Warrior Past Clings to Ft. Ord

This is a place in limbo, neither what it was nor what it will be.

Weedy ghost towns of World War II-era Army barracks and thousands of acres of target ranges riddled with live ammunition are reminders of its past. Raspberry-colored college dorms, hiking trails winding over coastal hills and piles of development blueprints offer a glimpse of its future.

Nearly the size of San Francisco, Ft. Ord is one of the largest military bases to close in the United States. When it showed up on the Pentagon’s hit list in the early 1990s, the Monterey Peninsula shuddered. Local towns feared economic evisceration.

The troops departed seven years ago. The towns survived. Some parts of the base were soon transformed.

The new Cal State Monterey Bay converted some of the Army’s more modern facilities into brightly painted classrooms and housing for a student body that is 3,000 and growing. Nonprofit organizations moved into other buildings, and the federal Bureau of Land Management took over thousands of acres of rolling coastal scrubland.

But overall, less than half of the 28,000-acre base has been turned over to new owners. Ft. Ord’s conversion has proved a slower and more difficult task than anyone envisioned, complicated by environmental lawsuits, regional housing conflicts and the presence of enormous amounts of unexploded ordnance.

Something as seemingly simple as turning three miles of mostly empty beach and dunes into state parkland has turned out not to be simple at all. The strip of sand contained 17 firing ranges. It was littered with tons of bullet scraps and lead fragments.

Some 1,200 barracks built as temporary housing more than half a century ago have yet to be torn down because their wood siding is coated with enough lead paint to make the boards hazardous waste by state disposal standards.

Ammunition--some of it fired into the coastal hills as long ago as the World War I era--can’t be removed from old target ranges until dense chaparral is cleared. That can’t be done until a dispute over burning the brush is resolved. And so on.

Ft. Ord was created in August 1917, when the Army bought land for troop maneuvers and artillery practice across the bay from the Monterey Presidio military installation. During World War II, the fort was a major staging area for troops headed to the Pacific. By the time it closed in 1994, 2 million soldiers had trained on Ft. Ord’s foggy beaches and scrubby hills.

Stretching from the sea across California 1 and inland toward Salinas, the former military base is dotted with bland, low-lying buildings and lingering soil and ground water contamination. It was declared a federal Superfund site in 1990.

Yet it also is a prized, relatively undeveloped stretch of the Central Coast containing thousands of acres of chaparral, grasslands and oak woodlands home to threatened and endangered plants and animals.

Adjoining cities and Monterey County are getting about 5,200 acres of the post for economic development. More than half the base will be set aside for wildlife habitat and public recreation, thanks to the presence of rare species and regional water shortages that limit growth. Most of those wildlands are going to the Bureau of Land Management. The state is due to receive about 800 acres of beach for the creation of Ft. Ord Dunes State Park.

The future state beach illustrates just how tough it can be for an old Army base to assume a new identity. Soldiers used the dune area as a rifle range for decades. Boats patrolled the shore while infantrymen blasted away at targets. They left behind 350 tons of bullet parts and lead fragments, in some spots encrusting the ground.

The Army knows the precise tonnage because it hired contractors to mechanically sift the sand and cart away the bullet remnants for recycling.

The shot-up dunes were resculpted, carpets of invasive ice plant torn out and native grasses planted. Biologists have even tried, without great success, to figure out how lead in the environment will affect an endangered species of butterfly that lays eggs on the dune grass.

Even though the beach cleanup is largely completed, the state still hasn’t taken over the property because it includes Stilwell Hall, a beloved bluff-top World War II soldiers’ club that preservationists are trying to save from demolition.

The barracks, nicknamed B-52s because they each housed 52 men, have their own lead problem.

In their early years, the two-story buildings were coated with lead paint cut with the cheapest thinner around--gasoline, which at the time was also leaded. The mixture seeped a quarter-inch deep into the wooden siding.

The staff of the Ft. Ord Reuse Authority has spent years trying to figure out what to do with the barracks, which stand in row after orderly row, an empty village with boarded-up windows and peeling, dull yellow paint.

The agency tried sealing the old paint with high-quality coatings. That didn’t get rid of the lead; it just encapsulated it, raising liability issues.

They tried shaving off the paint. That made the boards thinner and thus less useful, and left contaminated shavings to dispose of. The wood’s salvage value probably would not cover cleanup costs, said Stan Cook, facilities and leasing manager for the reuse authority.

Yet the siding boards can’t just be torn off and dumped at the local landfill. They would have to be taken to a hazardous waste site or perhaps burned as fuel in a cogeneration plant that captures the lead residue--both expensive propositions.

Along with the barracks, much of the base’s former family housing stands vacant in lifeless neighborhoods of shriveled lawns and sagging fences. Ice plant crawls across driveways. Overgrown bushes wrap around carports.

Built primarily from the 1950s through the ‘70s, the small houses, duplexes and apartments are basic box designs. They don’t meet contemporary building codes. They line roads that are too narrow. Utilities are not up to municipal standards. Many of the units will probably be demolished because officials have concluded it would be too expensive to refurbish them.

That so much property remains unused years after the base’s closure rankles many.

“The community is very frustrated,” said Jim Perrine, mayor of Marina, an adjacent city of 25,000 that intends to redevelop the barracks area as a commercial and residential complex. “Their patience is wearing very thin. They can’t understand why it can’t be done quicker, why it has to be so complicated.”

The Army, which is spending about $325 million cleaning up ordnance and environmental pollution at the base, is no happier.

“The Army is dissatisfied with the speed of transfer,” said Col. Kevin M. Rice, who, as Presidio commander, is overseeing the transfer.

So far, about 10,500 acres have been turned over to new owners, most of it to the Bureau of Land Management.

Cal State Monterey Bay, expected to eventually enroll 8,000 students, and UC Santa Cruz have received less than 1,000 acres each, with more to come.

Marina took over the former base airfield for a general aviation airport and business development.

The city of Seaside bought the base’s two golf courses and leased them to an operator.

The Army is retaining about 800 acres and 1,600 housing units for soldiers and students at the Presidio’s Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.

The military expects to release 2,200 acres earmarked for economic development within the next few months. The delay in transferring the rest of the land, most of it in the central and southern portions of Ft. Ord, stems primarily from what lies beneath it.

In a base warehouse, the Army has mounted a small display of ordnance dug from the earth at Ft. Ord. Rusty and discolored with age, the ammunition dates to 1917: mortar rounds, anti-tank rifle grenades, bullets and small rockets fired in practice but never exploded.

Some are duds, designed to emit a smoke puff on impact. Some are live rounds. The Army has cleared about 2,000 acres of explosives and has 9,000 more to go.

Now ringed by concertina wire and posted with “Keep Out” signs, the majority of that property will be used by the Bureau of Land Management for wildlife habitat and public recreation. Federal officials say most of the buried ordnance lies in the top two feet of soil and, once it is removed, the area should be safe for hiking, horseback riding and trail biking.

But some of the old firing ranges also are slated for residential and commercial development, a situation that appears unique in base closings. “There is nowhere in the country we know of where a former range area is being used for residential [purposes],” said James Willison, environmental and natural resources director for the Presidio and the former base.

That has raised a multitude of issues. How deep should the cleanup go if houses and hotels are to be built on the property? After development, should homeowners be required to obtain a permit before excavating their backyards? Should they have to attend workshops reminding them that their children are playing on land once used for target practice?

Simply ascertaining which parts of the sprawling post were firing ranges during its 80-year history has not been easy.

Reuse teams have pored over old artillery maps, run newspaper ads seeking information from veterans and even driven retired soldiers around the base to jog their memories of which hills they aimed at.

In one area thought to have been used only for troop maneuvers, ordnance crews have found thousands of rifle and hand grenades.

Detection is an uncertain science. Crews have conducted field tests, using different types of equipment to hunt for buried explosives. They then dug up the top four feet of dirt and sifted it to see if the equipment had missed anything. It hadn’t.

Looming above the ammunition cleanup--literally and figuratively--is coastal scrub, which must be cleared for the ordnance to be removed.

The Army began to burn the vegetation, the method favored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because some of Ft. Ord’s rare plant species depend on fire to reseed.

Concerned about smoke pollution as well as emissions from ammunition exploded by the flames, the Monterey Bay Unified Air Pollution Control District sued to stop the fires. As a result of that and another lawsuit, the Army is reviewing alternative removal methods.

But the Army doubts there is a better way. Some types of native shrub would not recover from cutting, which also would place equipment crews in danger of running over explosives and setting them off. Goats have been suggested. But the animals also could be killed and probably would never succeed in chewing their way through the densest chaparral, cleanup officials said.

They hope to settle the matter by next summer. However the brush is cleared, they say, it will take at least a decade to clean up all the ordnance.

Meanwhile, housing has stirred up political and social questions.

Many view the former base as a logical place to put desperately needed affordable housing. In September, Rep. Sam Farr (D-Carmel) suggested that land transfers be blocked unless half the planned new residential units were affordable.

Though Farr has since withdrawn the moratorium threat, it highlighted an old regional schism between rich peninsula towns such as Carmel and Pebble Beach and traditionally working-class communities such as Seaside and Marina.

Bordering Ft. Ord, Seaside and Marina were very much tied to the base. When it closed, so did a lot of their small businesses. In the Ft. Ord land transfers they see a chance to move up the economic ladder.

Local officials said they will include affordable housing in their new projects but don’t want to be its regional receptacle.

“That the former Ft. Ord is being portrayed as the solution to housing problems is absolutely wrong,” said Seaside Mayor Jerry Smith. “Ft. Ord is being used as a way for other jurisdictions to say, ‘Not in my backyard.’ ”

In hindsight, said Seaside-Sand City Chamber of Commerce Director Jacqueline Lambert, locals should have realized that Ft. Ord’s make-over would be a complicated, prolonged process. Ultimately, it will be worth the pain, she believes.

“I think the closure of Ft. Ord was one of the best things that could have happened to this area,” Lambert said. “With the military gone and the conversion, we have the opportunity to do some really exciting things that we would never have been able to do.”