Lincoln City Councilman William Lauritsen’s column
A Titan problem
Lincoln City Councilman William Lauritsen
Jan 26, 2023 8:00 AM
The problem
During the Cold War, the U.S. military established a Titan I missile base in Lincoln. It only operated for three years before its liquid fuel technology was superseded by more reliable solid fuel missiles.
The site was abandoned by the U.S. government and turned over to Placer County, which used it for a maintenance yard and firearms range. There was also a skeet shooting facility.
I don’t want to repeat the exhaustive study detailed in last week’s News Messenger. It was an excellent piece of investigative journalism and we should all thank Carol Feineman for her work. We now know about the various problems with contaminants from the missile site and the county’s use. However, I should mention that the federal government has known about the contamination problem for at least 30 years.
To its credit, the county has said that it will clean up the lead contaminants left over from the skeet and firearms range. Also, I have been told that the clay pigeons used at the skeet range are not really made of clay but synthetic material that can also be considered a contaminant. The county does want to keep its maintenance yard unless the city or someone else wants to purchase it and pay for relocation.
This leaves the contaminants from the missile installation itself. Per The News Messenger article, there are trichlorethylene (TCE), benzene, lead and xylenes there. Remember, standard operating procedures back in the ’60s were to dump leftover materials into pits so that the ground could soak them up. While that might have been OK back during the Cold War (there was no EPA back then), it leaves us with a mess to clean up now.
Finally, there is the problem with the leftover missile base installation. Most of it is underground. There are 180-foot-deep missile silos, control rooms, mechanical rooms which contained generators, ventilation shafts and tunnels connecting them. When the military left, they shut off the sump pumps and the underground chambers filled with water. While the actual missile silos are covered by huge heavy concrete doors, the ventilation shafts only have grates covering their opening. It looks like the grates have been vandalized and someone or some people have tried to gain entry.
The city wants to turn the site that lies above the installation into a park with some kind of recognition for its historical importance. While this seems like a nice idea, there is the issue of “attractive nuisance” in that it could become an attraction for people wanting to explore its interior. In that most of the underground site is flooded, this could be dangerous if someone were to gain entrance.
Solutions?
As mentioned above, the county has said that it will clean up the lead contamination left by the firing and skeet ranges. It has said that it wants to clean the site using the much stricter residential standard and haul the contaminants away. The county should be able to provide us with a timeframe for this.
As for the site itself, if the city of Lincoln is serious about turning the site into a park, then city officials should require the relevant authority (county or the federal government) to make the site safe for such use before the city takes custody. This might mean sealing any openings, pumping out the water and filling the voids with sand or concrete. This would also prevent a future cave-in possibility. The site is not safe now.
This leaves the issue of chemical contamination. As mentioned above, these contaminants included TCE, a known carcinogen. If you go out to the area around the site, you will see several monitoring wells extending toward Sun City. What we need to know is how contaminated the land is and where the contamination is moving. The federal government (Army Corps of Engineers or Environmental Protection Agency) needs to tell us. The city needs to know. Developers need to know.
The current plan for Lincoln’s Village I is to build more than a thousand houses, a commercial area centered next to a lake with a four-story building with shops below and apartments above and to turn the Titan missile site into a park. Developers already have plans but the problem of whether this area is contaminated must be addressed.
We need a comprehensive study of the contamination and it needs to be cleaned up. Developers who have invested in this project need to know before building. If houses were to be built on contaminated land, would this have to disclosed to future buyers? Would houses have to have active barriers to prevent contamination from entering the dwelling? Could possible future legal action stop projects before they were finished, leaving partially completed structures?
We need answers. I live in Sun City, which is next to the site, and represent the district on the Lincoln City Council.
William Lauritsen is a resident and retired member of the U.S. Foreign Service (State Department) where he served as a finance officer spending most of his career overseas. He has an MBA and is a retired CPA. Lauritsen is also an elected member of the Lincoln City Council. This opinion represents only his personal, and not elected, opinion. The column’s goal is to present issues that impact city residents in an impartial and understandable format. He can be reached at [email protected].