Contaminated campus

A two-decade-old cleanup at a former military depot isn't close to completion

BY JOHN M.R. BULL AND STEPHANIE HEINATZ
247-7821

June 6, 2007

SUFFOLK -- Part 4 in a series

More than 400 grenades, mortar rounds, artillery shells and a bomb have been dug up from an office park and community college here over the past 20 years.

Two tons of leaking, crystallized TNT was found by a 13-year-old next to a soccer field.

And 27 pounds of TNT - and detonators - were found last summer a few hundred yards from classrooms.

This land along the James River by the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel used to be the Nansemond Ordnance Depot. It stored and shipped tens of thousands of tons of ammunition during the world wars.

Some of it was chemical weapons, and some might have been buried on the property, judging by Army reports and common disposal practices of the time.

After almost 20 years of cleanup efforts, half the 975-acre site - the undeveloped part - is posted off-limits because it has yet to be fully investigated. But signs of trespassers in those areas are clear: The graffiti on and in old ammunition warehouses is fresh.

"When you were a teen, when you went out necking, you went to places where there wouldn't be a lot of people," said Marian "Bea" Rogers, a former Suffolk city councilwoman now on the former depot's restoration advisory board. "The old depot grounds is overgrown, and there wouldn't be a lot of people."

The site is one of the few munitions problems in the region that's being cleaned up, even though the job is nowhere near done and dangerous new discoveries crop up regularly.

The former depot was used extensively from World War I to 1960, when the military no longer wanted the property and ditched it on a private academy for boys. Cost: free. The land later was splintered and eventually became a branch campus for Tidewater Community College and a General Electric office park.

The long-buried problems - a common occurrence at former military bases - didn't reveal themselves until 1987, when a teenager playing near the college soccer fields ran across the brown, crystallized TNT. Over the years, it had partly broken down into its chemical components and was quite unstable.

The Army Corps of Engineers was called in because it's in charge of cleaning up former defense sites. It found 2 tons of TNT by the field and didn't finish cleaning it up until nine years later.

In the meantime, hundreds of unexploded munitions were found in an old burn pit near the office park. Mortar rounds, artillery shells and a bomb were removed. That work, begun in 2001, continues to this day. The project is within 30 yards of a road and isn't fenced in. Students routinely jog by.

Another problem was found last summer, when 27 more pounds of leaking TNT and some detonators were discovered along the banks of the James. A fence was put up. The Corps of Engineers will look more closely at the problem this summer, then decide what to do about it.

"We couldn't find any real records of what was done there," said Jeff Zoeckler, a corps project engineer.

So far, the corps has spent $30 million of its $50 million regional cleanup budget over the past decade on the former depot, which was placed on the federal Superfund list of the country's worst pollution problems. The money hasn't been nearly enough to clean up the site quickly.

"The funding - it's frustrating," said Rogers, who has been involved with the cleanup since the late 1990s. "You get funding cuts, or you get money one year, but the next year, you don't. If you have a spent shell that might have residue of something in it, and a child brings it home and starts banging on it, it could be dangerous."

Rogers said she got frustrated by the long delays between the discovery of a problem and the beginning of cleanup. Many studies must be conducted before earth can be moved. That routinely takes years.

She said, "The paperwork takes so daggone long. If you go out to a piece of property and find a shell, you have to do a sweep around the area. Then you have the investigation of it to see what is involved. Then you have a plan to clean it up. All of these things require the writing up of paperwork, but also, somebody else has to check it out."

An ominous discovery in 1993 along the James wasn't studied in depth. It was all but ignored, then discounted.

Five barrels were found in a landfill on the banks of the river, about 100 yards from Interstate 664 and the Monitor-Merrimac bridge. The barrels had the markings and configurations common to containers designed for chemical-warfare agents.

The police were called. So was the corps. A military bomb squad was summoned.

They considered closing the highway and the bridge as they worked on the barrels. The college president at the time pleaded with them to keep the road open, fearing negative publicity because TCC technically owns that part of the former depot, according to a 1993 corps report. The road wasn't closed, and the news media weren't informed.

According to the report, preliminary tests showed that two barrels once held cyanogen chloride. The agent attacks the human body at the cellular level and causes convulsions, unconsciousness and death within eight minutes if inhaled. It can penetrate gas masks.

But the tests were done with old test kits, so the readings might have been inaccurate, the Corps of Engineers maintains. No further tests were done.

In addition, two old German artillery shells were found near the barrels. The experts on the scene feared that they might have been filled with chemicals and brought to the United States to be studied either during or after World War II. There were few other logical explanations for their presence, according to the 1993 Army report. It turns out that the shells were filled with water. Whatever was in them had leaked out long before.

Shipments of captured German chemical munitions - mostly mustard gas - from Europe to the United States were common for a year after the war ended in 1945. But it was dangerous, the weapons routinely leaked and the practice was halted in 1946.

At least one record indicates that one of those shipments was made to Nansemond.

On June 7, 1945, the Office of the Chief of Ordnance at the War Department (now the Defense Department) sent a memo to the commanding officer at the depot, telling him to expect the SS Nathan Hale to arrive in mid-June. The memo says the ship was carrying, among other things, 20 rounds of captured German chemical-warfare "explosives" and 2,195 containers of what likely was tear gas.

Those weapons were destined for the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the main chemical-weapon storage and testing base on the East Coast. It's unclear what happened to them.

The Army has no known surviving record of the Nathan Hale arriving at the proving grounds with chemical weapons. It has records for eight other shipments from overseas but not for that one.

Another old Army document shows that a shipment of chemical weapons was taken from Nansemond and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean sometime around World War II. The Army has been unable to determine exactly what was dumped or exactly where.

"Numerous historical documents state that tens of thousands of tons of all types of conventional and chemical-warfare munitions were stored and shipped from ... Nansemond Ordnance Depot," the 1993 corps report said.

The chemical weapons included artillery shells, mortar rounds and "various captured enemy chemical munitions returned from overseas."

In mid-1945, the War Department ordered the depot's commanders to get rid of much of its weapons stockpile. World War II was nearing an end. The country's depots were full. Explosives in production were about to be delivered. There was no room. Memos in the National Archives make the situation clear.

Disposal in those days routinely took one of three forms: Burn it, bury it or dump it in the ocean. No one knows where the former depot's entire stockpile went.

Two other pieces of information might - or might not - be evidence of a still-undetected chemical-weapons problem at the former depot.

In 2002, the Corps of Engineers removed 860 tons of soil contaminated with Impregnite found buried on a 1.6-acre section of the former depot. Impregnite was a white powder or syrup put on the undergarments of chemical-protection suits during World War II to make them more resistant to chemical attacks.

The chemical might have been stored for shipment elsewhere or kept on hand in case of a weapon leak at the depot. No records show for certain either way.

And tests on two soil samples taken from the former depot found traces of methyl phosphonic acid, a breakdown component of VX nerve gas. But the level was low, and the corps concluded that it likely was the deteriorating remains of the common pesticide Roundup, which chemically is a distant cousin of that type of nerve gas.

British scientists seeking a more lethal pesticide developed VX in the 1950s, a few years before the Nansemond depot closed. They accidentally discovered a chemical so deadly, it can kill a human in less than a minute. This was much desired by the U.S. military, so secret thermonuclear technology was traded for the formula.

In response to written questions from the Daily Press, the Corps of Engineers maintained it had looked but found no conclusive evidence that chemical weapons were ever shipped to the former depot, stored there or buried there.

"Everything found at (the former depot) to date is conventional weapons and conventional scrap. All historical documentation found to date indicates that (the site) was only used for the transshipment, storage and disposal of both U.S. and foreign conventional weapons," the corps said in a written statement.

"To date, we have found no evidence that such shipping of captured German (chemical-warfare material) actually occurred, nor have we found any evidence that an arriving vessel had transferred such a ... cargo for further surface transport to Edgewood (Chemical Biological Center at Aberdeen) or some similar arsenal. Also, we have not found any plans, documentation or structures that suggest (the former depot) either stored such munitions or had any adequate facilities for doing so."