Navy Tackles Old Toxic Waste With New Ideas

Site 5 is a pool of muck and goo, coated with slimy pea green algae on top and lined with heavy metals below.

It is one of 18 old contamination sites that sit on wetlands and sensitive habitat scattered across the Point Mugu Navy base in Ventura County. And it is part of a bold experiment to clean up a legacy of waste dumping during the environmentally lax 1940s and 1950s.

To assist in the operation, the Navy is using the most advanced methods available at some of the most troublesome sites: from tiny organisms that eat toxics to electrical currents that draw out metals.

“We’re trying to be innovative,” said Ron Dow, head of the base’s environmental division. He added, however, that “nobody wants to try something that won’t work.”

The Navy operation is part of a nationwide task the military set for itself 15 years ago in response to new federal laws mandating cleanup of hazardous materials left by previous generations.

“The projects they’re working on [at Mugu] are important, first because they’re cleaning up the soil and ground water at the base,” said Peter Raftery, a geologist with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. Second, “those same technologies can be used at other sites.”

At Point Mugu and at its nearby sister base at Port Hueneme, Navy officials launched an exhaustive 10-year investigation to determine what kinds of wastes were dumped and where.

Biodiversity Adds Challenge to Cleanup

Some of the located sites are on sensitive wetlands, others close to the habitats of six endangered birds that make their homes at Point Mugu and at Mugu Lagoon, the largest estuary between Morro Bay and south San Diego.

“The bases are the only hotbeds of biodiversity left in the state,” said Dan Cooper, a biologist with the Audubon Society. “It’s in their best interests to manage nature, because they want the open spaces.”

Site 5 is a good example of what is at stake in the cleanup. It is home to the endangered light-footed clapper rail that has nested in close-by cattails. This meant no noisy trucks, no messy digging, no clod-hopping workmen.

The cleanup “could have been much faster, but the speed would be counterbalanced by the adverse effects,” said Steve Granade, a Point Mugu environmental engineer. “There are only about five places in the country where they’re trying this.”

And at $2.5 million to $3 million, it costs the same as “dig and dump,” or trucking out the waste.

Nearly 50 years ago, workers housed plated circuit boards and chrome bumpers in a building at Site 5, then let the liquid waste, a metallic sludge, slip into the wetlands.

Now toxic metals slowly wind their way through the brackish water, pulled to stakes that work like battery posts in a car. The metals, drawn by electric currents, rise slowly to the surface toward the poles.

Amid it all, Belding’s Savannah sparrows, a state endangered bird, flit through the grass, almost unnoticed but for their warbling.

By October, this pool should be clean, the metals collected and dug out in compact mud bricks. Instead of digging a 60-foot-wide, 15-foot-deep trough, workers will be able to dig a hole 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It’s a technique that observers say could be appropriate for other military sites, especially pistol ranges, where lead from the bullets has contaminated the ground.

Farther inland, at Site 24, scientists conduct what they call the “Got milk?” test. At one time the two-acre parcel was the site of a painting shop that allowed the contaminant TCE, a carcinogenic de-greaser, to seep into the salty ground water.

As part of a $1.5-million project, scientists are using microorganisms that live in the soil to eat the solvents as food. Lactic acid is pumped into the ground, which causes the microorganisms to grow faster, eating the acid and TCE at the same time.

About three years into the project, about 85% of the TCE is gone. Officials hope the entire operation will be completed in another two years, but that may be optimistic.

“One set of data suggests the whole process will take five years,” Granade said. “Another says 17 years.”

Elsewhere, the base’s scientists, in conjunction with UCLA, are building a marsh for migratory birds on 37 barren acres once used as storage ponds for the base’s sewage. They are testing native marshland plants to find which ones survive, and thrive, in the sludge.

At the Navy’s base at Port Hueneme, more microorganisms attack a plume of MTBE, residue from an old gas station. There is also an old landfill that will need to be covered, and monitored with wells.

The Navy’s goal is to have all of the “dirtiest” sites--its most hazardous--cleaned before 2007. It is on target to meet that date, with one major exception.

The 1,300-acre Mugu Lagoon, the base’s biggest cleanup effort, probably won’t be finished in the foreseeable future. A paradise for shorebirds, the lagoon is riddled with high levels of toxics, such as DDT and other pesticides that have collected in the mud and sediment.

Runoff from winter storms, combined with regular use, will continue to bring more pesticides and toxins down Calleguas Creek and into the lagoon, the dumping point for everything that goes into an east county drain, Dow said, from the runoff from five sewage plants and farms to the everyday suburban detritus of dogs.

The small sites are a beginning, but the lagoon represents the biggest challenge.

“All the other sites, they’re stable enough,” Granade said. “But, this will require a communitywide, countywide . . . effort.”