Park Plan Poses Risk, Official Says

Building a park at the former El Toro Marine base would expose people to cancer-causing chemicals in the soil and other unknown pollution, the chairman of the El Toro environmental review board said Monday.

The Navy hasn’t done a comprehensive study of contamination at the 4,700-acre base, which is listed as one of the most polluted sites in the country, said Greg Hurley, an environmental attorney who has chaired El Toro’s Restoration Advisory Board for the last five years. Federal law requires such panels for each closed military base.

Hurley said no soil was tested for contamination, nor was the Navy required to. The Navy’s assessment was based on “superficial observation” and documents detailing where hazardous materials were disposed, he said. Soil testing would have required about 2 million samples taken just within the 1,500 acres envisioned for the park.

A plan envisioned by the city of Irvine to build a park on 1,500 acres of the base would make matters worse by unearthing polluted soil and bringing people--notably children--into contact with it, he said.

“Ideally, we should put a fence around [the base], pave it and never let anyone touch it,” Hurley said. “We don’t know how contaminated vast portions of this base are, and therein lies the risk.”

An independent study of El Toro that Irvine released in January 2000 came to a similar conclusion, that exposure to soil excavated during construction at the base presented a higher than acceptable cancer risk. People could be exposed to harmful levels of hazardous materials without even knowing it, the report said.

Hurley spoke Monday about El Toro’s environmental risks at a luncheon sponsored by two groups that support construction of an airport at the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. A large banner on the wall read: “Great Park? A TOXIC Time Bomb?”

Hurley said the bitter fight over what becomes of the base has eclipsed the larger public-health issue of toxic contamination there. He said he has no stake in what is built there.

“I live in Laguna Beach,” a city where most residents support the park, he said. “I’m sure after this I’ll have neighbors who won’t be talking to me.”

Toxic concerns at El Toro would exist whether the soil is dug up for an airport or for sports fields and a park, said Seda Yaghoubian, an environmental consultant with a South County coalition of cities that oppose the airport. Either way, the federal government is responsible for cleaning up the base, she said.

“It doesn’t refute what we’ve known all along, that cleanup has to be done,” she said.

There are limits, however, to the federal government’s cleanup role, said Hurley, a partner in Kutak Rock, one of the country’s leading environmental law firms.

For example, the government is under no deadline for cleanup, which could take decades. The current federal budget has $139 million for cleanup of all closed military bases; the Irvine report estimated that contamination from just one type of pollution at El Toro could cost between $35 million and $350 million.

The review panel also has uncovered other contamination. It discovered a building used for industrial dry-cleaning, the presence of perchlorate in the soil and higher-than-normal levels of radioactivity at several locations in the base.