Coast Guard Yard planning cleanup

The Baltimore Sun

It has been decades since Charles S. Key Jr. has seen the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay, but he still shudders when thinking of his first job there.

Key was assigned in 1976 to work with the "major renovation" crew, gutting and rebuilding ships on and near the docks. He did everything from sweeping to moving salvage, he said.

"The environment itself was just horrible, and really, really nasty," said Key, 52. "I'd come back to my room after work and my uniform would just be covered with rust and grease and who knows what else."

Key, now a civilian living in Seattle, was stationed at the yard before present-day safeguards for the environment were put in place. Hazardous activities, such as sandblasting ship hulls, resulted in widespread contamination on the 113-acre site, nestled into the northeastern corner of Anne Arundel County near Curtis Creek and Arundel Cove.

Now, nearly 20 years after Coast Guard officials began investigating the environmental impact of discontinued shipyard tasks at the 108-year-old yard, the cleanup is set to begin this year.

The cost to clean up the facility's salvage yard alone is estimated at $500,000, said Scott Nesbit, an engineer overseeing the cleanup effort for Tetra Tech, an outside company contracted to help with the work. The Coast Guard has spent about $2.2 million for environmental testing at the yard, said Cmdr. John Slaughter, facility engineer for the yard.

Capt. Steve Duca, the yard's commanding officer, said it is important to the Coast Guard to clean up the yard, the military branch's sole shipbuilding and major repair facility. The yard was added to the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list in 2002, designating it as one of the most contaminated sites in the country.

"It's really hard for us to enforce the laws on one hand and be a violator on the other," Duca said.

Duca said the Coast Guard sought for the yard to be placed on the Superfund list, beginning in 1989, because it opened up funding sources to help with the cleanup. Chief among those: The EPA offers free oversight of cleanup efforts on federally owned Superfund sites, said Terri White, an EPA spokeswoman.

The Coast Guard, using consultants from Gaithersburg-based Tetra Tech, has designated 13 sites as places of concern. They include the salvage yard, a dry dock area, the site of a former incinerator and the site of a former burn pit, according to documents filed at the North County Library in Glen Burnie, where the Coast Guard keeps a depository.

The contamination varies from area to area, documents show, and involves numerous chemicals, metals and pesticides. They include lead, mercury, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), volatile organic compounds and dioxins, which were used as a cleaner of ships' hulls for decades, but are now known to be carcinogenic.

Last month, the Coast Guard released a proposed remedial plan for the first site, the dry dock area. Despite the presence of some heavy metals, PCBs and DDT, a pesticide classified as a probable carcinogen, the EPA and Coast Guard said no action was warranted because the levels of contamination did not meet dangerous levels.

"These are tiny, tiny numbers we're talking about here," said Jerry Hoover, the EPA's project manager for the yard cleanup. "I don't think it'd be right for the Coast Guard to spend federal dollars on something that doesn't need to be cleaned up."

Reports filed on the burn pit and salvage yard, however, suggest cleanups will be warranted in other parts of the yard.

Few safeguards were taken at the salvage yard, which was home to scrap metal, drums of oil, lead acid batteries and PCB-laden transformers, according to a Coast Guard 2004 feasibility study.

"Historically, up to 100 55-gallon drums of waste lubrication oil were stored with the salvage lot, a practice that was discontinued between 1996 and 1998," the study said. "The drums were reportedly stored on their sides in direct contact with the underlying soils in the southwest portion of the lot."

While the salvage lot is now used solely for the storage of scrap metal, testing has shown PCB levels in at least eight samples exceeding 10 milligrams per kilogram, a threshold that would require intervention, if it were to become a residential site.

At a public meeting last month to address the dry dock plan, Slaughter told a handful of activists that the Coast Guard intends to clean up the salvage yard so that it could be habitable, if the military ever decided to close the yard. The plan is to remove and replace 1,500 to 2,000 cubic yards of loam and ship it to a secure off-site landfill at an estimated cost of $500,000.

"If [the cost] comes out higher than that, the Coast Guard is committed to getting it done anyway," Slaughter said.

It is unlikely the cleanup will end there. According to the 2004 study, testing on the burn pit, separated from the salvage yard by only a chain-link fence, showed even higher levels of contamination. In fact, the amount of lead measured in some samples was so large it fell outside the EPA's guidelines for industrial sites.

Coast Guard officials and documents said more testing needs to be conducted before any plans can be made. The next plan, expected to come up for public review this month, is for the logistics of the salvage yard cleanup, Slaughter said.

Activists in the yard's Community Advisory Group, formed about the same time the yard was named to the Superfund list, credit the Coast Guard for hosting several meetings per year updating the public. But they said they are also frustrated with how long the cleanup effort has taken and some of the answers they get.

"If we aren't going to remove pockets of DDT and other contaminants in concentrated places [like near the dry docks], how are we ever going to use [Curtis Creek] again?" asked Rebecca Kolberg, a member of the advisory group. "It hasn't been open to the public for 30 years."

Key, the Coast Guard veteran, said he is thankful he was able to land a position working shore patrol after six months at Curtis Bay. He is in good health now, he said, but sometimes has a "creeping worry" about what long-term effects the environment at the yard had on him.

"I wonder about what I was exposed to, especially with some of the toxic fumes that were coming off of those boats," he said. "No one was even talking about environmental issues back then."

daniel.lamothe@baltsun.com

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