosed information about the Navy activity and about the oil waste dump to the Oxnard Shores Co., which bought the land in 1956 and developed the Dunes and the Shores neighborhoods.