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This Superfund site at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, is being restored as wetlands. The site was a dumping ground for railroad ties, unexploded ordnance and machine parts.
Once contaminated by a pesticide-rinse area, this wetland on Machodoc Creek at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, was cleaned up and planted with cattails and grasses. |
When Ann Swope began work as an environmental scientist 22 years ago at Dahlgren, the Navy base was just getting started cleaning up a series of polluted Superfund sites.
Swope will have to work another eight years to see the end of the effort, which is supposed to wrap up in 2011.
"We had just finished the initial look when I got here," Swope said in a recent interview and tour of several cleanup projects at the 4,300-acre installation on the Potomac River in King George County.
Superfund, enacted by Congress in 1980 to identify and clean up the nation's most polluted sites, is now 23 years old and still plodding along at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, and four other sites in the region--Quantico Marine Base, L.A. Clarke & Son in Spotsylvania County, Culpeper Wood Preservers Inc. in Culpeper County and Arrowhead Associates in Westmoreland County.
For reasons of funding, logistics and the time it takes for these projects to wend their way through the federal bureaucracy and the cleanup process, it will be years before all of them are done.
With less federal money in the pipeline for these cleanups, however, fewer of them will be completed on schedule.
Even after the work is finished, all will require long-term monitoring for residual effects such as groundwater contamination.
Federal facilities such as Dahlgren and Quantico fall under jurisdiction of the Department of Defense.
At Dahlgren, dozens of polluted sites have been identified over the years. The list eventually grew to 75 sites--11 were found to be of sufficient concern to place them at the top of a priority list and all but one of those has been restored. Overall, 43 projects have been finished. Work is ongoing at six locations.
"Each year we update our site-management plan," Swope said. Swope and Billy Weedon, the base environmental-restoration coordinator, oversee the projects and coordinate with the Navy, Environmental Protection Agency, contractors, and Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Lengthy process
A marshy area along Gambo Creek known as Site 6 is an example of how the program works.
"This used to be a big storage area," Swope said. Beginning in the 1940s, it was a dumping ground for scrap metal, empty chemical drums, inactive airplanes, gun mounts and telephone poles. It's also believed that the site may contain unexploded ordnance, which requires extra precautions on the part of the cleanup contractors.
"First you investigate and decide if you need to use intrusive investigation--sonar, magnetometer--to find metal. Once you know where the metal is, you can define the site," Swope said.
Next comes sampling, "And if you find [pollutants], then you weigh options for cleanup," she said. At that point there's a public-comment period.
That's followed by more study to design the cleanup method, known as remediation in the industry.
Site 6, formally known as Terminal Range Airplane Park, encompasses about five acres on the western bank of Gambo Creek.
Depending upon the size and technical challenges, a job can take months or years to complete.
"If it's simple soil [contamination], the cleanup is quick," Weedon said. Dirt can be scooped up and hauled to a disposal site or incinerator. "If you've got different types of materials" in the ground, as is the case with Site 6, "it takes longer."
The possibility of uncovering unexploded ordnance complicates the situation.
"If you find [ordnance], you've got to screen, screen, screen" soil, which is time-consuming, he said. The dirt has to be spread out in thin layers and checked with sensors that detect metals.
Cleaning up Site 6 will cost about $3 million in DoD funds. The project began last December and is expected to be completed by year's end. Two contractors do site-assessment work for Dahlgren; two do the actual cleanup.
"After this we'll be moving to the last big site," Swope said, a lead-contaminated area known as Site 37. That could be started as early as next spring.
Since its creation in 1918, Dahlgren's operations have spilled a toxic soup of contaminants--from solvents used in gun maintenance to PCBs spilled from discarded electrical transformers. Solvents can seep into groundwater; cancer-causing PCBs can wind up in water and the food chain.
At the time, no one knew that the weapons testing and its byproducts could create such an environmental mess.
Swope says that none of the sites at Dahlgren poses a threat to human health. Environmental restoration is the reason for the cleanups.
So many projects have been under way on the base over the past two decades that it takes an entire bookcase at Smoot Library in King George to store the public documents they've generated. Dahlgren was added to the Superfund National Priorities List in 1992.
One folder relates to work on Site 25, the base's pesticide rinse area. In the 1940s and '50s, DDT, a potent pesticide, was stored in a shed there. Runoff went downhill into a small marshy area.
Today, it's a lush, three-acre wetland planted with cattails and marsh grasses.
"We removed the soil and expanded the wetland area" to create a habitat for birds and aquatic life, Swope said. The wetland is being monitored.
Since 1980, Dahlgren has spent $46 million on cleanups. It's expected to cost another $22 million by the target completion date of 2011.
That's possible, Swope said, "providing we get the money and there are no roadblocks." Work on lower-priority sites at Dahlgren may be delayed if funds are diverted to priority projects on other military bases, which all compete for available money from DoD.
During the past 18 years, DoD's Environmental Restoration Program has spent approximately $25 billion to clean up military bases. A large percentage of that money has been used on Superfund sites.
Bring in the MarinesQuantico, like Dahlgren, has to deal with the legacy of decades of pollution caused by military use--training, storage of toxic chemicals such as gun solvents, explosives, heavy metals and toxic chemicals.
Operations at Quantico--56,000 acres straddling Prince William, Stafford and eastern Fauquier counties--began in 1917.
"It's a huge base as far as the number of [polluted] sites and where they are," said Steve Mihalko, a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality official who helps coordinate Superfund efforts at Quantico and three military bases in the Tidewater area.
The description of some of the polluted sites give clues as to what's involved: Arsenic burial area, former rifle range, pesticide burial area, old batch plant (where electrical transformers were stored) and an old landfill.
Quantico made the Superfund National Priorities List in 1994.
"We've [screened] over 200 of the minor sites and several larger sites we are studying now," Mihalko said. Sixty-six priority sites are under investigation.
For example, the old landfill has been capped and the groundwater around it is being monitored.
Cleaning up the former rifle range is a more complicated project, which has been in the works since the mid-1990s.
"We've been doing some phased work as excavation goes on," Mihalko said. "We're getting rid of [bullet] impact areas" which contain heavy metals, including lead and copper.
On another area near the river, contaminants were found to have migrated from an upland site.
"We're just getting into studying those to see if they were impacted. That's a pretty complex study," Mihalko said. It could take several years.
From identification to cleanup, some sites can take even longer, he said.
"A lot of these sites, it took 50 years to contaminate them. You can't clean them up overnightThere are a lot of complex ques- tions."
Funding dilemma
As Superfund goes into its third decade, funding is a growing concern.
Since 1981, Congress has appropriated $24.4 billion to clean up polluted industry sites. During the same period, those responsible have paid $19.3 billion into a trust fund, and taxpayers have ponied up $6.5 billion.
But in recent years, the Superfund appropriation has dropped, along with the trust-fund contributions from polluters. Consequently, the taxpayer tab rises.
Next year, EPA is seeking $1.4 billion from Congress to pay for Superfund projects. The trust fund will contribute only about $290 billion because it was not re-authorized in 1995 and is essentially broke. About $1.1 billion would come from general fund revenues. In 1995 the taxpayers' share was about $250 million.
Julie Wolk, with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington, said the funding scenario is bad news for people living near Superfund sites.
"The problem now is that there is not enough money to clean them up. It's going to take a lot longer, and the cleanup burden is being shifted to taxpayers," she said.
In a September report, the watchdog group said the pace of cleanups has slowed because of the funding shortfall.
To date, EPA has cleaned up 886 sites on the National Priorities List. During the 2002-2003 fiscal year, 40 priority sites were cleaned up, EPA Acting Administrator Marianne Horinko said Tuesday.
The number of cleanups has dropped during the past few years. Forty-two were cleaned up between October 2000 and October 2001. An average of 87 sites a year were cleaned up in the late 1990s.
"We still face serious challenges because we still have much work to do at our remaining sites," Horinko said. "Although we currently have 699 construction projects under way at 436 sites, many of these sites tend to be large, expensive and complex."
To reach RUSTY DENNEN: 540/374-5431 rdennen@freelancestar.com
