Turbulent Waters : Navy Suggestion That It Might Dredge San Diego Bay and Bury Toxic Waste There Draws Protests From Environmentalists

In an effort to accommodate up to three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers as part of its “Homeporting” project, the U.S. Navy is formulating plans for a massive dredging of San Diego Bay that may include digging a hole in the floor of the bay for burying contaminated soils laced with heavy metals, oils and PCBs, officials disclosed Thursday.

Environmentalists have reacted with alarm to the dredging plan alone--much less its toxic side effects.

If approved, the plan would mark the first time anywhere in the country that the Navy has disposed of such toxic material by storing it in massive quantities in one underwater site, said Dan Muslin, head of environmental planning for the Navy in its San Diego sector.

Muslin said the controversial disposal aspect of the plan is very preliminary. “But we have been looking at alternative disposal methods,” he said.

Mark Delaplaine, federal consistency supervisor with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco, said the Navy has consistently broached the disposal plan during its meetings with the agency.

“It keeps coming up as an option under study,” Delaplaine said. “It doesn’t mean they’re going to do it, but they are informing the various agencies that this is an idea they wish to explore.”

Navy officials expressed concern Thursday about potential risks to the California least tern, migratory waterfowl and eelgrass. Environmentalists, meanwhile, reacted in stronger terms.

“I’m appalled at the idea,” said Robert Simmons, an attorney who represents the Sierra Club in its federal lawsuit against the city of San Diego over sewage treatment. “We start with the bay waters as they presently stand. They’ve been identified by several investigative committees as the most contaminated bay waters connected with coastal waters on either coast. (San Diego Bay) is like an old septic tank that’s never been cleaned out.

“The idea of potentially adding to those conditions by directly placing God knows what quantities of toxic, hazardous wastes. . . . Well, it’s utterly unthinkable.”

But Muslin said the plan is necessary to accommodate a much larger fleet of Navy ships--including the three carriers--that may be deployed in San Diego as part of the Homeporting concept of military downsizing and consolidating.

Pending a federal environmental impact statement that should be finished by the end of the year, the Navy will definitely deploy at least one Nimitz-class nuclear carrier in San Diego by 1997, Capt. Mark Neuhart, a Navy spokesman, said Thursday.

Two conventionally powered aircraft carriers, the Kittyhawk and the Constellation, are currently moored here; the nuclear-powered carrier would be the first of its kind in San Diego. But pier construction to accommodate three such carriers is already under way at the North Island Naval Air Station on the Coronado peninsula, which forms the geographical centerpiece of the bay itself.

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To accommodate the ships, the Navy would need to dredge the outer main channel of the bay to a depth of 55 feet, the inner channel to 47 feet and the turning basin just north of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge to a depth of 50 feet, Neuhart said. All are presently 45 feet deep, which is too shallow for Nimitz-class carriers.

The dredging would begin in 1996 and would cost $70 million--the funds already have been earmarked by Congress--and would generate what Neuhart called up to 12 million cubic yards of “dredge material.” About 11 million cubic yards--said to be uncontaminated--would be redistributed on area beaches, which have suffered significant sand erosion.

But at least 1 million cubic yards are thought to be laden with hazardous and contaminated materials that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prohibits anyone from dumping in the open sea, Neuhart said. The need to dispose of such sediment is the reason Navy officials are talking of burying and “capping” such waste at an undisclosed site in the bay itself.

Environmentalists have lobbied for years to have tons of toxic sediment removed from the bay, which they contend has elevated counts of mercury, lead and other heavy metals.

“Underwater is exactly the wrong place to be putting that crap,” said Laura Hunter, director of the Clean Bay Campaign of the Environmental Health Coalition of San Diego. “We are not in support of developing an underwater, in-bay, hazardous-waste landfill and would have serious concerns about that kind of proposal. I try not to have a reaction until I’ve seen all the facts, but I can’t imagine how they could do that in a way that would be environmentally benign to the bay.

“To dredge it up means a lot of disturbance and re-suspension in the water. Then you have who knows how much accuracy in getting it in the hole. The cap may or may not last long enough, in which case you end up with a far more frightening problem than you ever had in the first place.”

In a worst-case scenario, “fish from the bay just couldn’t be eaten--ever,” Hunter said, noting that the risk of such a procedure would be in “taking that stuff from one place and dumping it in a second place. That gives it a second opportunity to enter the water column and contaminate the food chain. So, in effect, you’re doubling the recontamination by digging up the pollutants and putting them back in.”

Although a formal proposal has yet to be made, Delaplaine said that, at first glance, coastal authorities also have environmental concerns.

“If you’re a regulatory agency, naturally you’re nervous about it,” he said. “We’d want to see a lot of facts before we even considered it. It’s hard to say how we’d feel before our commission sees it, but we’re always concerned about contaminated materials.”

Hunter said that San Diego Bay has the highest level of a series of banned chemicals known as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, of any West Coast waterway.

Testing of San Diego Bay already reveals elevated counts of PCBs and mercury, she said, calling them “biocumulative, which means they readily enter the food chain. PCBs alone have a half-life of 250 years, meaning that, in 250 years, they’ll only be half as toxic as they are at the moment.”

In California, such materials can only be dumped in Class 1 or Class 2 landfills, such as those found at toxic-waste disposal sites, Delaplaine said. But Navy officials said it would be too expensive to transport such materials to a landfill.

Muslin said the Navy would be following the lead of other agencies, which have been dumping and then capping contaminated wastes under Puget Sound near Seattle and in areas of the East Coast for years “without a problem.”

But Ken Moser, who directs the San Diego Baykeeper, part of a national alliance of river, sound and bay protective groups, and who formerly worked with the Puget Sound group, said that in the Pacific Northwest, capped dumping has more closely resembled an environmental quagmire.

“The precedent for it is in Puget Sound, on Elliott Bay,” Moser said. “Years ago, the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers began dredging toxic sediment from the mouth of the Duwamish River. They dug a hole in the deepest place on the bottom of the river and filled it with contaminated sediment.

“They then took several feet of clean material and put it on top, the theory being the toxic material would never escape. But what they failed to reckon or predict is that what they had there--obviously--was a wet environment. So, the toxic stuff leaked into the shellfish beds off Magnolia Bluffs on the north side of Elliott Bay,” an inland waterway of Puget Sound.

“What happened was disastrous,” Moser said. “Along some of the most desirable waterfront property in Seattle, people can no longer harvest shellfish. . . . “You’re essentially sweeping under the rug all sorts of toxic materials, and you don’t know if the rug is going to hold.”

The cap is usually between three and 10 feet thick and consists of sand or a mixture of sand and gravel, he said, noting that “the integrity of the cap” must be “rigorously maintained.”

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To win approval for the project, the Navy would have to complete the federal environmental impact statement, or EIS, then obtain permission from, among other agencies, the Corps of Engineers, the Coastal Commission, the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said David Zoutendyk, a biologist with the regulatory division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in San Diego.

“The burden on them is to convince reviewers and the public that it’s safe,” Delaplaine of the Coastal Commission said. “They won’t be able to do that without a lot of studies. They also have to weigh the public-relations concern of being a good neighbor to everybody in San Diego.”