Regulatory turmoil, Air Force resistance waylays Kirtland jet fuel plume cleanup

Sep. 14—Lurking underground in the middle of Albuquerque is a massive Air Force jet fuel plume that contaminates soils and groundwater, with no cleanup officially planned a quarter-century after it was uncovered.

The lack of progress in tackling Kirtland Air Force Base's mammoth fuel spill, discovered in 1999, drew recent public attention and calls to pick up the pace by some political leaders who were baffled about how efforts had stalled for two decades.

The Air Force is still in the first phase of investigation. A second phase is required before a full cleanup strategy can be crafted for the plume that, regional water managers say, will continue growing as long as it remains in the ground, possibly flowing later toward neighborhood wells while making a huge volume of water unavailable amid a changing climate.

The Air Force publicly has promised to do more, and the state Environment Department has talked tough about stepping up enforcement. But behind the scenes, the Air Force has pressed for more relaxed requirements for monitoring and probing pollutants, and state regulators have often accommodated their requests.

Emails and regulatory documents obtained by The New Mexican show Environment Department officials overriding the agency's Hazardous Waste Bureau managers as they pushed for better data collection and more thorough sampling of contaminated groundwater and toxic soil vapors.

The plume's contaminants include ethylene dibromide — or EDB — benzene, xylene, toluene and naphthalene. Combined, they can cause an array of health effects, including dizziness, headaches, irregular heartbeat, lung and liver damage, and birth defects.

A big concern to a former bureau manager is Air Force officials refusing to set up monitoring wells to determine whether the plume is emitting hazardous vapors into the nearby U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital and the Siesta Hills subdivision north of the base.

People might be exposed to toxic vapors, or they might not, but the important thing is to find out — something Air Force leaders don't want to do, said Dave Cobrain, retired program manager for the Hazardous Waste Bureau. Cobrain says the department punished him and others who displeased the Air Force by speaking up too loudly.

"They're doing everything they can not to look," said Cobrain, who left the bureau in 2023.

Cobrain noted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has agreed the Air Force needs to do this testing for public safety.

Ryan Wortman, a Kirtland physical scientist, wrote in an email the Air Force isn't testing for vapors under the hospital or homes because there is no need to do so.

"Current sampling results confirm there is no impact to the VA hospital or adjacent neighborhoods," Wortman wrote. "In the unlikely event that future monitoring results show potential impacts to these areas, the Air Force will immediately take the necessary steps to ensure people aren't exposed to toxic vapors."

Environment Department spokesman Drew Goretska wrote in an email the agency asked the Air Force to conduct sampling in 2022 to confirm no harmful vapors were being emitted into the hospital or the neighborhood. Results showed levels well within accepted limits, Goretska wrote.

But Cobrain said the Air Force took samples at USS Bullhead Memorial Park, about a quarter-mile from the hospital, and some open fields. The bureau had asked for monitoring wells to be placed next to the hospital and in the parking lot, where truer readings could be made, but the Air Force opposed that, he said.

That vapors were detected at all in the park and the fields indicate the intrusion could be even worse than anticipated at the hospital, which is closer to the plume, Cobrain said.

"They haven't demonstrated there is no threat to the VA hospital or the neighborhoods," Cobrain said.

Unending problem

It's not known how long jet fuel spilled into the ground before contractors discovered it while overhauling infrastructure at Kirtland's bulk fuels facility in 1999.

Estimates vary widely on how much groundwater is fouled. A commonly cited amount is 24 million gallons, though the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority pegs the EDB contamination at 250 million to 350 million gallons, based on its computer modeling.

Although the plume is stable at the moment, water managers have expressed concerns about this immense amount of water being unavailable in a growing area in a state that's becoming more arid under climate change. Also, changes in water levels could make the plume spread toward residential areas or utility wells.

"The contamination plume is roughly a half a mile away from our nearest wells, so it's really important that they clean it up so that we don't have this ... risk to our supply network," said Diane Agnew, water rights program manager for the water authority.

The longer the plume stays in the ground, the more it will grow, adding to a cleanup that's already going to be very long and slow, Agnew said.

"The best-case scenario at this point is 100 years," she said.

Almost from the start, the Air Force pushed back against the state's efforts to address the expansive plume.

Environment Secretary James Kenney contends he has had to play catch-up on dealing with something that should have been taken care of years ago. Remediation sputtered under the administration of Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, he said, who served eight years before Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office.

"Under the current administration, the Environment Department is ensuring the clean-up efforts are no longer treated as a science experiment but as a regulatory-driven process with accountability," Kenney wrote in an email. "Under this approach, we have arguably accomplished more in the last few years than in the previous two decades."

Wortman, the Air Force scientist, disagreed with the statement that little progress was made in previous years.

The Air Force has prevented contaminants from spreading to where they can pollute drinking water by pumping out tainted water at the plume's edge, treating it and then injecting it deep into multiple state-regulated wells, Wortman wrote in his email.

As of July, the Air Force had treated 1.9 billion gallons and spent $130 million on the work done so far and conducted intense surveying with 323 points where groundwater is monitored and 173 wells gauging soil vapors, he wrote.

The Environment Department has signed off on everything the Air Force has done so far, Wortman wrote, including a report for the first phase of the investigation and a risk assessment that covered the groundwater treatment system.

Wortman and Kenney both said they are working on the investigation's second phase and will come up with remedies that will finally clear contamination from the site.

But Cobrain said such a rosy outlook is unrealistic.

The Air Force for years has collected flawed data on groundwater contamination and toxic vapors and has refused to probe places vital for learning the plume's scope and what's required for cleanup, he said, leaving data gaps that make it virtually impossible to get through the investigation phase and make real progress.

Kenney bashes his predecessor for lax oversight, Cobrain said, yet he and other department managers have let the Air Force slide on flawed data gleaned through deficient methods established during the Martinez administration, Cobrain said. This caused friction between the agency's leaders and some bureau employees who viewed their higher-ups as bending to pressure from the Air Force or its political allies, Cobrain said.

The conflict eventually would come to a boil.

Agency leaders accused of acquiescing

Kenney ordered the Phase 1 investigative report to be pushed through, believing it was necessary to proceed with the investigation, even though Cobrain says it was riddled with bad information and received only partial approval. Hazardous Waste Bureau managers complied but added language saying the data couldn't be relied on for decision-making, he said.

The hundreds of soil-vapor-sampling and groundwater monitoring wells that Wortman touted have made bad readings for years, Cobrain said. He and other bureau managers rejected the Air Force's work plans for that reason — and butted heads with higher-ups.

On Oct. 22, 2021, Ricardo Maestas, the acting bureau chief, drafted a rejection letter for Kirtland's vapor-sampling work plan. It contained 31 criticisms and suggestions, including the need to test for vapors under the VA hospital and nearby homes, and said the Air Force was not properly purging air from the wells, making the contamination appear lower than it is.

But unbeknownst to the bureau's managers, Chris Catechis, former acting director of the agency's Resource Protection Division, had sent a letter to Kirtland on Oct. 3 giving the go-ahead for the vapor sampling plan — without telling anyone at the bureau.

Catechis received an email from Wortman on Sept. 10 informing him the Air Force had written a draft letter Catechis could use to approve the work plan. Blindsided, Cobrain emailed Catechis questioning why he OK'd the plan and urging him to reject it. Catechis never responded. In 2022, he went to work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, an entity the agency regulated.

The Air Force's groundwater monitoring plan also proved thorny. On Nov. 8, 2022, Hazardous Waster Bureau Chief Rick Shean sent Kirtland a letter with 37 comments, rejecting the work plan.

A key problem was Kirtland never reset the wells after the groundwater had risen in recent years, Cobrain told The New Mexican. To get an accurate reading, a device must measure contaminants at the water table or surface where they're most concentrated. The detectors were now submerged and reading contaminants that were heavily diluted in the water, he said.

The Air Force asked for an extension.

Nancy Balkus, a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force, complained in a Feb. 27, 2023, email to Kenney and other officials that bureau managers were demanding new work plans that called for changes in how they do groundwater and soil vapor monitoring, and they had set hard deadlines.

"I understand the two letters seek revisions to the NMED-approved (existing) work plans that would essentially discard all groundwater and soil vapor data collected since 2015," Balkus wrote. "My team believes the HWB's [Hazardous Waste Bureau's] requested course of action would significantly delay cleanup completion, and erode community trust in both the Air Force and NMED."

Shean sent a letter on March 31, 2023, saying the Air Force could submit the plans "as soon as practicable." The letter also said the agency was withdrawing an earlier order for a plan to determine the "migration pathway" of contaminants moving from the spill area to groundwater.

Cobrain said this letter irked him and several of his colleagues.

"Soon as practicable" meant the Air Force had unlimited time with no deadline to submit the plans, he said. And not requiring the Air Force to pin down a migration pathway thwarts any real remediation effort, he said.

Simply put, if you don't know the main source of the contamination and how it's affecting groundwater, you can't do a valid investigation, let alone a cleanup, he said.

In early April 2023, Cobrain and the Hazardous Waste Bureau's Ben Wear and Lane Andress exchanged emails in which they criticized the Air Force's approach to addressing the spill and questioned why the bureau's enforcement was stifled. Wear and Andress also passed on scathing comments state officials made at a meeting about the Air Force's tactics to hinder the cleanup.

The emails were posted on the Environment Department's public website. Balkus read them and wrote an angry letter to Kenney in July 2023, pointing out the comments she found especially objectionable.

"Our senior management is not interested in enforcement or has direction from the governor's office not to enforce," Cobrain wrote in one excerpt.

In another, Wear stated he overheard discussions that certain Air Force officials had threatened to close the base if the state pushed hard for cleanup.

"I view the misinformation, personal attacks and lack of professionalism evidenced therein as extraordinary," Balkus wrote.

She argued the adversarial nature of the remarks has "played out" by the bureau directing the Air Force to come up with a work plan that disregards six years of data gleaned from groundwater monitoring.

Kenney responded on Aug. 25, 2023, with a contrite letter.

"I want to express my deep concern regarding the emails you brought to my attention," Kenney wrote. "It is disheartening to see that these emails of a few HWB employees draw inappropriate conclusions, driven by incomplete or inaccurate information and assumptions. Know that we stand ready to find opportunities to build consensus with you and your team."

Cobrain, Wear and Andress were suspended and put on paid leave. Cobrain retired; Wear and Andress were removed from the bureau and now work in different sections.

"By this time it had been recognized by NMED senior management that internal and external dysfunction had begun to guide professional judgment at this site," Goretska, the agency spokesman, wrote in the email.

As for alleged political pressure, Goretska wrote, the governor wants the agency to make progress on the cleanup that previous administrations failed to finish. The Governor's Office didn't reply to questions about whether the Air Force complained or requested that regulators be more accommodating.

Cobrain said he and his co-workers simply expressed frustration.

"The dysfunction was in his [Kenney's] office," Cobrain said. "At any point, Kenney could've let us do our jobs. They don't want people who disagree with them. So they got rid of us."

In the end, the agency set a deadline but let the Air Force stick with its same groundwater monitoring plan that wasn't working, he said. The agency is reviewing the soil vapor work plan, which might return to proper purging of air in the sampling, he said.

But they won't test for vapors at the VA Hospital, neighborhoods or underground pipelines through which the toxic fumes could flow, he said. And there are no plans to ascertain how contamination is moving from the fuel spill area to the groundwater, which he said could delay cleanup indefinitely.

"If you don't clean up the source, it's a forever problem," Cobrain said.