Lack of Money Slows Cleanup at Airport : Camarillo: The Army Corps of Engineers has taken responsibility for chemical contaminants at nine sites. But local officials say the promise to help falls far short of what’s needed.

A contractor repaving the play yard of the Shirley Hendershot Job Training Center at the Camarillo Airport unearthed a patch of green soil that smelled like gasoline, and work stopped.

Tests revealed that the soil near the county-run special education facility, where 40 developmentally disabled students play, was tainted with lead, benzene and other hazardous chemicals, officials with the county Environmental Health Department said.

The contamination, discovered last summer, came from a service station that stood on the site for 31 years when the airport was Oxnard Air Force Base.

School administrators, who had already spent $800,000 to clean up two other sites at the airport, followed the advice of county health officials and ordered the contractor to just cover the contaminated soil with a layer of fresh asphalt.

The site was the most recent of nine contaminated areas discovered at the airport in the last four years. At one location, soil to a depth of 11 feet was saturated with jet fuel from leaks in an underground fuel depot, and at others, workers discovered that heating oil, leaded gasoline and diesel fuel had seeped into the ground from leaking tanks.

The Army Corps of Engineers agreed to assume responsibility for most of the leaks four years ago, but still has not furnished a penny for cleanup, county officials said.

Health officials approved the temporary remedy at the Hendershot Center to slow the spread of contaminants to the shallow water table beneath the airport, and said that paving over the site will protect the health of the students.

But it was a short-term solution, and the only alternative without the Corps’ funds, officials said. Remedial work has been suspended at eight other polluted sites, including several where contaminants have seeped into the ground water, county health officials say.

“We’ve tried to be as squeaky a wheel as possible, but the Corps’ money is tied up in Washington,” said Doug Beach, who manages the county program that monitors leaking underground tanks.

The Corps failed to provide a cleanup schedule to county health officials by a Jan. 7 deadline, but Thursday said it plans to install three monitoring wells sometime this spring.

The promise falls far short of the cleanup that local officials expected.

“We hate to see work stopped on any site, because of the potential for harm to the ground water,” Beach said. “The longer (the contaminants) remain in place, the better the chance they will migrate into the water table.”

Because of the high water table beneath the Oxnard Plain, all underground water in Ventura County is potentially useful and must be protected, the Regional Water Quality Control Board has determined.

And while some in the county question the need to protect an upper aquifer already polluted by agricultural pesticides and fertilizer, Beach thinks that it is important.

“We are not dealing with an immediate problem with water quality, but someday we will certainly face one if the contamination continues,” Beach said.

Discovery of contamination has held up several construction projects at the airport and increased the costs of others, Airport Manager Tom Iverson said.

Twice, county school officials paid to remove old tanks that lay beneath the sites of new buildings. “If we had to go in later, it would have meant major disruptions,” said Shirley Maclean, a business director for county schools.

“We knew that, time wise, we couldn’t get the Corps of Engineers to do it fast enough.”

The first contaminated sites were discovered in 1987, nearly two decades after the Air Force closed its base in 1969. Complying with a state law that requires underground tanks to be checked for leaks, airport officials found that a major leak--the one that seeped down 11 feet--had occurred at the airport’s fuel depot.

The fuel may have been leaking for decades. Monitoring wells installed by the airport confirmed that the fuel had seeped into the underground water basin. The leak occurred in pipes that carried aviation fuel from two aboveground tanks west of Eubanks Street to four 25,000-gallon tanks at the fuel depot near the runway.

The leak had developed in the pipes’ couplings with the underground tanks, said John Wascher, a public works program manager who supervises the airport’s cleanup efforts.

About 500 cubic yards of saturated soil were excavated from around the fuel depot and spread on the surface to dry, but the amount represented a fraction of the contamination, Wascher said. Health officials estimate that more than 4,000 cubic yards of soil were contaminated.

For more than four years, a hole has marked the site of the fuel depot. The rain and ground water that fills several feet of the 15-foot-deep pit continue to leach chemicals into the water table, Wascher said.

Wascher, using a magnetic pipe-finding device, and Iverson, wielding a dowsing rod, traced the route of the fuel pipes beneath the concrete runway. Tests of underground gases turned up “hot spots” confirming that the pipes had leaked, Wascher said.

And fuel may remain in 3,000 feet of underground pipe, or could have seeped out along the route, Wascher said. He calculated that the pipe could hold up to 600 gallons of aviation fuel.

The 1987 survey turned up a number of other leaks from tanks where heating oil, gasoline and waste oil were stored.

“The military seemed to go crazy in putting in tanks in the 1940s and 1950s,” Beach said. “Practically every building would have its own heating-oil tank.”

At the base service station that caused the Hendershot contamination, gasoline was routinely used as a solvent by mechanics to soak dirty parts and was even used to kill weeds, said David Wadsworth of the county environmental health agency.

The Army Corps of Engineers accepted responsibility for cleaning up the base as part of a federal effort to restore the environment at 7,400 former military sites nationwide. More than 1,100 of the former military facilities are located in California.

Scheduled for federal assistance were facilities as varied as remote radar sites, Gen. George S. Patton’s tank-training ground in the California desert and former Air Force bases such as the one in Camarillo.

Since the Department of Defense initiated its cleanup in 1983, preliminary assessments have been completed at 3,100 locations, said Scott Saunders, a Corps spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of the inspected sites needed no further attention, the Defense Department determined. Of the 900 that were identified as needing remedial action, the department has completed cleanup at 100.

But Brian Stone, who oversees the Camarillo site for the Corps, said the contamination sites at the Camarillo Airport were initially considered to be less hazardous and were given lower priority than those at many other facilities.

“Our bottom line is attempting to get to the worst first,” Stone said in a telephone interview from the South Pacific Region’s headquarters in San Francisco.

However, funds for three monitoring wells at Camarillo Airport finally have been included in the Corps’ 1992 fiscal-year budget, Stone said. By spring, he said, the Corps’ Los Angeles office should be able to begin the assessment that the Corps promised four years ago.

Stone conceded that the help that Ventura County officials have sought has been slow in coming. “Call it red tape, but we haven’t been as responsive as we should be,” he said.

Wascher said three wells at each site are needed to test the spread of contaminants, so the Corps funding will only be enough for wells at a single spot.

“I don’t see what good that would do,” he said.

Health officials say they will give the Corps another chance to come up with a cleanup plan before turning the Camarillo Airport sites over to the Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Unlike the county, the state board can use federal statutes to levy a $1,000-a-day fine on the Corps until it comes up with a cleanup plan.

Similar pressure prompted the U.S. Forest Service to shift a significant amount of funds to Ventura County to clean up underground tanks, Wadsworth said.

But the county won’t consider such action, he said, “until we decide someone has dug in their heels and it’s clear they just won’t pay.”