Soil is excavated at the Buxton Naval Facility Formerly Used Defense Sites property, to remove remaining petroleum contamination at the former Navy submarine monitoring station, also used for other military and Coast Guard purposes over the decades. Photo: Army Corps of Engineers-Savannah District
BUXTON — Large amounts of underground oil contamination left behind decades ago at a former beachfront U.S Naval facility may finally be gone after the recent completion of an intensive seven-month excavation project, but additional sampling will still need to be done in the fall to confirm that petroleum is no longer a threat.
By month’s end, Army Corps of Engineers contractors, after removing tons of tainted soil and untold gallons of polluted water, will have restored dug-up areas off Buxton Beach and removed the heavy equipment.
“We’re hoping to be out of your hair when the tourists get in your hair,” joked Hillary West, program manager for contractor Bay West, at the April 30 quarterly update held in Buxton.
In a presentation at what is officially known as the Restoration Advisory Board, or RAB, for the Buxton Naval Facility Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) property, Weber provided details about the latest challenge in the decades-long effort to clean up the former Navy base, with sporadic, reoccurring incidents since September 2023 of petroleum odors, sheen and shoreline tar balls on the eroded beach and nearshore ocean area after storms.
In the wake of a report of sheen by Cape Hatteras National Seashore last August, the Corps’ Savannah District awarded a contract for petroleum containment, limited soil removal, and monitoring, and then another contract in September for removal of petroleum-contaminated soil.
“It takes quite a bit of effort to get to this site,” Weber said. “A lot of man hours were put in in September and October to get us ready for a successful season.”
Inherent project challenges weren’t helped by heavy rain that saturated the site in November, she said. Still, the first load of soil was able to be removed starting in December.
“Our goal was to minimize our footprint before the holidays,” Weber told the RAB members and a small audience at the Cape Hatteras Anglers Club building. By January, “we really hit our stride,” she said, with excavation at the areas of highest impact.
The site demobilization was originally scheduled to be completed by May 7, but the exit was delayed until just before Memorial Day to allow more time to bring in additional sand to restore the site.
Although Weber reported that 17,000 cubic yards of affected soil and 315,000 gallons of water were removed, Sara Keisler, the Corps’ Savannah District FUDS Program manager, said in a later interview that those numbers were merely estimates. But the exact amounts, which have specific contractual maximum volume limits, were still being calculated, she added.
“So the intent of this action was to remove a majority of that contamination that potentially could be eroded away and washed out to sea,” Keisler told Coastal Review. “And that’s what we accomplished during this this response action.”
All told, Keisler confirmed, the project consumed about 31,500 labor hours, required 10 “pieces of yellow iron” — heavy equipment — and removed an estimated 275 feet of asbestos pipe, 5 million pounds of concrete, and 2,800 pounds of infrastructure debris.
As Keisler explained, the contaminated soil was sent to a regulated hazardous waste landfill in Canada. The Emelle, Alabama, Subtitle-C landfill that the Corps used in 2024 to dispose of earlier excavated soil from Buxton was not currently available, she said.
Much of the Corps’ time and resources have been dedicated to cleaning up the former top-secret submarine-monitoring facility, which operated from 1956 until 1982 through a special-use permit with the National Park Service, the property owner.
Starting in 1989, the Corps, the federal entity designated to clean up FUDS properties, removed above-ground storage tanks. Next, the FUDS office handled removal of below-ground storage tanks. Subsequent years involved testing, sampling, removing, and monitoring contaminated soil and/or water at various areas of the 50-acre site.
There was a lull, except for some monitoring, after September 2009, when the Corps determined that no further action was warranted. But in September 2023, severe shoreline erosion associated with a series of storms exposed chunks of buried infrastructure and evidence of even more petroleum contamination. Since then, the Corps has spent parts of every year investigating and cleaning up the site.
In the fall, another contractor will sample soil and groundwater within the project area to determine if and where any additional petroleum contamination remains.
Much of the petroleum contamination removed in the recent excavation had been at the site of a former heating plant, Keisler said, which lines up to where there was a previous fuel pipeline.
“That was where the bulk was that we were able to find,” she said. But because the extent of the contamination at that location in the polygon used to delineate areas at the site wasn’t initially known, a modification had to be made to the contract.
“The comprehensive sampling contract was awarded prior to this response action that we’re working on right now,” Keisler said. “When we awarded it, we were basing it upon other data. Then we had to award this response action because we were actively seeing releases again.
“And so, because in that whole polygon, the soil was all mixed up,” she elaborated, “because we were digging it and removing and putting new soil in. We went and modified that contract so that it would be a more evenly dispersed amount of borings across the entire polygon so that we would get the data we need, since the site conditions change due to that response action.”
If further remediation is required, the Corps would have to address it in an additional response action, she said.
Meanwhile, once funding is obtained, the Savannah office plans to return to Buxton for yet another project, known as “a Military Munitions Response Program,” which would address lead contamination at the former small arms range. Compared to decades of environmental cleanup of petroleum and other dangers, remnants of some ammunition almost may seem innocuous.
“It’s located on the southwest side of that pond,” Keisler said. “It’s a very small area. It’s got a whole bunch of growth on it. It’s not accessible.”