Napalm Now Headed for China Lake Navy Base

The napalm rail car that no one in Chicago wanted is headed back to California.

Not quite back to its origin at the Fallbrook military facility in northern San Diego County, however. Instead, the two 6,000-gallon drums at the center of this week’s imbroglio are heading to another naval weapons station--this one in China Lake, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert.

The incendiary gel will be stored there for as long as 90 days, while the Navy figures out a way to dispose of it and 3 million gallons more that have been stored at the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station since 1973.

Few political leaders in the area near China Lake seem terribly concerned about the impending arrival.

“A couple of canisters of napalm aren’t even going to register a blip on the radar screen around here,” said John Sterling, city administrator in Ridgecrest, the community of 28,000 people that abuts the 11-million-acre military compound.

“I mean, we had the Stealth bomber here,” he said. “We have bombing ranges and armed fighter planes flying around, so the storage of the napalm is not a big deal out here. It’s normal business.”

But Renee Westa-Lusk, a Ridgecrest resident who lives just a few miles from the base, said not everyone shares that opinion.

“There’s people in this community who are very upset about this. We feel we’re being dumped on. We’re scared, and we don’t know what’s going on. Why couldn’t they just leave it in San Diego if it was so safe? And what kind of precedent is this setting for China Lake to be the dumping ground for the military’s toxics?”

The answer, military officials say, lies in the geography.

“China Lake is in a relatively remote area with a low-density population,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jon Smith, a Navy spokesman.

Moreover, he said, China Lake is better equipped than Fallbrook to store the two drums of napalm because the contents have already been converted into gel form, drained and separated from their original bomb canisters. The Fallbrook facility is designed to store the Vietnam War-era napalm bombs--it has had about 34,000 of them there for the past 25 years--but not the hazardous waste byproducts that were boarded on the train, he said.

The napalm now stored in Fallbrook was supposed to be recycled into industrial fuel at a plant in the Chicago area--until rancorous politicians there began challenging the Navy’s assertions that the napalm was relatively harmless to transport and store. Federal railway standards list it as safer to transport than propane and other flammable material.

A plant in East Chicago, Ind., had agreed to process 3 million pounds of napalm that was to be sent in shipments virtually every day by train from the Fallbrook base. But after the protests, the company backed out of the $1.7-million deal this week--two days after the first shipment of napalm had departed from Fallbrook.

That left the military with a rail car loaded with napalm and nowhere to take it.

But Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), whose district includes China Lake, contacted the Navy and said the community there wanted to help.

“There were a number of people in the House of Representatives [from the Chicago area] who seemed to want to be part of the problem,” Thomas said in an interview. “Well, I wanted to make sure that we were part of the solution. . . . I did not want to see the rail car have no place to go because of ignorance and hysteria.”

By today, the napalm shipment is expected to leave Kansas City, Kan., where it had been uncoupled from a freight train Wednesday. It should reach China Lake by early next week, military officials said.

The China Lake plan does not solve the Navy’s long-term problem of what to do with the napalm still in Fallbrook.

Instead, Battelle, the Ohio-based nonprofit company that is handling the disposal for the Navy, must begin the bidding process anew to find a subcontractor able to get rid of the toxic gel.

Officials are now contacting some of the original bidders that lost out to the Indiana processing firm, Pollution Control Industries, along with others that have expressed an interest in the job in recent days. Of the seven other firms that offered proposals in 1996, two were in Texas, two in Missouri, and one each in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, said Greg Koller, spokesman for Battelle.

Battelle figures that this week’s complications could add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the disposal process’ $25-million price tag, and Koller said the firm is considering legal action against Pollution Control Industries to recover those costs.

“Certainly when you break a contract, that invites legal people to come to the table,” he said. “We just want to resolve this. It’s been a considerable headache, and it’s certainly nothing any of us were planning on.”

Meanwhile, California officials will be watching to ensure that China Lake does not become a permanent home for the napalm shipment.

“The Navy is in a jam. They’ve got a political problem on their hands . . . and the state is extending a hand to assist them,” said Sean Walsh, spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson. “But we’ve received assurances from the secretary of the Navy that [the napalm] will be there for only 90 days, at which time they will inform us as to what their permanent disposal methods are.”