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GROOM LAKE TOXIC BURNING
Former worker at the secret Air Force base says
poisonous substances were routinely ignited.
Formatted By CammoDude
09-05-99

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mar. 20, 1994, Page 1B.
By Keith Rogers, Review-Journal

Trucks hauling poisonous waste from California routinely arrived
at the Air Force's secret Groom Lake base on Mondays and
Wednesdays, said a former base worker who was employed there
during the 1980s.

There were always two Kenworth rigs, he said. They towed trailers
with sealed cargo bays sometimes filled with 55-gallon drums of
resins, solvents and hardening compounds--stuff he said Lockheed
Corp. used to coat its radar-evading Stealth aircraft.

At the base, 35 miles west of Alamo in Lincoln County, the trucks
would roll past the dormitory complex where as many as 2,000 full-
time residents lived, then down a road that parallels a taxiway
that leads to Lockheed's hangers at the south end of the base.

There, just west of the road and at the foot of Papoose Mountain,
the trucks would back up to one of the 300-foot-long trenches.
Workers would then roll the barrels into these pits where the
drums and their classified contents would be doused with jet fuel
and ignited.

Like every activity at the base, the Air Force and the phantom
trucking company, known only a NDB, operated with great latitude
under the veil of secrecy, often in defiance of state and environmental
laws at the time.

The waste shipments were never accompanied with manifests, which
are required by law in Nevada and California. And the trail of
paperwork to the base, once known as Area 51, was covered by code
words.

Any reference to the base during the Stealth project was
nonexistent in government correspondences, other than the name
"Score Event," said the source who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, but who provided a base manual, map and aerial
photograph of the base that was taken in the mid-1980s by a
government contractor.

"They could have hauled in untold amounts of things," he said.
"They would bring the stuff up from California at first twice a
week, then once a week," he said.

His story about waste disposal practices at the Groom Lake base
confirms what other workers and former workers have said about the
burn pits and the acrid fumes that wafted over the hangers and
dormitories where people lived and worked.

Nevada environmental officials are probing whether the burning was
proper and George Washington University law professor Jonathan
Turley is preparing legal action against the Air Force, accusing
it of environmental crimes. Turley has said his growing list of
clients includes people who were injured by the Air Force's
actions.

Nevada's only environmental official with a clearance to enter the
base, Air Quality Bureau Chief Thomas Fronapfel, has visited the
base twice since allegations about open-pit burning were made last
year. He said he has "looked at most of the information" about
waste burning practices at the base and has found that classified
materials were burned, but they were mostly papers.

Fronapfel and his boss, Environmental Protection Division
Administrator Lew Dodgion are still trying to determine how they
will report their findings and what action, if any, they will take.
Dodgion has said, though, that the amount of information
that state has compiled about waste disposal practices at the base
is small compared to what his staff has not reviewed.

Neither the Air Force, Lockheed nor NDB are licensed waste haulers
in Nevada, according to the state's Motor Carrier Division in
Carson City. NDB is not listed as a trucking firm in Nevada,
California or in the National Directory of Addresses and Telephone
Numbers.

Allen Hirash, a spokesman for the California Department of Toxic
Substance Control, said, however, that Lockheed Aeronautical
Systems Co., in Burbank, Calif., was a registered hazardous waste
hauler from 1982 to 1991. Likewise, several Air Force bases in
California once were registered to haul hazardous waste but the
registrations have expired, the latest being the one for Beale Air
Force Base. Its registration expired Jan. 31.

When asked about its waste hauling practices from Lockheed's
Advanced Development Co. in Palmdale, Calif., the so-called Skunk
Works division that developed Stealth aircraft, company spokesman
Jim Ragsdale issued a statement that he said "is all my management
is willing to say on this topic."

"Lockheed on occasions in the past has had requirements for
removal of materials from our factory that our customer, the US
Air Force, deemed to be classified materials. In those instances,
Lockheed followed instructions from its customer as to how the
materials were to be transported away from the factory location,"
the statement says.

"When the materials were trucked away, the destination of the
trucks and the eventual disposition of the classified materials
were determined by the Air Force," Ragsdale's statement says.

Air Force officials in Las Vegas and at the Pentagon did not
respond last week to questions about Lockheed's statement.

But in a telephone interview Thursday, Rep. Jim Bilbray, D-Nev., a
member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees,
said he has asked the Air Force to give him a "full, detailed
briefing on any burning activities in its Nellis Range Complex,
which maps show include the Groom Lake base.

"They may not be willing to come forward and admit to violations
that they don't think took place," Bilbray said, noting that while
he can't acknowledge the base's existence he said he has "deep
reaching ability to peer in."

"What was done out there a few years ago, the institutional memory
might not be there. Records might not exist," he said.

Regardless of the secret nature of the Groom Lake base, Bilbray
said if any environmental crimes took place, the people who
suffered from them should be compensated.

Bilbray confirmed that he has heard of the words, Score Event, in
connection with the Nellis Air Force Range complex, but "I
shouldn't get into it," he said.

"When you cannot acknowledge that a facility exists, it makes it
very difficult to talk about what goes on there," he said.

What did go on at the Groom Lake base from 1980 through 1990
didn't come cheap, said the source who worked there during those
years.

The source said he saw charts that listed the base's budget at
between $93 million and $115 million per month. That figure fits
with the $1 billion to $1.5 billion annual budget that private
military analysts have estimated based on projects at the base and
daily flights to shuttle workers there.

"I was staggered by the numbers," the source said.

High-powered, telemetry satellite dishes at the base's north end
serve a dual role for communicating and fogging film of any would-
be photographers who were detected on nearby ridges, he said.

A Scoot-N-Hide shed on one runway was used to keep secret advanced
aircraft out of sight while foreign satellites orbited in view of
the base.
While the F-117A Stealth fighter jets and a prototype B-2 bomber
were housed at one end of the base, the government's Red Hat
teams--the foreign Technology Assessment Group from Edwards Air
Force Base in California--kept its collection of advances Soviet
MiG jets in hangers at the other end, the source said.

In the time he worked there, the source said base personnel were
involved in seven plane crashes that involved three F-117s, one A-
7 Navy chase plane and three Soviet MiGs, including one that
landed in a woman's back yard in Rachel.

At least five unmanned F-86s were shot down for any Army
battlefield air defense system project. The crashes and missile
exercises sometimes caused range fires that could have been
avoided, he said.

Sidebar: Extravvagant Living on a Secret Base

Just because the 2,000 or so civilian and military personnel
working at Groom Lake were fighting the Cold War didn't mean they
couldn't enjoy a cold one.

A favorite watering hole was Building 170, the hanger-size
centerpiece of the base's recreational complex. It is listed in
one base directory as Sam's Place, a bar named after a Central
Intelligence Agency official who once ran the base, said a source
involved in base operations during the 1980s.

Sam's Place was a dark, fully carpeted nightclub with large padded
chairs and a bar ringed with stools that rivaled the largest ones
in Las Vegas, the source said. The bar and many of the facilities
probably still exist, he said.

The club had four pool tables, dart boards and a big screen where
pornographic movies were shown "until a few ladies on the base
complained," he said.

The recreational complex was complete with an eight-lane bowling
alley, a heated indoor pool, four racquetball courts, a basketball
gymnasium with a wooden floor, tennis courts, saunas and a snack
bar. At one time, a golf course and lighted softball field
existed.

Supplies for the base were flown in from Hill Air Force Base in
Utah aboard C-130s.

"Sometimes people would chip in and buy big ice boxes of shrimp
that were flown in specially to the base from Florida in 20 to 30
big Styrofoam coolers," he said. The planes stopped at the base
only long enough to offload the shrimp, he said.

Some colonels, he said, "had very extravagant tastes," including
one who had grapefruit flown in from Israel at $25 a piece and
requested deliveries of canned tuna from South America that he
estimates cost the government $26 per can.

In the dining hall, prime rib was offered every Wednesday
afternoon and New York steaks were often on the lunch menu. "They
used to serve frog legs, king crab and filet mignon at no charge,"
he said.

"They drank bottled water to the tune of $50,000 a month," he
said, comparing the lifestyles of some base inhabitants to high
rollers in Las Vegas at the government's expense."

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