Military Bases Present Toxic-Waste Problems : Environment: A consultant says sites slated for closure may never be fit for civilian use. The Pentagon estimates cleanup costs at $1 billion.

For years, most military bases disposed of solvents, dead batteries, used motor oil and most any other kind of waste by dumping it in an out-of-the-way corner.

Now, many of the 43 bases that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney wants to shut down are so poisoned by old wastes that converting them to civilian use is likely to take a lot of time and money.

Just how lengthy and how costly the cleanup projects might be is anybody’s guess. Estimates range to decades and billions of dollars.

“Nobody really knows how much contamination exists at these bases,” said Tim Terry, military affairs aide to U.S. Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Sacramento), who has made the problem his specialty. “You don’t know for sure until you start digging.”

Some of the bases Cheney wants to close could be attractive sites for parks, housing, factories or civilian airports--but only after the mess is removed. In most cases, selling the land before cleanup would be illegal or impractical.

At Castle Air Force Base in California’s Central Valley, trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen that was used to hose down aircraft, has seeped into the water table beneath the base.

In 1987, the Air Force had to supply bottled water to neighbors of the base whose wells were contaminated, then drill new, deeper wells for the town of Atwater and for the base itself.

Besides a permanent cleanup of the ground water, before the base can be sold to civilian developers officials have to worry about buried oil tanks, old landfills, chemical disposal pits, fuel spill dumps and other discharge sites for solvents, pesticides, cyanide, cadmium and other pollutants.

Hazardous wastes in the soil or in the ground water pose the biggest problems, but some bases may also harbor other poisons--such as asbestos or radon gas--that could require expensive remedies.

Eleven of the 43 bases to be closed by 1997 are priority cleanup locations under the federal Superfund law. The others, although less polluted, have hundreds of hazardous waste sites that are noted in the Defense Department’s annual environmental report. The report offers few clues, however, to how serious those problems might be.

At some bases, the cleanup is likely to eat up whatever savings the Pentagon might expect to come from the closure and land sale.

“Some of these properties--they’re just going to have to build a high fence around them and mark it off forever,” said Gary McKown, vice president of ICF Engineers, an Oakland-based contractor hired design environmental remedies for the Army.

One of the toughest cases is that of the Army’s Jefferson Proving Grounds in Indiana, where 1.4 million unexploded shells, bombs and mines have accumulated on a 100-square-mile test range. Jefferson is one of the 86 bases slated to be closed since 1988, but no one knows how the range could be cleaned up.

Complete restoration depends on technology not yet invented, and could cost more money than has been spent on the base since it opened, McKown said.

Cheney’s list of 43 bases is being reviewed by an independent commission, but the panel is not supposed to take cleanup costs into account in deciding which installations should be closed. The Pentagon’s rationale is that cleanup costs will have to be paid even if a base remains in operation.

The Pentagon’s chief cleanup man, Thomas Baca, dismisses the most alarming cost estimates. He said he thinks the 43 bases can be restored to good environmental condition for less than $1 billion.

“Our intent is to clean them up,” said Baca, who is deputy assistant secretary for the environment. “We feel we will have the money.”

The people who live near the bases proposed for closure are not so sure.

“We’re worried that, once it’s closed, it’ll be ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ ” California’s U.S. Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) said in an interview.

Condit’s district includes Castle Air Force Base, which is on both the new closing list and the Superfund priorities list.

Cleaning up Castle could take until 2017 and cost as much as $400 million, Condit said, and the money could be hard to find.

The Pentagon’s annual budget for environmental restoration at all bases totals just $1.2 billion, and $100 million of that is earmarked for bases already scheduled to be closed before the latest list was drawn up.

Condit recently introduced a bill to require the military to keep bases open until 75% of the cleanup was complete, then finish the job within two years after closing.

“Without this legislation, Castle Air Force Base and other military bases scheduled for closure could become wastelands for years to come,” Condit said.

Asked if his proposal was reasonable, considering the scope of the mess, Condit said that if Pentagon officials are not given a deadline, “community leaders wind up fighting them for the next 25 years. I don’t think that’s reasonable.”

The Sacramento Army Depot, another Superfund site on the latest closure list, isn’t nearly as bad as Jefferson, but putting the land back to use is going to be tough because of trichloroethylene and heavy metals in the water supply.

“Because of the contamination it’s never going to be used for housing. It may be a blank spot in the economy for years to come,” said Michael Picker, West Coast director for the National Toxics Campaign Fund.

“You can’t build a modern functional city around this gory mess. You can’t just leave it there,” Picker said. “The military is leaving these blighted toxic ghettos behind them. I think there’s a little more required.”

Here are the bases proposed for closure that are Superfund National Priority sites, and the contaminants identified in the Defense Environmental Restoration Program’s 1991 annual report:

* Castle Air Force Base, Merced, Calif.--spent solvents, fuels, waste oils, pesticides, cyanide, cadmium.

* Davisville Construction Battalion Center, North Kingston, R.I.--PCBs, volatile organic compounds, oily lubricants, pesticides, lead.

* Ft. Devens, Middlesex County, Mass.--volatile organic compounds, petroleum products, PCBs, pesticides, herbicides.

* Ft. Dix, Pemberton Township, N. J.--volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, lubricants, solvents, photographic chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, medical wastes.

* Ft. Ord, Marina, Calif.--metals and volatile organic compounds.

* Hunters Point Annex, San Francisco--paints, solvents, fuels, acids, heavy metals, PCBs, asbestos, phenols, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds.

* Loring Air Force Base, Limestone, Maine--waste oils, fuels, solvents, PCBs, pesticides, heavy metals.

* Moffett Naval Air Station, Sunnyvale, Calif.--metal-plating wastes, PCBs, waste oil and fuels, painting residues, organic solvents, caustics, coolants, pesticides, asbestos, Freon, dyes.

* Sacramento Army Depot, Sacramento--oil and grease, solvents, metal-plating wastes, waste waters containing caustics, cyanide, heavy metals.

* Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Whidbey Island, Wash.--volatile organic compounds, oily lubricants.

* Williams Air Force Base, Chandler, Ariz.--waste solvents, fuels and lubricants, heavy metals.