AEROSPACE : A Deodorized Skunk Works : Lockheed Calls New Plant Environmentally Safe

Faced with a cost of about $263 million to clean up the site of its old Skunk Works operations in Burbank, Lockheed Corp. declares it won’t be caught in such a bind with its new operations in Palmdale.

Giving the media a glimpse of the 677-acre complex last week, officials of Lockheed Advanced Development Co. boasted that the latest addition to its Palmdale site, a $30-million parts plant, is one of the most environmentally safe facilities of its kind in the country.

The plant, which opens next month, will fabricate, prepare and paint metal aircraft parts, including those needed to make modifications to the Lockheed-built F-117 stealth fighter and update the old U-2 spy plane.

This new Skunk Works takes its name from the secret Advanced Development Projects unit originally in Burbank, which for decades designed and built top-secret military aircraft. Employees dubbed it the Skunk Works back in the 1940s, when fumes from a nearby chemical plant filled the unit with a foul smell. (They were also inspired by characters in the Li’l Abner comic strip who operated a moonshine distillery with secret ingredients in their brew.)

Lockheed said it has invested more than $22 million in environmental systems at its new facilities to prevent pollution and minimize hazardous materials and waste.

“We believe this is what it takes to meet all the environmental rules that have evolved over the years,” said Skunk Works Executive Vice President Jack Gordon. “With this facility we have established a standard for environmental protection that other companies will be trying to achieve for years.”

Some pollution control experts dispute that claim. “Their systems sound good, but they are not necessarily the first or best in the country,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Indeed, other defense concerns, including Los Angeles-based Northrop Corp. and Falls Church, Va.-based General Dynamics, have been using some of the same type of air-cleaning equipment for several years. All of it was built by Harrington Plastics Inc., a privately held Chino-based company.

As for worker safety at the new parts plant in Palmdale, “it looks very good, but we can’t tell until it’s in operation,” said Bill Seiner, an official of the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration who toured the facility last week.

Calabasas-based Lockheed is in the process of moving 3,000 employees from Burbank to the Palmdale complex. The move, which began three years ago, is scheduled to be completed next spring. The Palmdale complex will then be a complete aircraft company, capable of taking planes from design to flight testing.

Most of Lockheed’s environmental efforts in Palmdale have centered on parts processing, where volatile, organic compounds such as hexavalent chromium are used. Nearly a third of the new metal-parts plant’s cost, or about $9 million, went into state-of-the-art systems that will release no waste water and almost no air emissions.

The plant includes a system for cleaning and recycling all water used at the plant for industrial purposes. Air-emission controls will process and remove a minimum of 99.9% of all chromium and 95% of all acid and nitrous oxide emissions, and an ultraviolet oxidation system for capturing metal-painting emissions will remove 99.9% of all contaminants, according to the company.

The plant’s air- and water-recycling systems are the latest-generation versions of similar systems that Lockheed installed at another of its plants in the Palmdale complex. That plant fabricates and processes parts made of space-age plastic composites.

Like other large defense contractors, Lockheed’s environmental problems in Burbank date back to World War II. At the peak of Lockheed’s military aircraft production in the 1940s, more than 90,000 Burbank employees worked around-the-clock, assembling planes both indoors and out--with nobody worrying about what was spilled on the ground.

Those environmental problems led to a suit filed against Lockheed by its workers. The huge chemical-exposure action was brought on behalf of 624 current and former Lockheed workers at the Burbank complex during the 1970s and ‘80s.

Generally, the workers claimed that solvents, resins and epoxies used at the plant caused maladies ranging from skin rashes and memory loss to cancer.

The Times reported that in 1992, Lockheed agreed to pay $33 million, along with $300,000 to a team of judicial mediators, to distribute the settlement fund among the plaintiffs.

As for the estimated $263-million cleanup of the Burbank complex, U.S. taxpayers will help foot the bill. Last spring, the General Accounting Office reported that the Defense Department, Lockheed’s largest customer, would reimburse the company for more than half the cost of the cleanup.

Nationwide, the Pentagon has agreed to pay the country’s 15 largest defense contractors for much of the $3.1 billion they collectively face in environmental decontamination expenses.