BUXTON — As storm-roiled ocean surf continued to unbury noxious reminders of an old submarine surveillance base, aggressive action is finally being taken this week to address the ongoing blight of a Cape Hatteras National Seashore beach.
Contractors for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are scheduled to start work Friday near Old Lighthouse Beach in an intensified effort to locate the source of intermittent fuel odors and oily soil clumps first exposed more than a year ago by storm erosion.
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“The overall objective of the response action is to remove visible petroleum-impacted soils from the beach and dunes,” said Cheri Pritchard, media operations chief at the Corps’ Savannah office, in a Sept. 18 email response to questions from Coastal Review. The specific amount of material that will be removed, Pritchard said in the email, was “yet to be determined.”
The Corps in 1991 designated the former Naval facility as a Formerly Used Defense Site, or FUDS property. The Corps has since taken responsibility for cleanup of petroleum infrastructure and spills and leaks in surrounding soil at the 50-acre site. But during numerous visits over recent months to the site, the FUDS teams said that the current source of the petroleum had been difficult to pinpoint due to increased erosion, ever-changing conditions and the passage of time.
Bay West, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based environmental services company, was recently awarded a contract by the Corps to remove contaminated soils at the site.
According the information the FUDS team provided to Pritchard in the email, the contractors will work in up to four quadrants of various sizes along the beach and dunes, likely using heavy equipment such as excavators and roll-off containers.
“The contractor will excavate and containerize the petroleum-impacted soils from these areas and then properly transport and dispose of the material at an offsite waste management facility,” according to the email.
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Depths of excavations of oily soil will vary, but generally would be expected to go down to the water table.
After fielding numerous questions and concerns from the community during the Sept. 3 Dare County Board of Commissioners meeting, Col. Ronald Sturgeon, the Corps’ Savannah District commander, traveled down to Buxton with other Corps officials.
About a week later, the Corps announced that it would send a district-level team in response to the fuel sheen and odors to monitor the site. According to the FUDS email, the team, which will stay until the contractors are onsite, has performed test pits on the beach and west of the dunes to identify petroleum-impacted soils.
“We are committed to the safety of the community. Together with our federal, state and local partners, we’re going to find the contamination, and we’re going to remove it,” Lt. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon, Corps of Engineers commanding general, said in a Sept. 9 press statement.
In September 2023, the National Park Service closed three-tenths of a mile of Buxton Beach after reports of oily peat clumps on the beach, a strong odor of diesel, and an oily sheen in the nearshore ocean.
In addition to the fuel issues, the beach was littered with remnants of Naval base infrastructure, including large chunks of concrete and rusted rebar and wiring.
In the year since, the debris has been covered or partially covered by sand, then reexposed, depending on storms, tides and winds. And the fuel smells and sheen have also come and gone, although their appearance is more mysterious. But as the ocean eats away at the shoreline, each exposure seems worse than the time before.
Related: ‘Strong petroleum smells’ lead to expanded beach closure
With strong northeast winds on Sept. 5 carrying powerful petroleum odors along the beach near the FUDS location, as well as exposing more debris, Cape Hatteras National Seashore announced in a press release that it was expanding the size of an already-closed beach area.
“The precautionary expansion, implemented in consultation with the Dare County Department of Health and Human Services, closes the beach from the southern end of the location of beachfront homes in the village of Buxton, located at the end of Old Lighthouse Road, to approximately 0.25 miles south of the old lighthouse jetties,” according to the statement.
“We are working with the Coast Guard Sector N.C. and the EPA’s Regional Response team to see if there is some way the saturated sections of petroleum soil that are being uncovered can be removed to mitigate the releases into the ocean,” Dave Hallac, the superintendent of National Parks of Eastern North Carolina, said in a Sept. 5 email. “We are also asking if something can be done to prevent the sheens that are coming out of the sand/water interface from washing into the ocean.”
Hallac was unavailable to be interviewed for this report.
Although the Buxton Naval Facility, decommissioned in 1982, qualified as a FUDS property — a status for sites transferred outside Department of Defense control prior to Oct. 1986 — the Savannah district says it does not have the authority to remove the remnant infrastructure from the property.
Still, in the process of removing petroleum-impacted soil, if it is found under remaining infrastructure, the Corps will respond.
“The response action will include excavating, with the possible removal, of petroleum-impact soil beneath some of the remnant infrastructure which may require removal of limited amounts of infrastructure that is incidental to accessing the impacted soil,” the FUDS team said in the email.
The site cleanup is made more complicated by the fact that the Coast Guard most recently used the property as a base until 2010, and left behind its own hazards, which are currently being reviewed by the Coast Guard.
According to a portion of its special use permit issued in 1956 to the Navy that the Cape Hatteras National Seashore cited on its website, it appears that the Navy may have slipped out of town before meeting its part of the deal.
Condition 11 of the permit states that “The permittee shall remove all structures, foundations, and pavements, and clean up and restore the site prior to or immediately following termination of use.”
“The Navy concluded operations at NAVFAC Cape Hatteras in June 1982;” the park service website said, “however, all buildings and infrastructure remained at the site.”
But with the Navy long gone and the Corps saying it lacks authority to get rid of the growing amount of debris, all eyes are now focused on getting rid of the petroleum pollution that is washing into the Atlantic and coating the beach.
The debris cleanup will be for another day.
