Published in the Asbury Park Press
by KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
LAKEHURST -- This little crossroads town has played its part in America's defense for more than 80 years: as a proving ground for artillery, an air base for submarine hunters, and the test center that makes sure Navy pilots can safely land their jets on aircraft carriers.
Now community leaders are balking at a new, unscripted role: Lakehurst as the shipping center for plutonium-contaminated dirt from a Cold War nuclear accident that happened 40 years ago.
"No one has spoken to Lakehurst or Manchester," Lakehurst Mayor Stephen F. Childers bluntly told Air Force officials when they unveiled plans last week to clean up the Bomarc missile site on Route 539 in nearby Plumsted.
"We were never notified," said Manchester Mayor Michael Fressola. "I get a little suspicious. . . . They are trying to indicate this is nothing to worry about."
"But I know they have taken some extraordinary steps" to isolate the fire site, Fressola added. Childers and Fressola have talked to state Sen. Leonard T. Connors Jr., R-Ocean, who may get the state Legislature involved, Fressola said.
The Air Force and its primary civilian contractor, Chem-Nuclear of South Carolina, propose to dig an estimated 8,600 cubic yards of sandy soil and concrete out of the old Bomarc missile site on Route 539 in nearby Plumsted, starting perhaps this spring.
One part of their plan calls for using a Lakehurst railroad loading station to transfer sealed bags of tainted soil from trucks into rail cars for shipment to a low-level nuclear waste facility in Utah.
To get there, flatbed trucks would go south on Route 539 to Horicon Road in Manchester and east on Horicon to Route 70, and then east down Union Avenue, the main street of downtown Lakehurst.
But railroad station owners at the Ocean County Utilities Authority say they've already decided to avoid any involvement with the Bomarc project.
"The bottom line, is we haven't given anyone permission to use that siding," said Richard Woods, the OCUA's lawyer.
The railroad siding is a section of rails off the main Conrail track, with an overhead crane to load gondola cars, which are used to ship bulk materials -- such as the sewage sludge the OCUA processes for use as fertilizer. The authority got a telephone call inquiring about using its siding for a military-related project, "and we thought it was from the Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Center, and since they are one of our (sewer) customers we thought we could help them out," Woods said.
The Navy has a long relationship with Lakehurst. A World War I artillery range north of town became the Navy's airship center in the 1920s. Now Lakehurst is the Navy's center for making equipment to launch and land jets on aircraft carriers.
But when OCUA officials found out they were being asked by a private contractor to help handle the Bomarc soil, worries about liability led them to dismiss the idea, Woods said.
Contractors could try again to negotiate with the OCUA, or use other sidings alongside the Conrail line in Ocean County for the project.
Mixed in with the Bomarc site's dirt and rubble will be plutonium -- the main ingredient in a nuclear warhead that melted in a blowtorch-like fire on June 7, 1960, after a pressure tank explosion in a Bomarc anti-aircraft missile cracked open tanks of volatile liquid fuel and oxidizer.
Firefighters pumped water into missile shelter 204 for 15 hours, until the scene had cooled down enough for Air Force specialists to get in and retrieve pieces of the Bomarc weapon. Left behind were between 2 ounces and 11 ounces of oxidized and scattered plutonium particles, according to one analysis of recovered warhead debris by government scientists.
The Air Force paved and painted the scorched area around shelter 204 to lock in radioactive particles, and kept using the missile site until 1972. By sealing in particles, a plutonium-contaminated site can be maintained without posing a broad threat to public health, said Maj. Steven Rademacher, a radiation expert from the Air Force environmental health institute at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
Still, military and civilian environmental workers who have been to the Bomarc site say they took extreme care to avoid contamination. Even standing on top of plutonium in a protective suit is safe, but inhaling particles can be deadly, they say.
That's because plutonium emits alpha radiation, which has little penetrating power compared to searing gamma rays and other radiation from a nuclear explosion. To make people ill or kill them, plutonium particles must enter their bodies, with food or by breathing, Rademacher said.
Inside the Bomarc compound at shelter 204, the levels of contained plutonium can be as high as 100,000 picocuries per gram, a measurement of radiological contamination.
Working around shelter 204 requires coveralls, gloves, booties and respirators, all standard equipment for the people who will be tearing down the shelter and digging up the soil. Chem-Nuclear officials say they will use water sprays and filtered vacuums to control and collect dust during the work.
The company's detailed work plan, now available for public review at the Ocean County Library in Toms River and Plumsted, lists daily cleanup and check-out procedures for workers and vehicles, to guard against plutonium contamination.
Working around the fire site means tedious dressing, taping shut coveralls, and taking it all apart at the end of the day while scanning workers for radiation, recalled Richard Bizub of Jackson, now a projects manager with the non-profit Pinelands Preservation Alliance environmental group. He worked at the Bomarc site as a civilian consultant years ago.
"We would do nose wipes (to test for radiation), in case we inhaled a hot particle," he added. "It only takes one."
Tainted soil will be packed in thick, double-walled polymer bags, each holding 10 tons of dirt, and carried by flatbed trailer to a railroad loading platform, said David Ramineh, the project's construction manager. On arrival at the tracks, the bags will be hoisted into railroad gondola cars, and opened from the bottom to let the soil out, he said.
Chem-Nuclear's work plan calls for radiation monitoring both at the Bom-arc site and at the railroad, including wipe tests of the trucks to make sure no plutonium particles have escaped.
The goal of the Air Force cleanup is to reduce the contamination to no more than 8 picocuries per gram. That level would expose a person walking around the fire site to no more radiation than they'd get from high-altitude cosmic rays from space during a trip on an airliner, Rade-macher said.
A decade ago, the Bomarc site was low on the list of environmental clean-ups for McGuire Air Force Base. But that changed with pressure from Rep. H. James Saxton, R-N.J., the area congressman who pressed Air Force officials to seek a permanent cleanup, said King Mack, an Air Force civil engineer who oversees the Bomarc project.
Radiation experts say the Bomarc site could be managed as it is for many years, because its plutonium would stay in place if undisturbed. But it would be around forever, in human terms; the time it takes for plutonium to expend half its radiation energy, its "half-life," is 24,000 years.
Chem-Nuclear and its construction subcontractor IT Corp. have years of experience working for the Army In-dustrial Operations Command, which is helping the Air Force with the Bomarc project, said Thomas Schie-tinger, Chem-Nuclear's project man-ager.
Their plan calls for first peeling away contaminated surfaces inside shelter 204, watering down the dust, and sucking it up with filtered vacuums. Then, a hydraulic hammer would be used to bust the decontaminated shel-ter and its thick slab floor into 1-foot-wide chunks.
Next, workers would excavate the most contaminated soil in front of the shelter, digging an anticipated 22 feet to 24 feet below the surface, in 2-foot intervals until the 8 picocuries criteria is met.
The Cohansey aquifer, the vast water formation beneath the entire Pine-lands region, runs about 50 feet below the old missile bunkers, and no pluto-nium has been found in the ground water, according to studies commis-sioned by the Air Force. Slightly ele-vated radiation levels have been found in sediments of Elisha's Branch, an intermittent stream that extends be-yond 2,000 feet from the missile base, but those detection levels are far be-low levels that need cleanup, the Air Force has decided.
Workers would cut off the faces of adjoining shelters 202 and 206, as a safety measure so they don't topple into the cleanup pit, the plan says. The next step would be excavating pockets of elevated plutonium in a drainage ditch alongside Route 539, where water flowed during the 1960 fire. Those diggings should go only 4 feet deep, tha plan says.
The proposed work schedule would have most on-site work wrapped up by Labor Day, with only inspections and filling in the holes with clean soil to be done.
But the project's need for a rail con-nection may complicate that time line. Mayor Fressola of Manchester said state Senator Connors will ask the state Legislature to oppose the soil transportation plan.
Published: February 6, 2000
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