The Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station provides weapons storage, loading, maintenance, assessment, and support to ships and submarines of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Fully contained within the Station is the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR), a 400+ acre wetland and estuary habitat. Site 14 is a former underground storage tank (UST) site at the Naval Weapons Station where leaks and spills led to subsurface contamination by compounds associated with gasoline such as methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, a fuel oxygenate. Benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene (BTEX), which are also components of the gasoline stored at the site, were also detected in the groundwater and creating a potential threat to SBNWR.An existing remediation plan was to use Oxygen Releasing Compounds (ORC) in approximately 180 injection points at Site 14 to clean up the MTBE and BTEX compounds. However, the use of ORC to enhance the microbial degradation of these existing hydrocarbons would have been hampered by the intrinsic high oxygen demand of the site soils, significantly increasing the remediation costs. Before implementing the ORC remediation approach, the Navy requested that Geosyntec complete an ecological risk screening (ERS), field investigation, microcosm study, geochemical evaluation, remedial site evaluation (RSE), and a corrective action plan (CAP) to deal with the contaminants of concern.
