By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

OF THE 78 old dump sites and chemical storage areas identified for hazardous waste cleanup at Andersen Air Force Base, 30 have been cleared, seven are in progress or pending, and 41 continue to be evaluated, according to an environment official at AAFB.
Gregg Ikehara, chief of the Installation and Restoration Program for AAFB’s environmental division, said environmental surveys have not shown any areas where war chemical weapons might have been stored during World War II and the Vietnam War.
Guam activists have been demanding that the military provide public information on the status of the cleanup, suspecting that certain diseases among local residents might have been caused by contamination of water, ground and air from the storage of Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals.
A Vietnam War veteran, who has been doing research on toxic contamination on Guam, earlier furnished Variety with old pictures of barrels stored on base, which he said contained defoliants that were sprayed in Vietnam during the war.
“We’ve not identified any area where chemical weapons might have been stored. The barrels that have been found contained asphalt,” Ikehara said.
The base cleanup is mandated by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Com-pensation and Liability Act, commonly known as the Superfund, which was enacted by Congress on Dec. 11, 1980. This law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad federal authority to respond directly to the release or threatened release of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment.
Over five years, $1.6 billion was collected and the tax went to a trust fund for cleaning up abandoned or uncontrolled hazardous waste sites all over the nation.
In 1992, AAFB was placed on the priority list, Ikehara said.
Among the sites that have been cleared so far were Marbo Annex, the Ritidian dumpsite, land fill 2 and chemical storage area 4.
“These areas received immediate attention because of the potential impact on groundwater,” Ikehara told a press conference.
Immediately after the press conference, Ikehara led members of the local media on a tour of the old Urunao dumpsite, where the contractor, Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure Inc., began the process of removing hazardous waste from the area that held debris from the construction of Northwest Field and North Field.
The cleanup began in February.
Ikehara, however, assured the public that the waste materials found at the site were not likely to cause contamination in the surrounding groundwater.
“If there was any contamination, it might have happened years ago. The materials that we are looking at now are not mobile and not likely to get down to the groundwater,” Ikehara said.
He said the waste that accumulated in the area was generated by construction debris that was pushed over the edge of the cliff. “Back in the 1940s, that practice was acceptable because environmental regulations didn’t exist then,” Ikehara said.
During the tour of the site, Nestor Acedera, project manager for the contractor Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure Inc., said his crew has so far collected 1,000 rounds of discarded munitions from World War II and old tires.
“We originally estimated that we would collect 3,000 rounds of ordnance at the completion of the process. We just started the actual cleanup in February and, this early, we have already collected 1,000. This means that we will probably find more than 3,000,” Acedera said.
“The old tires that we collect will be transported to a recycling company, while the munitions are disposed of by burning them,” he explained.
Ikehara said the Air Force has set a two-year target for the completion of the Urunao dump cleanup. “It may take shorter time than that; or maybe longer, depending on the complexity of the process,” he said.
So far, Ikehara said, there is no immediate plan for the use of the Urunao property.
“There’s no future scenario until we know the footprint of future growth,” Ikehara said. “There’s no immediate plan to return the land to the original landowners.”