Closed military bases remain a toxic blight

MONTEREY, Calif. — For much of the 20th century, Fort Ord was one of the largest light infantry training bases in the country, a place where more than 1 million U.S. Army troops were schooled in the lethal skills of firing a mortar and aiming a rifle — discharging thousands of rounds a day into the scenic sand dunes along the coast of central California.

Later, when it became clear with the end of the Cold War that the colossal military infrastructure built up to fight the Soviet Union would no longer be necessary, Fort Ord was one of 800 U.S. military bases that were closed between 1988 and 2005.

The cities of Seaside and Marina, Calif., where Fort Ord had been critical to the local economy, were left with a ghost town of clapboard barracks and decrepit, World War II-era concrete structures that neither of the cities could afford to tear down. Also left behind were poisonous stockpiles of unexploded ordnance, lead fragments, industrial solvents and explosives residue, a toxic legacy that in some areas of the base remains largely where the Army left it.

Across the country, communities were promised that closed bases would be restored, cleaned up and turned over for civilian use — creating jobs, spurring business growth and providing space for new housing.

But the cleanup has proceeded at a snail’s pace at many of the facilities, where future remediation work could extend until 2084 and local governments are struggling with the cost of making the land suitable for development.

Marina and Seaside city officials say the land they received costs more to service than it generates in new taxes, and future growth is unpredictable.

“They say Fort Ord is the biggest success in the United States, but if you ask me, it is the biggest failure,” said Marina’s city manager, Layne Long. “They didn’t do anything to remove the blight — 28 years after the base closed.”

At more than 1,000 sites within the closed bases, the land is so badly contaminated that no one will ever be allowed to live on it. Sites that were supposed to be clean were later found full of asbestos, radioactivity and other health threats.

In most cases, fixing up the bases is costing far more than expected and taking longer, federal reports show. The Government Accountability Office found last year that the projected costs for closing the bases had escalated to $65 billion from $43 billion. And while the Pentagon officially reports that it is saving $12 billion a year as a result of the Base Realignment and Closure process, the GAO said Pentagon officials did not have complete records of how those estimates were calculated.

Senior Department of Defense officials declined to discuss the current state of the base closure program amid widespread litigation and growing concern in Congress that the closures have been costing money for decades, rather than saving it.

In a 2019 report to Congress, the Pentagon said the remote location of some bases, new standards for toxicity, the severity of contamination and limits in current technology have slowed the work. Officials said the department “is committed to fulfilling its obligations” and pledged to “maximize cleanup program efficiency and effectiveness.”

Tensions among local communities, federal overseers, cleanup contractors and homebuilders have produced hundreds of lawsuits all over the country.

Among the most highly contaminated and contentious properties is the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard on the San Francisco waterfront. Even after $1.2 billion in federal spending, dozens of disintegrating buildings sit on soil contaminated with toxic solvents and metals, including plutonium and uranium.

Warships used in nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific during the 1940s and 1950s docked at Hunters Point for decontamination, and the Navy operated a radiological laboratory there. The base was supposed to be closed, decontaminated and handed over to the city, but after 30 years, 90% of it is still in the Navy’s hands.

HARD LIVING

Military base cleanups are often full of surprises, but Hunters Point is in a league of its own. Two supervisors at an environmental firm, Tetra Tech, which the Navy hired to help clean up the base, were convicted in 2018 of fraudulently submitting clean dirt to a laboratory in place of the contaminated dirt at the shipyard and were sentenced to prison. The Navy says the crime set back the cleanup by years.

A class-action lawsuit brought by 660 homeowners who purchased condos built on a small section of the shipyard resulted in a $6.3 million settlement with home developers as a result of the flawed cleanup, said Anne Marie Murphy, a lawyer who represented the homeowners. The suit is still pending against Tetra Tech, which did not settle.

“It is very hard to sell your house out there,” she said. “Residents are feeling a sense of despair.”

The neighborhood surrounding Hunters Point is among the lowest-income areas of San Francisco, a place where homeless people shelter in tents and rundown recreational vehicles.

A community health program, the Hunters Point Biomonitoring Foundation, has found elevated levels of toxicants in 150 nearby residents matching the substances in the shipyard soil, said the director,

Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai.

“It is amazing how dangerous the situation is,” she said.

One of her patients, Kelly Tankersley, who lives in a warehouse about 100 feet from the base’s fence line, provided medical records showing unsafe levels of uranium and plutonium in her urine. Sumchai said Tankersley has fatigue and other health problems that are probably a result of toxic exposure from Hunters Point.

In a statement, a lawyer for Tetra Tech noted that a 2022 study showed that most radioactive contamination at the site had long been “at or near local background concentrations.” It said there was no reason to believe Tankersley’s symptoms were related to any exposure from the Hunters Point site and that Sumchai’s findings were “unreliable and do not stand up to diagnostic or scientific scrutiny.”

In upstate New York, the former Seneca Army Munitions Depot still has more than 100 concrete igloos from World War II for storing bombs, which officials in Seneca County say they cannot afford to demolish. Many such old structures do not meet modern building codes, and for local communities, they become permanent white elephants.

Glenn Cooke, who directed efforts to repurpose the depot for more than a decade, said he pleaded with a senior Department of Defense official for more funding to remediate the base. “And he said, ‘How can I afford to give you guys more money when I can’t afford to buy body armor for all my troops in Afghanistan?’

“We were doing it on a shoestring,” Cooke said.

The depot employed 1,000 civilians and 400 Army personnel, representing about 10% of the county’s households. Now the biggest use of the 10,587-acre site is the Five Points Correctional Facility, a prison with 938 inmates and 660 employees.