Secrets Away : Navy Lifts Veil on High-Security Research Lab in Port Hueneme

For 45 years, scientific experiments conducted inside the Navy’s oceanfront laboratory here were shrouded by security guards, barbed wire fences and the lab’s penchant for secrecy.

But peacetime is changing the Navy. And even the security-conscious laboratory wedged next to the Port of Hueneme is coming around now that it must justify its worth to compete for federal dollars in the post-Cold War era.

As Pentagon cutbacks force the lab to abandon its 33-acre site and move onto the adjacent Seabee base, Navy officials are beginning to lift the veil on its research.

What emerges is an eclectic array of scientific endeavors designed--not to provide the Navy with bigger guns or faster ships--but to help the service run more smoothly and efficiently.

Scientists and engineers test high-tech materials to make waterfront piers impervious to salt-water corrosion. They nurture microorganisms that can clean up contaminated soil by feasting on oil spills.

They play with photo-chromatic house paints that change color--lighter shades to reflect the hot sun or darker shades to absorb the heat. They designed a canteen to keep water from freezing in subzero European winters and remain cool in the merciless heat of the Egyptian desert.

The lab recently joined with five smaller Navy outfits to form the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center. It was a consolidation recommended by the 1993 base-closing commission that also ordered shutting down the lab’s 33-acre base.

But unlike the threat of other base closures, this one has done nothing but benefit Ventura County, said Capt. John P. Collins, commanding officer of the engineering service center.

Most people fear that base closures bring loss of jobs and economic ruin, Collins said. “This is a case where the community gets a new $20-million facility and [gets] to keep nearly all of the jobs,” he said.

By next spring, the service center’s team of 500 scientists, engineers and technicians will pack up their instruments and relocate to a massive two-story building now under construction in the middle of the Seabee base.

The transformation coincides with the Navy’s new openness after the end of the Cold War, said Pete Edward Tafoya, a longtime engineer at the base.

“We have gone from a lab, which was very secretive in nature, to a center, which is very open,” Tafoya said. “It is a transition going on throughout the federal government.”

As a result, the public can finally learn what lies behind the security fence on the beachfront base:

* A concrete blockhouse with thick, plexiglass windows that are pockmarked by blowtorches, drills and explosions that tested resistance to terrorist penetration. It was part of the lab’s work to improve security at U.S. embassies and foreign outposts.

* A deep ocean lab with a seawater-filled chamber that can simulate extreme pressures experienced on dives miles below the ocean’s surface. Even Jacques Cousteau has used the chamber to test deep-sea equipment.

* A lab with a walk-in freezer that simulates the arctic environment and checks out how equipment and materials stand up to extreme cold.

* A dive tank filled with murky water to experiment with contraptions that enable ocean divers to coordinate their movements in seawater with little or no visibility.

* A large swimming pool draped with dozens of electrical and communications cables. Huge pumps circulate salt water, creating a swift current to test the durability of underwater cables.

The service center, as the lab is now called, has expanded its focus from the days when its inventors churned out hundreds of patents and embraced the lab’s motto: “I will find a way or make one.”

Now, it is often a clearinghouse for new technology available on the civilian market. The center’s engineers sift through the dizzying array of new high-tech equipment and scientific breakthroughs and adapt them for military use.

“We make sure that the Navy is taking advantage of the newest technology,” Collins said.

The service center is testing new high-tech devices used in commercial warehouses to overcome the logistics nightmare of tracking materials during a fast-paced military mobilization.

Typically, the Navy puts boxes of food, machinery, ammunition, spare parts or other equipment into huge shipping containers, which are loaded on ships or planes bound for overseas.

Instead of keeping track of the material on a clipboard, engineers attach “radio labels” that are encoded with a list of contents to each box. Using radio waves, the labels can talk to a tiny computer mounted on each shipping container and transmit information about their contents to commanders in the field.

When linked to satellites and computers, the devices will enable military commanders to quickly pinpoint the exact location of needed equipment anywhere in the world.

The potential time savings, Collins said, could eliminate the logistic troubles that befell U.S. forces during their 1990 Mideast buildup before the Gulf War.

“The problem with Desert Storm is that they shipped 50,000 containers and they had to open up 30,000 of them to try to figure out what was in them,” he said.

“It is one thing that we wanted to send Saddam Hussein back to Iraq,” Collins said. “It was another to get the forces there in place with all of the equipment. That took months.”

With the shrinking Pentagon budget, the engineering service center’s mission aims to find technology that can save money.

The service center has erected an experimental pier in the adjacent deep-water Port of Hueneme to test new composite materials and less expensive construction methods.

The pier’s concrete piles are reinforced with carbon fibers instead of traditional steel reinforcement bars. Steel corrodes when exposed to salt water absorbed by the concrete. During corrosion, the metal swells, cracking the concrete like a time-lapsed explosion.

“The carbon strands are much more inert,” said structural engineer Bob Odello. “This may be an answer.”

Building longer-lasting piers is important for the Navy, which has a $2-billion backlog of repairs needed on its aging waterfront structures. Most of the Navy’s wharves and piers were built during World War II or earlier.

The Navy also has extensive needs to clean up soil polluted by leaking fuel tanks and other spilled contaminants.

And the service center was selected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the nation’s site to test and improve new methods to remove spilled jet fuel, gasoline, diesel and bunker fuel from the ground.

At the national test site, the service center has huge mounds of contaminated dirt for experimental cleanup. One method explores how to help oil-munching microbes flourish in the soil; another heats the dirt so fuel vapors are extracted and burned off.

Engineers say the methods hold great promise because they can clean up after leaking tanks from military and civilian fuel stations without the tremendous cost of excavating the polluted soil and hauling it to a dump.

“We have a hometown organization which is dealing with one of the major environmental problems facing the country,” said Tafoya, who works on environmental projects.

The service center, with its annual $165-million budget, is more than just a Consumer Reports of new gadgets and technology for the Navy.

The center designs desalination plants to provide fresh water for the Navy and Marine Corps; it builds moorings for big ships. It also analyzes the soil or rock on the ocean bottom for Navy construction crews.

On most workdays, the lab has 100 employees or more dispatched to Navy bases worldwide as technical consultants or trouble-shooters.

Sometimes they come to the aid of other armed services.

Rick Messock, head of the energy and utilities department, sent three engineers last year to locate leaking water pipes that were threatening to shut down a U.S. Air Force Base in South Korea.

Using special ground radar, the team found the pipes and then with ultra-sensitive listening devices pinpointed the leaks so they could be repaired.

“Someone in the Air Force got wind of what we could do and forwarded a request,” Messock said. “We don’t normally work for the Air Force or the Army.”

When the service center moves to its new, 190,000-square-foot building on the Seabee base, it will leave behind dozens of weathered buildings, corrugated metal sheds and Quonset huts.

The Pentagon is now evaluating a joint proposal from the city of Port Hueneme and the Oxnard Harbor District to take over the property and divide it up for civilian use.

If the plan goes forward, nearly all of the old buildings will be torn down to make way for port expansion and various public projects, said Tom Figg, Port Hueneme’s director of community development.

And lost with the buildings will be the once-secretive labs that have conducted thousands of experiments since 1950.

“I’ve worked in the community for 20 years and before I started on this project, I’d never set foot on this property,” Figg said. “I found out there has been some very interesting experiments and research going on there.”