Monterey Peninsula Airport Noise
Citizen Pain 08/03/00
How two ordinary people uncovered an environmental hazard at the airport
that went untold for 10 years.
By Traci Hukill
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dirty secrets
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As a kid growing up on Rosita Street in the '50s, one of Sheldon Mayes' favorite
things to do was watch the planes take off. It was a short jaunt from his house
across Work Memorial Park and up the hill at the end of the runway. There he'd
climb up on the 55-gallon drums stacked on the slope to get a thrilling view
of the planes' underbellies as they passed close overhead. He never gave much
thought to the drums. "There were hundreds of 'em off the edge," he recalls.
"That's just the way they did things back then, I guess."
Mayes grew up, joined the service and forgot all about the drums. They disappeared
from view, obscured by the maturing greenbelt, and then vanished altogether.
In 1995, 13 hangars sprang up where the drums used to be.
In time Mayes moved back to his family home on Rosita and joined a citizens
group opposing airport noise. One day in June, Mayes' neighbor mentioned that
following the 1995 construction of the hangars, the chorus of croaking frogs
that normally filled the night air at Work Memorial Park had fallen silent.
Mayes got to thinking about some of the things he'd seen around the airport
as a kid: the drums, their rims coated with black gunk; a burn site where firefighters
trained; an ammo dump. He and his fiancee Sandy Cannistraci met with airport
Assistant General Manager Donn Trenner and learned that there'd been a dump
site, not far from the barrels, which the Army Corps of Engineers had investigated.
(Because the airport served as a Navy facility from 1942 to 1989, it falls to
the Army Corps to investigate and clean up potential hazards.) Mayes and Cannistraci
got a copy of the Army Corp's September 1999 final report. In its pages they
discovered that the airport is the source of two toxic plumes containing known
carcinogens, that one of the plumes goes offsite and into the Casanova Oak Knoll
neighborhood, and that contamination levels in some sites are alarmingly high.
"As soon as we got hold of that report we took it to county health," says Mayes.
"They said they had never seen the report and asked if they could copy it."
By the last week in July, word had spread to local government agencies. The
health department planned a meeting on August 7 to educate local officials about
the problem. For many of the attendees, the issue only came to light in the
last two weeks.
Others have known about it longer. County Environmental Health Director Walter
Wong told the Weekly that "The citizens who lived here brought it to
our attention--up to this point we didn't know anything about it." But Army
Corps of Engineers spokesman Jason Fanselau says Wong's department approved
all the permits to drill monitoring wells at the airport, and numerous letters
going back to 1997 mentioning groundwater contamination are cc'd to Wong's subordinates
in the department. Still, Wong maintains he knew nothing. "I can't explain it,"
he says. "I was surprised."
Monterey Peninsula Regional Parks District Board President Ben Post is steamed
that he was never told about this before. The airport is near the wetlands at
Work Memorial Park, which in turn drain into the creek that feeds Laguna Grande
(a stopover for migrating waterfowl) and eventually into Roberts Lake and the
bay. Those waters haven't been tested yet, but they will be soon, Post promises.
"If they've known about it for five years," he fumes, "how about telling people
like Fish and Game that there may be trichlorides sloshing down into an aviary?
Why wasn't this knowledge made available?"
At present, the Army Corps of Engineers does not suspect that either plume emanates
from the barrels Mayes remembers, but Fanselau confirms that the Army Corps
plans to investigate the site.
Gas from the Past
One of the two plumes is a petroleum plume that the Army Corps and the airport
have known about since 1995. In 1990, the Corps removed from the light industrial
park just north of the airport two 50,000-gallon underground storage tanks that
the Navy used to hold jet fuel. At that time the Corps tested the soil and found
troubling amounts of benzene, which is known to cause cancer, especially leukemia;
and toluene, a potent chemical that can disable the nervous system. Federal
drinking water standards only allow one part per billion of benzene and 10 parts
per billion of toluene; the 1990 soil samplings showed 1,400 times that amount
of benzene and 240 times that amount of toluene in the soil surrounding the
tanks.
The Army Corps dug up the soil and took it to another site to air out, but did
not test the groundwater until 1995. At that time the Regional Water Quality
Control Board, which guards groundwater health, asked the Army Corps to investigate
the tank site again. The monitoring wells revealed even more ominous news than
the soil had: Concentrations of benzene and toluene had risen dramatically.
As more monitoring wells went in, it became obvious that the plume had spread.
The Corps began testing quarterly. Then, in 1997, it found TCE in one of the
wells. TCE is a solvent used to clean engine parts and circuit boards and, until
recently, in dry cleaning. It can cause liver and kidney failure and may cause
cancer. Federal standards for safe drinking water are 1.6 parts per billion.
In August 1999, the monitoring well closest to what is theoretically the source
of the TCE--an old hangar where the Navy used to clean engine parts using TCE--registered
1,600 parts per billion. That's the magic number at which the Environmental
Protection Agency generally requires cleanup. As the Corps tracked the TCE plume,
it became obvious that it had spread off the airport site. Two of the monitoring
wells that register the highest concentrations of TCE, in fact, are in the Casanova
Oak Knoll neighborhood. One is on the street in front of the park.
The local agency meeting on Aug. 7 is designed to get local people up to speed.
After that, the Army Corps of Engineers says it will be holding public meetings.
In the meantime, the question remains: Why wasn't the public notified? Denis
Horn, General Manager of the Monterey Peninsula Airport, takes the understated,
hat-in-hand approach to why the airport didn't inform the public about the mess
on its property. "I was assuming things were being taken care of, but they apparently
weren't," he says. "As far as the failure of the public to be kept fully advised,
they surely should have been. What can I say? It was a bad error of omission."
To view the Army Corps of Engineers' final report online, go to www.montereyairportnoise.com.
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