Officials Want Bombs Away

For more than a decade after World War II, Navy pilots from the El Toro Marine base dropped thousands of bombs and rockets on a large swath of south Orange County.

The target practice ended after the Korean War nearly 50 years ago. But the legacy of those bombing runs continues to haunt the area in the form of unexploded munitions hidden beneath open spaces.

The Trabuco Bombing Range now consists of the housing tracts of the city of Rancho Santa Margarita and the rolling ridges and crevices of O’Neill Regional Park. About 70 tons of bombs and rockets were excavated when the city was built, so few are believed to remain there. However, countless others remain beneath the soil in parts of the sprawling 3,100-acre county park, a popular spot for hiking, mountain biking and picnicking.

Local officials believe the munitions represent a public hazard and are unhappy at the federal government’s timetable for cleanup, which would not begin for 21 years.

“Quite frankly, 2023 is really unacceptable,” said Rancho Santa Margarita Councilman Gary Thompson. “We’re talking about an area utilized by the public. They certainly should put a priority on that.”

There is no record of any injuries caused by people coming into contact with the unexploded ordnance in Orange County, though federal authorities have recorded dozens of civilian causalities at other sites with unexploded munitions across the nation, including the death of two San Diego boys in 1983. The bombs used for practice contain only a fraction of the firepower of normal bombs, but the government said they can still cause serious injuries.

“It’s like Russian roulette,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight in Washington, D.C. “You know most people won’t be hurt.”

The 1,812-acre bombing range is one of more than 9,000 so-called “formerly used defense sites” across the United States. About 2,500 need cleanup that will cost about $19 billion. However, federal spending has hovered around $220 million annually, said Candace Walters, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters in Washington. “That doesn’t go very far.”

If that spending pace remains stagnant, cleaning up all the sites will take nearly a century.

An Oregon congressman has been pushing for years to focus more attention on the issue of unexploded munitions and former defense sites.

“No one is really in charge of dealing with the problem of unexploded ordnance, and there is not adequate funding to address it,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said.

According to a federal study that has yet to be published, at least 67 civilians have been killed and 137 injured from unexploded ordnance since World War I. Nearly half of those killed or injured were minors.

One of the most tragic and well-known accidents took place in 1983 in a northern San Diego subdivision built on a World War II artillery range. Two 8-year-old boys were killed after coming across a live mortar shell. A third boy was seriously injured.

In other cases around the nation in recent years, bomblets containing liquid sarin nerve gas were found in a national wildlife refuge near Denver, and mortar shells containing a gas that explodes when it comes in contact with air were discovered 2,100 feet from an elementary school on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

At the Trabuco Bombing Range in south Orange County, Navy pilots from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station used the grazing land as a bombing- and gunnery-practice range from 1944 to 1956. Aiming at a mission-era adobe hut, the men bombarded the land with 3-, 4- and 25-pound practice bombs, as well 2 1/4-, 3 1/2- and 5-inch practice rockets.

The military removed all ordnance found on the surface, and 70 tons was excavated when Rancho Santa Margarita was built. The deepest rocket was found eight feet underground. Some of the ordnance was reburied 30 feet beneath the 8th hole of the Tijeras Creek Golf Course.

Construction workers in the city find one or two practice bombs or rockets a year; the county’s bomb squad is called out to dispose of it. But the park was never graded, so it’s unknown how many are hidden by a few feet of eroding soil.

Bruce Buchman, the south district supervisor for the county’s Public Facilities and Resources Department, said park rangers haven’t found a practice bomb or rocket in two decades. But he urges park visitors not to wander off trails into unexplored wilderness.

The practice bombs contain an explosive charge designed to expel a puff of smoke to let pilots know whether they hit their target. But about 10% of the charges didn’t detonate. Decades of age and exposure have made these bombs unstable and more dangerous, officials said.

“It may not kill you, but you’ll lose a finger or a hand,” said Debra Castens, a program manager with the Los Angeles district of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is the lead federal agency overseeing the former Trabuco Bombing Range.

The corps is focused on cleaning up the most dangerous sites first. On a scale of 1 to 5 -- with 1 being the highest priority -- the Trabuco Bombing Range is rated 2. In 1993, the corps concluded that surface contamination no longer exists there, but underground ordnance remained a concern.

Cleanup is expected to cost $2.7 million, according to a 2001 General Accounting Office report to Congress. But there won’t be enough money in the corps budget to start the job until 2023. Plans include surveying the ground with magnetometers and other types of metal detectors as well as ground-penetrating lasers, removing any ordnance that’s found and sampling the soil for hazardous chemicals.

In recent years, state officials began combing unexploded-ordnance sites in California. Most are in deserted areas, but the Trabuco Bombing Range “grabbed our attention,” said John Scandura, a branch chief with the state Department of Toxic Substances Control office in Cypress, which is working with the corps, city and county on public education efforts near the old Trabuco Bombing Range.

“The maps we had showed roads out there, and when staff followed the roads to where the bombing range was supposed to be, it was right smack in the heart of Rancho Santa Margarita,” he said. “We think the probability of encountering these kinds of substances in the areas that were developed [is slim], but what we are concerned with is that a big part of that practice bombing range was within O’Neill Regional Park.”

The state agency plans to meet with the corps before the end of the year to see if the cleanup can begin sooner than 2023.

Though records indicate that the ordnance used at Trabuco was practice bombs and rockets, state and federal officials confirm government-watchdog charges that record-keeping was lax during the time the bombing range was operated.

“The problem is because the records are so bad, there are some places where everything is supposed to be practice bombs, and it’s not,” Siegel said.

Local, state and federal officials emphasize that the likelihood of encountering a practice bomb or rocket is slim and that if one is found, the explosive fuse was likely detonated when it hit its mark a half-century ago.

However, they warn anyone who sees ordnance to call police and to avoid handling it.

“Call 911. Don’t touch it, don’t kick it, don’t bring it home, don’t move it,” Castens said. “You walk away from it.”