LNAS works to clean environment

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California
THE SENTINEL
LNAS works to clean environment
By Judy Finney
January 5, 2003

LEMOORE - Tumbleweeds, brown grass, concrete, burrowing owls, jack
rabbits and Hornets, the F/A-18 kind, are all part of the environment
around the operations side of Lemoore Naval Air Station.

So are the soil and water under the weeds, grass, concrete, owls and
rabbits. And in some places that soil and water has been contaminated by
aviation fuel and other hazardous compounds.

LNAS personnel are working to clean up contaminated sites and to keep
such contamination from happening again.

One such person is Don Roberts, LNAS environmental director.

Roberts said the Navy became aware that there may be some areas of
ground and water contamination in the 1980s and began a systematic
identification and clean up of the sites late in that decade.

"Seventeen sites were identified," Roberts said.

The company that conducted the contamination search did more than just
scrape some dirt up and turn on a tap to locate and evaluate the
problems. They researched files, according to base information officer
Dennis McGrath, dating back to when the base was first constructed to
find out what areas were used to store chemicals, for fuel and for use
as a landfill.

"They even contacted people who were stationed here in the 1960s as well
as people such as electricians who worked constructing the base to find
out if things had been spilled or incorrectly stored," Roberts said.

He pointed to a small metal building along the road to operations.

"There was a transformer laid on the ground at that site," he said.
"Back then (1960s) all transformers had PCBs in them. So when we found
out about that we tested it and, sure enough, there were trace elements
of PCBs found in the ground."

But the largest contamination came from aviation fuel from a pipeline
leak about the size of a pencil. Roberts' data shows that approximately
200,000 gallons of fuel has been removed from groundwater on the base.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.newzcentral.com/articles/2004/01/03/front/daily01.txt

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