Developers and Military/Industrial Complex Bump Heads in Sacramento County

By: Duane Craig

A now defunct housing development in Sacramento County is still haunting the developers who originally had to find sources of water other than groundwater to move on with the project, according to this Sacramento Business Journal article.

At the center of the controversy are a number of aviation manufacturers including Aerojet, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. In a lawsuit, the developers, allege that the manufacturers released hazardous substances into eastern Sacramento County. Those substances, the developers say, contaminated the ground water, requiring them to spend millions to make water available for the development from other sources.

The planned Sunrise-Douglas development south of Rancho Cordova would have had 22,000 homes. But after the water problems and a lawsuit where residents and environmentalists prevailed in stopping the development, the developers are looking for relief from their losses. Specifically, they claim they had to sell the property at a loss as well as incur large legal expenses throughout their ownership - mainly because of the water pollution. The area has had numerous industrial and military sources of pollution including Air Force operations at Mather Air Force Base and contamination from a maker of rocket motors. Contaminants include rocket propulsion waste and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The developers claim the pollution caused people to close domestic water wells and for the county to also close some of its own wells.

Cleanup at Aircraft Manufacturing Site Enters Final Stages

The contamination story on a 26-year-old site is winding down to what could be the final public comment period. The site, called the Boeing Wichita Site in Wichita, Kan., now has a draft Corrective Action Decision that tells what remediation will finally close the book on pollution left over from years of airplane construction, according to this report.

The site at 3801 Oliver St. and the surrounding area was home to aircraft manufacturing beginning in the 1930s. In 1985, Boeing noticed contamination while it was performing an environmental investigation. Originally, the source of the contaminants was suspected to originate solely at a Cessna plant nearby. But as more test wells were drilled, it became apparent the pollution was widespread. Next, private water wells came up contaminated in the 31st and Clifton Street area. The primary contaminants detected were tetrachloroethene (PCE); trichloroethene (TCE); cis-1, 2 dichloroethene (cis-1, 2-DCE); vinyl chloride (VC); benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene(s) (BTEX); and chromium, according to Kansas Department of Health and Environment documents.

To its credit, Boeing took an aggressive and active part in the investigations and remediation over the years, no doubt helping to prevent the site from falling under the Superfund program for lack of cleanup funds. The company currently operates “179 recovery wells, 195 monitoring wells and 9 air stripper sites.” It installed a “300-foot long by 30-foot deep groundwater interceptor trench to recover off-site groundwater contamination immediately upgradient of two springs ... at the northwest edge of the site,” and installed “more than a dozen air-strippers to remove TCE dissolved in recovered groundwater which is then discharged to the Arkansas River through a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit or is treated at the Spirit Industrial Waste Treatment Plant (IWTP) and recycled for use in the Spirit plant.”

Besides continuing the air stripping operations, remedial action will also include bio-remediation in place and the maintenance of permeable reactive barriers to mitigate further spread of existing soil-based contamination. In cases where it’s necessary, remedial soil removal and disposal will be on the cleanup agenda.

by: Duane Craig