Toxic Soup Under Navy Base Creeps Toward Water Supply

An underground plume of toxic waste is slowly seeping toward subsurface drinking water supplies for Seal Beach and the Naval Weapons Station there, documents and interviews show.

The plume is a half-mile-long stew of chemicals once used to clean rocket boosters that blasted Apollo 11 to the moon. The Saturn V boosters were built at the weapons station in the late 1960s and early ‘70s by what was then North American Rockwell.

“This was a time when there was a race to put man on the moon, to beat the Soviet Union. It’s a time when certain risks were taken,” said Gregg Smith, spokesman for the weapons station.

David Baillie, environmental director for the base, said, “Back then . . . what everybody thought was, ‘You pour it in the ground and it goes away.’ As the whole country got smarter, we said ‘OK, what do we have left behind?’ ”

Officials say the plume poses no immediate danger to drinking water supplies. But extensive testing is being conducted to determine potential health risks and how to contain or remove the spreading chemicals before they reach at least one nearby drinking well.

Tests concluded this month found 163,000 parts per billion of TCE, a cancer-causing toxic solvent, in water pumped from the middle of the top layer of the plume. The safe level for drinking water is 5 parts per billion, according to federal and state standards.

Breathing, drinking or swimming in water with high levels of TCE may cause liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and even death.

Because the plume is beneath the surface of a secured military base, experts agree there is not an immediate threat.

“Nobody’s going to say ‘I’m thirsty’ and bend down and have a drink,” said geologist Carl Lind of Bechtel National Inc., the San Diego-based contractor that conducted the tests.

But there is a long-term risk to drinking water supplies because toxic plumes are tricky to clean up or contain.

“Obviously, there is cause for concern,” said Patricia Hannon of the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board division that handles Seal Beach. “There is no immediate risk . . . but there is real concern.”

The plume, which measures 2,500 by 2,000 feet in its widest layer, has descended 195 feet beneath the surface and is almost one-third of its way to the nearest drinking water aquifer, at 600 feet.

There are two drinking water wells near the contaminated site, one owned by the military base, the other by the city of Seal Beach. But they draw water from deep below the plume, officials say.

The plume also is far from the national wildlife refuge on the base, they said, and is generally drifting southwest, away from populated areas such as Leisure World or downtown Seal Beach.

During the rainy season, it partially reverses direction, the tests found.

Scientists involved in the project say there is no way to know exactly why there is contamination at the site. They theorize that the chemicals, mostly TCE, may have leaked from tanker trucks that were driven onto the base at the north end, near Seal Beach Boulevard and Westminster Avenue. The trucks pumped their liquid cargo into two storage tanks in use from 1962 to 1973.

Today, the tanks sit empty and rusting outside a complex of hulking gray metal buildings that are a familiar sight to anyone driving along the San Diego Freeway past Seal Beach.

The buildings, known as the Research and Testing Evaluation Center, were rented by NASA and used by North American Rockwell to build the second stage of the Saturn V boosters, one of which blasted Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts toward the moon in July 1969.

During the assembly process, TCE was pumped into the buildings by hose and sprayed inside the boosters to remove oil and grit.

“Clamps may not have been tightened properly, a gallon may have been spilled here or there,” said Robert Robinson, who is coordinating a massive cleanup project at the base involving several dozen sites. “But when it’s a gallon of something that is measured in parts per billion, you want to make sure . . . it won’t ever be a problem.”

Geologist Lind agreed. “A cup a day here, a cup there, and you’ve got that huge plume underneath now. It’s amazing.”

TCE, or trichloroethylene, is the same chemical that has been detected in huge underground plumes threatening drinking water supplies for 600,000 residents in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. A 3-mile-wide plume under the Woodbridge section of Irvine contains both TCE left in the soil by the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and nitrates from area farming. Navy officials said the plume associated with the Saturn V construction, and another smaller one on the base, are “a drop in the bucket” compared with the San Bernardino and Irvine plumes.

But concerned Seal Beach residents said they will monitor carefully how the situation is handled.

“This is our drinking water area, right here,” said Mario Voce, a Seal Beach artist and longtime activist who co-chairs a Restoration Advisory Board established by the Navy to offer input on the cleanup of hazardous waste at the base. “I think they know we’re going to be breathing hard down their necks.”

Robinson, the cleanup coordinator, said the slow seepage of the toxic waste through layers of soil, sand and clay would filter and disperse many of the contaminants. Baillie noted that the plume was moving extremely slowly and appeared to be blocked by a layer of thick clay.

“It took 30 years to get this deep,” he said, referring to the current 195 feet.

Still, the plume could reach the Navy well “in the next decade,” according to the Bechtel draft report.

And Hannon of the Regional Water Quality Control Board said the plume could find an opening in the clay strata and spread faster.

“Anything’s possible,” she said. She and community activists said the Navy appeared to be doing what it should to determine how to best contain and clean up the plume.

There are several options normally used to handle an underground toxic plume: leaving it in place and injecting it with substances to neutralize the poison; leaving it in place and monitoring it to see if it disperses naturally; or pumping the contaminated water out, removing the toxic chemicals and disposing of both.

As part of the recent testing, 300,000 gallons of contaminated water from the plume have already been pumped out. The water was treated and released into a storm channel that drains into the Pacific Ocean.

The environmental quality control board that advises the Seal Beach City Council asked last week that testing be expanded to off-base areas if necessary.

“There’s no problem with that,” Robinson said. “But it’s not necessary from what we’ve seen.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Navy Attacks Clean-Up Sites

Military officials are trying to prevent an underground toxic plume from drifting into the water table beneath the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. Loaded with chemicals used to build rockets in the 1970s, the plume extends from one of 27 hazardous waste sites targeted for cleanup.

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Gaging the Plume

The toxic plume, which reaches 195 feet deep, is about a a third of the way to the nearest drinking water aquifer at 600 feet.

Source: The Weapons Support Facility -- Seal Beach

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times