Navy Cleaning Up Toxic Trash on Island

A jumble of airplane body parts lies corroding next to huge mounds of contaminated soil. Plastic barrels of toxic waste stand nearby, quarantined behind a fence to protect human health from escaping fumes.

This is the “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” known to thousands of children as the lonely spot where a young Native American girl was left behind to fend for herself.

It was also, for years, a Navy dumping ground.

Its fields are a boneyard for broken aircraft that Navy firefighters once doused with jet fuel and set ablaze to hone their skills; its ravines, a repository for drums of hazardous chemicals used by Navy crews there.

After years of study, the Navy is finally cleaning up decades of spills, leaks and ill-planned dumping of poisonous chemicals on the most remote of the Channel Islands, 60 miles off the coast of Point Mugu.

“This is one case where we feel we can really get something done, without studying it to death,” said Ron Dow, chief ecologist at the Point Mugu Navy base, which runs a small operation on the island to help test missiles.

Removing toxic waste from San Nicolas is part of a monumental task the Pentagon has set for itself: cleaning up hazardous materials left behind by generations of workers at virtually every military installation in the nation.

The pollution is a legacy of an earlier era, before scientific knowledge about the harmful effects of industrial chemicals led to stricter environmental laws.

“Pouring it in the ground was common,” said Jim Ross, a senior engineer with the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles who is monitoring the island’s cleanup. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

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The military, initially slow to face its environmental problems, has now resolved to be a good steward of its land and protect remaining wildlife.

That is especially true for Mugu Lagoon, with its species of shorebirds facing extinction, and for San Nicolas Island, a rookery for federally protected elephant seals, sea lions and seabirds.

Point Mugu now has tight controls on hazardous waste. And it has placed large portions of San Nicolas Island off limits to the 200 workers who operate the island’s 10,000-foot runway, radar towers and other high-tech equipment that help track the test-firing of missiles.

With limited dollars for cleanup, the base has focused on removing contaminants from San Nicolas before cleaning up some areas on the main base with a known history of toxic waste dumping.

The island’s pollution is far from the worst to be found at the nation’s military installations. Yet its five major sites undergoing cleanup reveal a pattern of hasty disposal common among military installations.

Some of it was mere convenience. A dirt lot next to the public works shop was regularly used as a dumping ground for waste paints and solvents. From 1940 until the early ‘80s, a ravine near a storage area was filled with everything from oil fuel tanks and batteries to electrical appliances and 55-gallon drums.

The island, 9 miles long by 3 1/2 miles wide, operated a beach landfill from 1970 to 1975 for general refuse from its mini-city of Navy workers. An array of chemicals also went into the dump, given the amount of heavy metals, cancer-causing PCBs and other toxic residues detected in soil samples.

But drums of hydraulic fluids, fuel oil, solvents, lubricants and pesticides were not dumped there--they were thought to present a hazard if compressed by a bulldozer. Instead, they were tossed down more than three dozen ravines around the island.

One early study estimated between 4,500 and 24,000 drums were disposed of in this manner, but investigators now believe those numbers were exaggerated. They are not too sure what was in the barrels, many of which are so badly rusted that the markings are no longer visible, the contents evaporated or seeped into the soil.

Navy reports detail the findings at each ravine, such as this one discovered with 40 heavily corroded drums:

“Approximately 50% of the drums contained a very small amount of residual black tar-like material similar to the material covering the ground,” the report said. “Two of the drums containing tar residue were stenciled on the side of the drum with ‘Sodium Cyanide.’ ”

These old drums and contents on the surface have been scooped up and placed in plastic barrels awaiting a barge ride to the mainland. Environmental contractors have also unearthed mounds of dirt from a fire-training pit where old planes and other materials were torched so runway crews could practice their fire-suppression techniques.

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On a recent blustery day, a geologist in protective white coveralls scooped soil samples into sterilized glass jars with blue lids to be sent to a lab. A battery of tests will determine if the tons of soil, now draped in plastic sheeting, can be treated on the island or must be shipped to appropriate disposal sites on the mainland.

On the same day, U.S. Coast Guard officials scoured an area where their predecessors had ditched batteries used to power lights that help sailors navigate around the island.

Use of battery-powered lights began in the mid-’50s, but Coast Guard officials did not begin tracking the disposal of batteries until 1973.

So they had come for the old ones, or their remaining fragments, at three known sites on San Nicolas Island. Four other sites exist on Santa Catalina, Santa Barbara and San Clemente islands.

After scrounging up a dozen batteries at one site, Coast Guard officials were about to call it quits when Navy archeologist Steve Schwartz showed up with two shovels and a pickax.

Schwartz, who typically digs for more exotic finds--the remnants in Indian middens or trash piles left by early islanders--handed over the tools and suggested the workers look beneath where they had plucked one half-buried battery.

With dirt flying, workers soon found another discarded battery and then another. At one point Schwartz reached down and plucked out a brown beer bottle. He upended the bottle and read the embossed markings on the bottom. “You’re down to the 1962 level,” he said.

By the time they were through, the workers had unearthed another dozen batteries that were buried in silt a half-dozen paces from the old light tower.

“It’s a shame this was here, but at least it’s getting cleaned up,” said Glenn Forman, who was watching as a representative of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.

The cleanup of major toxic waste sites on San Nicolas Island is much further along than most of those at Ventura County’s Navy bases. None of the county’s bases conceal an environmental horror on the order of those military bases targeted by the nation’s Superfund cleanup list.

Officials at the Point Mugu Navy base have removed 130 underground tanks, some of which leaked fuel oil, diesel or other liquids into the ground. In the cases of leaking tanks, contractors removed as much of the tainted soil as possible.

Yet, Point Mugu has nine sites with serious contamination problems that may be years away from being fixed.

An old paint-stripping operation near Point Mugu’s airfield has leached highly toxic components of solvents into the ground water, said Steve Granade, a Navy environmental engineer working on the problem.

Yet the shallow aquifer is heavily affected by intruding seawater and is not a likely source for drinking water, Navy and state toxic waste regulators said. For that reason, they said, the contaminated water poses little or no risk to human health.

Instead, they said, the thorniest problem is Mugu Lagoon.

Navy officials have removed 117 cubic yards of dirt tainted with toxic levels of metals from an old metal-plating shop that emptied its waste into a slough that leads to the lagoon, Granade said.

The entire 1,300-acre lagoon is listed as a cleanup site because of high levels of toxics, especially DDT and other pesticides, that have collected in the mud and sediment. Ecologists fear that dredging could do more harm than good for the lagoon’s wildlife by stirring up the hazardous residues.

“What’s worse, dredging or leaving it entombed?” Granade asks. “We will probably be monitoring the lagoon for a long time.”

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The Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme has removed 109 underground storage tanks for heating oil and other fuels that were either leaking or could leak in the future.

The Seabee base also is reviewing 20 sites with problematic levels of contamination, such as an old waste disposal pit and a trench used to burn trash, said Lt. Cmdr. Rick Sauerwein, environmental officer at Port Hueneme.

“We continue to move forward with our studies,” he said.

The adjacent base that was home to the former Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory expects to complete the cleanup of its three hazardous waste sites by the end of this month, said Lt. Jim Bray. The most serious was a storage yard where hazardous chemicals spilled or leaked into the ground; another was where diesel fuel and oil were sprayed on the ground for dust control.

The cleanup took place more quickly than at most sites because the 33-acre laboratory was ordered shut down by the nation’s base-closing commission in 1993. All cleanup must be finished before the land can be transferred to local governments for civilian use.

Usually, the process is painstakingly slow.

“This business can take 10 to 15 years,” said Point Mugu ecologist Ron Dow, “from the point of recognizing an old hazardous waste site and actually removing it.”