Naval Cleanup : The county is now the hub of the military branch’s worldwide eco-sleuth effort to reduce pollution at its bases.

The U.S. Navy is undertaking to clean up its act, and rely heavily on civilians to help do it. The process is fascinating.

“We’re trying to fix every base so you can’t tell where the (electrical generating) plant is,” said David Carpenter, a supervisor with Port Hueneme’s Naval Energy and Environmental Support Activity (NEESA) program, when I called recently. He also offered an enviro-tale.

“The other day, a Navy boss came onto the base in the morning and right away got upset,” Carpenter said. “There was no smoke rising from the stacks on the generator building. He called the energy officer to see why they hadn’t fired up the boilers that morning. What he heard was that they had just finished installing a clean-air rig and there wasn’t going to be any smoke to see from now on.”

I asked which base Carpenter was talking about. He said, “It could be any one of 10 where the sky was black before.”

OK. I wasn’t going to quibble. I knew that he and NEESA had thousands of sites to worry about. Their job is to assist these corps in complying with environmental regulations in 50 states and overseas, while getting them to cut their energy consumption. This includes the cleanup of old hazardous waste disposal sites.

And money is getting tighter. In this county, that difficulty showed up recently at Camarillo Airport. There, the Army Corps of Engineers has acknowledged the need to clean up several old fuel leaks, but has not spent a penny on the task in four years.

With the Soviet menace fading, each of the armed forces is having to face up to environmental problems for which they never had time or money. And since Ventura County is now the hub of the Navy’s worldwide eco-sleuth effort, I thought I’d see how our local folks--140 civilians and 40 military personnel--are doing.

They have compiled an inventory of 2,200 naval sites and then checked them out for environmental problems. About half need cleanup or at least further checking. Already the fix-up bill could run to $3 billion, which has not yet been appropriated from Congress. At least we have an annually updated record--the Defense Environmental Restoration Program Report--to track what’s happening.

But NEESA’s job is much more than inventorying and air filtering.

“We’re not in the enforcement business,” Lt. Cmdr. Scott Newman said. “We’re more like a consulting business. We handle things like training day-to-day for compliance” of civilian laws.

Since 1987, Newman said, his group has wrangled the Navy’s production of toxic wastes downward 42%. (Just for the record, I’ve heard that we civilians have also stopped throwing so much paint down the drain. Our figure, according to the recycling think tank The Institute for Local Self Reliance, is down about 40%.)

Newman also said his command was given the task in 1985 of getting the Navy to cut energy consumption by 12.5% by the year 2000.

“The Navy’s utilities bill is $57 million less in ’91 than it was in ‘85,” Newman said.

My favorite NEESA program is “Plastic Media Blasting.”

No, it’s has nothing to do with attacks on tabloid newspapers. It’s about the age-old Navy practice of painting everything.

With blasting, workers use tiny, reusable plastic balls to blast dirt, grease and paint off equipment. They capture the dust in filtration rigs and reuse the tiny plastic balls.

Thus, no toxic, oily water or land pollution.

Now, about those civilians I mentioned before.

As I’ve pointed out in earlier columns, haz-mat and related work is a growing career field. The military is reducing its gun-toting units, but increasing its eco-units. Men and women laid off from one branch can, after some civilian retraining, qualify for a new job. And local civilian contractors can get consulting and cleanup work via NEESA.

This situation is a bit diabolical. My research suggests that the U.S. military may just be angling to spend on cleanups exactly as much as it was previously spending on buildups.

And as it did historically with the buildup, it seems, Ventura County is getting its piece of the cleanup action.

* FYI

Recent college graduates or recently trained applicants interested in environmental or energy control jobs at NEESA should call Pati Moreno, 982-3526. Local point of contact for contractors interested in Naval Energy and Environmental Support Activity projects is Cathy Volpe, 982-5073.