OBX: Local leaders urge government to remove former Navy base, leaving behind pollution

BUXTON, N.C. — Built back in 1956 to detect submarines, Naval Station Cape Hatteras could be seen near the old site of the lighthouse. It is believed to the be the first site to detect a Soviet submarine.

After being turned over to the Coast Guard in the 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to get rid of Building 19. They signed an agreement to take out the entire foundation, but parts of it are still poking out of the beach.

Chunks of the building, large cables, septic drain pipes and metal pipes — some are testing positive for petroleum, according to the National Park Service. They seem to be leaking into the ocean, with surfers reporting an oily sheen on their wet suits when they come out of the water. Storms will occasionally cover up the old Navy site with sand, but it repeatedly emerges.

“This isn’t anything new,” said Carol Busbey of Buxton. “It comes and goes and it comes and goes.”

Living and surfing the Outer Banks for more than 40 years, Busbey has seen this poke out of the sand many times. Years later, it has yet to be removed.

“I come down here almost every day and I pick the trash up off the beach almost every time,” Busbey said, “and I just wish somebody else would do it too.”

Colin Kreutzberg, a surfer visiting from New Jersey, was disappointed to see the stretch of beach closed off because of the old base.

“Not as many developed areas, no skyscrapers, nothing like that that you might see in the distance in New Jersey,” he said, describing why he loves the Outer Banks. “So when you come here, you kind of expect it to be kind of like a safe haven.”

The stretch of beach closed last September and is now about three-tenths of a mile long.

State Park Superintendent Dave Hallac laid out the deeply rooted history of the base to county commissioners, telling them that “we had no idea it was here.”

It used to be a 50-acre site with about 100 workers and several buildings. Thick cables went into the water, used to detect Soviet subs. Such cabling is still seen there today, along with the rest of the abandoned site. Dare County Commission Chairman Bob Woodard took a trip to D.C. to speak with lawmakers about the base and its pollution.

“Without any successes whatsoever of taking ownership of this,” Woodard said, “it’s clearly a federal government problem and the federal government is not responding.”

Woodard is especially worried about how this might impact the local tourism industry.

“We’re actually having people have second thoughts about coming down for a vacation,” Woodard said.

The Navy base was not nearly as close to the water when it was built. A common theme along the Outer Banks — decades of erosion bringing the Atlantic closer to Building 19, exposing what is left behind.

“It’s been eroding … since people were occupying the area,” Dave Hallac told 10 On Your Side. “And it makes the management of anything along the shoreline here really challenging. … We’re urging the branches of the military that use this site and are involved in remediation or restoration of the site to remove all of the historic building infrastructure.”

The Navy turned the base over to the Coast Guard in the 1980s. Since then, the Army Corps agreed to remediate Department of Defense sites used before 1986, according to Hallac. The Corps removed thousands of tons of petroleum contaminated soil in the early 2000s.

Since the beach closure in September, the Corps took samples from the site to figure out where the contamination is coming from. They are expecting results in June.

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