Extensive Pollution Stalls Base Conversions

After a decade-long struggle to weave dozens of former military bases into California communities, pollution left behind by the armed forces has complicated and stalled ambitious plans to convert the 12 most heavily contaminated bases into industrial parks, museums, airports, housing and other civilian uses.

These facilities, representing 41% of the state’s closed bases, are plagued by some of the worst pollution in America.

Although at least $1.6 billion has been spent on environmental problems at the sites, records and interviews show that none have been fully converted to civilian use. Not one has been fully cleaned up and, on several, not all of the pollution has been evaluated.

Plans for the bases have encountered not only environmental hurdles, but also budgetary constraints and political and legal battles involving the military, municipalities, regulators and activists.

“People had unrealistic expectations of what the [base closure and cleanup] program could do,” said Glenn Kistner, who supervises cleanup of the state’s Navy sites for the Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s not like you drop a container of milk on the kitchen floor and you can go in there and mop it up sometime later.”

Up and down the state, the pollution stands in striking juxtaposition to dreams for the bases.

At the former Alameda Naval Air Station, teenagers catch air at a new skateboard park less than a mile from a lagoon contaminated with toxic metals left behind by the Navy.

Across San Francisco Bay, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard sits virtually idle--as it has for the past quarter of a century--in a booming city that is starved for land. The soil and ground water are dangerously dirty.

In Monterey, a California State University campus bustles on the former Ft. Ord Army Base, but fears of pollution prompt many students to drink bottled water.

In Merced County, grade school children attend a summer Space Camp at Castle Air Force Base, where cleaning solvents and jet fuel have seeped into the soil for years.

Pollution at some bases will take decades to remedy, and none have a final cleanup plan in place for the entire base. Negotiations and study of a single plume of ground-water pollution at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County have taken more than six years, and still there’s no settlement. Cleanup at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento is expected to take as long as a century.

The cleanup and conversion have taken so long that conditions have deteriorated on many bases, exacerbating the cost of transforming the land. At George Air Force Base in San Bernardino County, more than 2,000 trees died because irrigation was reduced after the base closed. At Hunters Point, looters stripped copper pipes and wiring from commercial and residential buildings. And at some bases, plumes of ground-water pollution have crept toward neighboring communities.

“From the very beginning, the military base closure process has been deeply flawed,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who opposed closing bases. “Transfer of bases has been slow and cumbersome, environmental cleanup difficult. Each base is handled separately. It is a gut-wrenching process for local communities. . . .”

In the late 1980s, Congress decided to close many military bases and transfer them to civilian control to save money. But this program clashed head on with another federal program: the 20-year-old Superfund law, which regulates environmental cleanup of the country’s most hazardous sites.

No state was hit harder by base closures than California, which accounted for 29 of the nation’s 97 major base closings. And no state had so many Superfund sites among its closed bases. California accounts for a third of the three-dozen former bases that received this designation.

Military officials say they have moved as quickly as possible to address complex pollution while complying with tedious requirements to assess and remedy it.

Navy officials also say California may be the most contentious state, and some communities here are slow to make final decisions about how to use the land. “There is a high degree of political meddling in the cleanup process,” said Paul Yaroschak, director of the Navy’s environmental compliance. “An unprecedented number of letters related to reuse and cleanup fly back and forth between Washington and California.”

Many bases were cities unto themselves, with homes, schools, stores, gas stations and movie theaters. So closing them often devastated surrounding communities, costing thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue statewide.

Before local governments can assume control of the bases and develop them, Superfund law generally demands that cleanup plans be approved. Everyone knew contamination would make base conversion more difficult. But no one understood the extent of pollution resulting from military operations such as shipbuilding, plane maintenance and weapons training.

Reporters from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism spent six months assessing the impact of pollution and the progress in merging the bases into communities.

Military Personnel Didn’t Know Better

For decades, personnel at March Air Force Base in Riverside doused old jets with fuel, set them ablaze, then practiced their firefighting techniques. The unburned fuel seeped into the soil.

Such practices have left bases polluted with chemicals, heavy metals and unexploded ordnance. Landfills were left uncapped. Solvents were dumped at random. And fuel tanks leaked for years.

Trichloroethylene, widely used to degrease planes and machinery, is a toxic solvent that turns up in the soil and ground water at virtually every base. Experts say one teacupful of TCE can contaminate 6 million gallons of ground water.

Military personnel, while responsible for the pollution, did not deliberately harm the environment, officials say. Like civilians, they were unaware of potential hazards.

“If you had a fuel spill on the [runway] apron in the ‘60s and ‘70s, you just washed it down,” said Albert Lowas, director of the Air Force Base Conversion Agency in Washington. “Now you go out there and you absorb it, and you containerize it and you dispose of it.”

Cleanup is a monumental challenge, particularly at the 12 Superfund bases, which cover a total of more than 62,000 acres--nearly 100 square miles.

About 10,000 acres have been cleaned up and another 4,500 have cleanup underway, the most recent military figures show. Work has not started on an additional 13,500 acres, and 7,500 more have not been fully evaluated.

The total projected cost is almost $3.6 billion, including at least $1.6 billion already spent, according to military officials and a report to Congress last year.

Of all the military branches, the Navy has been the slowest to respond to environmental contamination, EPA officials say. And the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard has some of the most intractable problems.

Located on San Francisco’s southeastern shoreline, the base has been closed since 1974. Although the city has plans for housing with panoramic views, promenades, museums and businesses, the base is littered with rotting and looted buildings and heaps of rusted scrap metal. Barbed wire cordons off contaminated soil.

Cleanup is expected to cost $416 million--the Navy’s most expensive cleanup in the nation. “Clearly, Hunters Point has not been one of our stars,” one Navy official said.

As at several other bases, progress at Hunters Point has been bogged down for years by disputes over how to clean up the base and what to do with it. San Francisco wants more cleanup than the military wants to pay for. Citing budgetary constraints, the Navy insists that much of the land need only be clean enough for industrial use.

“The process is moving . . . glacially,” said Byron Rhett, who oversees the city’s redevelopment plans. “There is very little out there that can be immediately used. The facilities just aren’t there.”

Sacramento County envisions a day when McClellan Air Force Base is a thriving industrial park with a tenants-only airfield on flat land north of the capital. In all likelihood, the facility will operate amid hundreds of wells drilled to monitor and treat underground pollution.

Almost half of the 3,400-acre base was tainted. The cleanup effort began in 1979, but at the current pace it will take 100 years to finish. If scientific advances are made, officials say, the cleanup could be completed by 2032.

The price tag to date is $404 million; the final cost is estimated at $1.2 billion.

Military officials say McClellan, slated to close in July 2001, is the most polluted Air Force installation in the country. But conversion to a civilian airport is relatively simple because it requires far less cleanup than, for example, housing construction.

“Sacramento is urban sprawl,” said Philip Mook, the base’s environmental program manager. “We don’t have that pressure, like some of the places in the Bay Area, for housing. I guess we kind of dodged a bullet there.”

Four hundred miles away in the Mojave Desert, a similar transformation of George Air Force Base was held up for four years by local disputes.

Adelanto and Victorville, neighboring cities, battled in court over reuse plans. A settlement was reached, and now Victorville is proceeding with plans for a cargo airport.

Today an air cargo maintenance firm, a truck driver’s training school and a textbook company are among the 60 businesses leasing space at the airport. Still, many buildings remain vacant. “The plan is developing as we envisioned it for a cargo maintenance hub,” Victorville City Manager Jon Roberts said. “But if you were going to start with a blank slate, you certainly wouldn’t choose a military base.”

Dreams Run Into Ugly Realities

A few years ago, a movie called “What Dreams May Come” was filmed in a corrugated metal warehouse on the former Alameda Naval Air Station. Most dreams for the base lie in the future.

Although it is just a finger of land jutting into San Francisco Bay, the base is vital to the adjoining city. When the base is transferred, Alameda will grow by 50%.

Part of the city’s plan for the base has been realized. Sixty tenants lease space, including a church, auto and boat repair shops, shelters for the homeless and a child care center. A local soccer league rents fields. A motion picture studio occupies warehouses.

Like other closing bases, Alameda is facing some ugly realities. Many facilities are on or alongside polluted land. Seven years after the base’s announced closing, the city still does not own it.

Alameda is leasing the base from the Navy and subletting portions not too severely polluted. Meanwhile, the city is paying upkeep--$8.4 million this year alone--and will add $10 million in capital improvements by 2002.

About 100 miles to the southeast, the former Castle Air Force Base in Merced County is transformed each summer into Challenger Space Camp for about 100 children, who learn about space flight and experience it firsthand through a flight simulator once used to train jet fighter pilots. Elsewhere on the 2,777-acre facility, a minimum security federal prison is being built. The Merced Symphony leases the base theater.

Five years after closing, the Air Force still owns most of the land intended for public sale. In part because of pollution problems, only two small parcels have been sold.

With stunning vistas of the Pacific, Ft. Ord is the nation’s largest Army installation being converted to civilian use. Monterey and other surrounding communities will inherit a four-mile stretch of dunes, hills and woodlands.

Of the 28,000 acres, 60% will be preserved as open space. Some land is leased to tenants such as a Jewish folk dance center and a Korean church.

The base’s star occupant is Cal State Monterey Bay, which opened six years ago and now has more than 2,250 students. It may be the nation’s only campus to open on a federal Superfund site containing everything from chemical waste to unexploded ammunition.

Although the water has been deemed safe to drink, some students are wary. “I don’t drink the water,” said Dominic Manchester, 22, a fourth-year student. “Most students buy water by the gallon.”

The 685-acre campus is an island, surrounded by polluted sites and hundreds of dwellings with broken windows and graffiti-covered doors. The university wants to expand but can’t until pollution is addressed.

“Everybody calls Ft. Ord a success story, but it’s not,” said Kurt Gandy, director of the Ft. Ord Toxic Project. A lawsuit by his organization in 1998 prodded the Army to use more stringent cleanup standards.

The environmental dispute continues to hold up the sale of land to civilian agencies. “Most of the property is clean,” said Jim Claypool, business development director for neighboring Seaside, which wants to use some of the base housing. “And most jurisdictions can’t understand why that can’t be transferred over.”

From Boom Times to Hard Times

Times have changed for Sam Kakeish, owner of Sam’s Automotive on a strip of businesses withered by the 1994 shutdown of Norton Air Force Base. Many neighboring businesses along 3rd Street in San Bernardino are boarded up, and most, like Sam’s, are struggling to stay open.

Thirteen years ago, Kakeish picked the spot because it was only about a mile from the base and its nearly 11,000 employees. He had four mechanics, and the repair shop often stayed open until 3 a.m. to keep up with demand. “The young guys on base were especially good for business,” he recalled. “They bought fast cars and crashed them and brought them here.”

Only 2,000 new jobs have been created since the closing. Now Kakeish has only one mechanic, and they often wait out front for the occasional customer. He no longer offers smog checks because he cannot pay the licensing fee. He barely makes his $1,200 monthly rent.

Kakeish hopes plans to transform Norton into a high-tech industrial park will materialize soon. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “If they don’t do nothing, it’s hard to tell how long I can hang on here.”

What happened around Norton is only a small part of the fallout from base closings.

When these 12 bases closed, 58,236 military and 27,073 civilian jobs were lost, according to state officials. Only a fraction of the jobs have been replaced, despite optimistic projections for an economic rebound.

The closing of bases aggravated the impacts of other defense cuts and recession. Even as the state recovers, the signs of economic and physical decline persist.

At the onetime Mather Air Force Base, local and military officials bickered over the price of base housing that Sacramento County wanted, in part, for low-income tenants. After negotiations fell apart, activists for the homeless filed a lawsuit to stop the military’s proposed sale of the land.

A seven-year delay allowed 1,300 homes to rot beyond repair and they were torn down. Today new homes are slated for the same sites, with 390 reserved for low-income families.

“The property deteriorated at a fairly dramatic rate,” said Rob Leonard, director of military base conversion for Sacramento County. “The care by the Air Force was not at the level that we thought it should be.”

While communities up and down the state wonder why it takes so long to clean and convert the bases, conditions sometimes worsen. At El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, debate over a single plume of contaminated ground water remains unresolved after six years. EPA officials say pollution has extended three miles beyond the base and under a housing development in Irvine.

In an attempt to speed up base conversion, Congress passed legislation last fall that would allow communities to acquire base properties at no cost, rather than pay millions. A “fire sale,” one military official called it.

Perhaps no community has been hit harder--or longer--by base closure than Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco.

The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is a ghost town of monstrous warehouses, cranes and other remnants of its vibrant past. The facility once employed 17,000 workers, many of them African Americans, who found steady work after World War II.

While the city thrives in a high-tech-induced boom, the neighborhoods surrounding the old shipyard languish with double-digit unemployment.

Like many other residents, Dorris Vincent blames the neighborhood’s depressed condition on the Navy’s failure to clean up the pollution. “I’m just hoping that the Navy will get off the dime,” said Vincent, 67, who has lived in the Bayview for three decades. “They’re just sitting there, not doing anything. Being government.”

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Superfund Sites Among Closed Bases

Twelve former California military bases were heavily polluted, hampering their conversion to civil use. The map shows their locations and details of cleanup and conversion efforts.

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Source: Federal and local officials and records.

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This article was reported and written by Matthai Chakko Kuruvila, Lisa Munoz, Lisa Rapaport and Jennifer Inez Ward of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for a course taught by Times projects editor Tim Reiterman.