Making Amends : Navy Is Cleaning Up Its Hazardous Waste on San Nicolas 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 humans from escaping fumes.

This is the “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” known to thousands of young readers 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.

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.

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 the 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.”

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

The Point Mugu base now has tight controls on hazardous waste. And it has placed large portions of San Nicolas Island off-limits to 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 dealing with some areas on the main base with a known history of toxic waste dumping.

The island’s pollution is far from the worst compared to other military installations in the nation. Yet its five major sites undergoing cleanup reveal a pattern of hasty disposal common on other military installations.

Some of it was mere convenience. A dirt lot next to the public works shop was regularly used to dump waste paints and solvents. From 1940 until the early 1980s, a ravine near a storage area ended up 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 readings of heavy metals, cancer-causing PCBs and other toxic residues in soil samples.

But drums of hydraulic fluids, fuel oil, solvents, lubricants and pesticides were not dumped there because they were thought to present a hazard if compressed by a bulldozer. Instead, they were tossed down more than three dozen ravines spread across 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 having evaporated or seeped into the soil.

Navy reports detail the findings at each ravine, such as one found holding 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 fire-suppression techniques.

On a recent blustery day, a geologist in protective white coveralls scooped soil samples into sterilized glass jars with blue lids. 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.

The lights began using battery power in the mid-1950s, and 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 until 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 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 a brown beer bottle from dig. He read the embossed markings on the bottom. “You’re down to the 1962 level,” he said.

By the time they were through, the workers unearthed another dozen batteries that had been buried by silt half a 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.

At many military installations, the process has been painstakingly slow.

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