YESTERDAY, the OC Register offered a tiny story about cleanup of the huge TOXIC PLUME beneath us here at Irvine Valley College and environs: Getting El Toro spick-and-span:
The last major pollution cleanup at the old El Toro base has begun.
Thirty-five pumps are now drawing up 390 gallons of polluted groundwater per minute, around the clock. The remediation will cost the federal government $42 million and could take 30 years.
The pumps are drawing up solvent-laced water from rock, sand and clay in an underground plume that extends about four miles under the base and into the neighboring village of Woodbridge.
The pollution comes from years of aircraft parts being cleaned with a solvent called trichloroethylene. Rainwater carried the solvent into the earth, and now the plume ranges from 150 feet deep under the base and 300 to 1,000 feet under Woodbridge.
"This is the major item that put the base onto the Environmental Protection Agency's national priority list," Darryn Newton said Friday. Newton is the Navy's project manager for cleanup of the Tustin and El Toro bases.
Newton said the cleanup process is not expected to interfere with development of the Great Park. Some Woodbridge residents have worried about possible groundwater contamination—but Navy and Environmental Protection Agency officials say the plume is about four miles from the nearest drinking water well.
3 comments:
is this why rebel girl looks like a 60s hippy on meth?
So that's what the Navy says? In 1990, it was a Navy official who, with a straight face, tried to convince Irvine officials that the toxic run-off was a not a result of the fluids from the base but from cars being washed at the former auto race track off of Old Trabuco. I swear to god, he tried to say that, straight face and stiff white uniform intact. And we should trust what they and Bush's EPA say today? Ha!
I think the toxic plume looks very pretty!
Every community should have one!
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