SEAL BEACH : New Panel to Oversee Cleanup at Navy Base

Fifteen years after the Navy first investigated the dumping of hazardous waste at the Naval Weapons Station, a newly formed 27-member citizens committee will hold its first meeting Thursday night to oversee the cleanup process.

Navy officials estimate there are about 70 sites on the 5,000-acre base where paint, solvents and chemicals were dumped over the years. The Navy estimates it could take until 2005 to complete the cleanup at a cost of more than $11 million.

The Navy began an investigation of the base shortly after Congress passed the nation’s first Superfund hazardous waste cleanup legislation in 1980.

The Navy searched records and interviewed former employees to fill in the gaps where records did not exist on how waste materials were disposed. Rocket boosters for the Apollo and Skylab missions were constructed at the weapons base between 1963 and 1974 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Employees who had worked on a secret Department of Energy project several years after NASA left also were contacted.

There were few laws during that time regulating waste disposal, according to Navy officials.

Two landfills at the 50-year-old base identified for cleanup may be of particular public concern, according to base spokesman Richard Williamson. They are on base property across the street from a Seal Beach and a Huntington Beach elementary school.

“The environment is safe at this point in time,” Williamson said. “But if any cleanup actions have to be taken, then it is even more critical that the community in the immediate area be fully briefed on what’s there and on the alternatives for action.”

Naval Weapons Station Cmdr. Joel F. Steadley will attend the first meeting of the Restoration Advisory Board, scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in Seal Beach City Council chambers. A committee co-chair will be named to share leadership duties with Steadley.

An oil drilling operation on a small island within the 1,000-acre Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge on the weapons base may not fall within the jurisdiction of the committee because it is already monitored by the state Environmental Protection Agency, Williamson said.