Those who live in the San Bernardino area are curious as to the subtext of the police department’s application to obtain state funding to cover the cost of enforcing prohibitions on illegal off-road vehicle use both at the city’s periphery and within its more central and largely undeveloped areas falling within city limits.
Some believe the city wants the money to cover the cost of its vigilance with regard to some World War II-era metallurgical facilities that may yet contain material or equipment used in the designing and construction of the United States’ first generation atomic weaponry which may be vulnerable to vandalism or theft by individuals or entities inimical to the public interest.
Additionally, the patrols may prevent dirt bikers and other off-roaders from inadvertently coming upon spots where runoff from the San Bernardino International Airport – the former Norton Air Force Base – has left deposits of contamination from legacy atomic and early thermonuclear weaponry that may be extremely hazardous to their health.
San Bernardino’s atomic history, once well-known among a small circle, has since been forgotten and purposefully obscured.
Among the scientists working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico were Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Harry Daghlian, Robert Serber, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and Edwin McMillan. All were involved in both theoretical and practical work. Even before the laboratory was established in Los Alamos in April 1943, skeptics within the U.S. Government and military were demanding of the scientists involved “proof of concept” in an effort to prevent the squandering of money on a technology that ultimately would not work. Accordingly, early on, Enrico Fermi, a physicist who had established his credentials at the University of Milan by developing theories with regard to subatomic particles in the 1920s and achieved a Nobel Prize in the 1930s for his work relating to the creation, or at least discovery, of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation followed by theoretical and foundational experimentation with regard to nuclear chain reactions, began making frequent trips to San Bernardino. Fermi, who had coordinated, in conjunction with Arthur Compton, triggering the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in 1942 at the University of Chicago, was deeply involved in the verification of the theories and processes that ultimately led to the development of the first atomic bomb, exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 and the second, dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on August 6, 1945 and the third, exploded above Nagasaki in Japan on August 9, 1945.
In San Bernardino, sections of the Shandin Hills were honeycombed, and a metallurgical facility was established there.
Accompanying that project, Culligan Z-Light established a water purifying plant close by and the Ethyl Corporation, which had been successful in formulating tetra-ethyl lead used in gasoline, built a plant at which it manufactured a type of specialized plastic pipe. The highly purified water and the plastic pipe, which was not vulnerable to corrosion by uranium hexafluoride, were necessary in the uranium extraction and enrichment process.
Uranium ore, mined in the Mojave Desert as well as in the San Bernardino Mountains, was crushed in large conical crushers brought in to San Bernardino for that purpose. Following the crushing, different types of separation processes to pull the uranium metal out of the ore were used. One of those was to add the purified water to the rocks and then subject the slurry to a gravity concentration process to get the heavier metal particles to separate or drop out from the sandstone or granite. Also used were centrifuges and calutrons to electromagnetically perform the separation, whereupon the uranium was liberated from any accompanying metals and placed onto an existing uranium substrate using an electroplating process.
Fermi was engaged in this effort throughout 1943 while he was working on the X-10 graphite reactor at Oakridge, Tennessee and later that year and into 1944 while he was awork on constructing and testing the B reactor at the government facility in Hanford, Washington.
Even after July 1944, when Dr. Fermi was installed at Los Alamos in a role overseeing both development and production of key atomic weapon components there, he continued to return to San Bernardino on a weekly or biweekly basis, flying in late on Fridays and leaving on Sundays. In short order, a cover story was developed in which it was disseminated that Dr. Fermi was relaxing in San Bernardino on the weekends by visiting with several of his students who had studied under him at the University of Milan in the early 1930s who were at that time prisoners of war at Camp Ono, located roughly four miles northwest of San Bernardino.
The metallurgical facilities were were closed out shortly after the end of the war. The dirt roads that led to the facilities were in several spots blocked off with boulders, rendering them virtually impassible. The shuttered facilities, with their 18 foot high and 35-foot wide two-foot thick metal entrances were sealed off.
Meanwhile, in the run-up to the war and shortly thereafter, what was once the San Bernardino Municipal Airport had been transformed, by 1942, into an Army Air Corps base known initially as San Bernardino Army Air Field and/or the San Bernardino Air Depot and eventually as Norton Air Force Base.
Over the years, the base had multiple missions, some of which were acknowledged by the Air Force and the Department of Defense and others which were not acknowledged. As the Headquarters Air Defense Command for Southern California, it was widely known but not confirmed that the base had atomic and nuclear missions and hosted atomic and nuclear weapons. It is also known that Norton housed specialized long-range aircraft utilized to monitor the United States’ potential enemies and its allies’ development of atomic and nuclear weapons. The planes, carrying sensors and collectors, were flown into the nuclear cloud above test detonation sites, accumulating data and physical evidence which upon analysis could provide the U.S. military with an accurate estimate/assessment of the weaponry involved in those testing exercises, their make-up, power – kilo-tonnage or mega-tonnage – and the constituents, or many of them, meaning atomic isotopes, that went into the warheads.
To verify the accuracy of this capability and refine it further, the planes at Norton were also used in practice runs in which they overflew atomic and nuclear detonations made by the Air Force, Army, Navy or Department of defense at their testing ranges and testing grounds, whereupon they would return to Norton where the analysis the testing team did and the conclusions it reached with regards to the nature of the armament detonated was extrapolated from the telltale evidence contained in the mushroom cloud above such explosions and was compared to the known actuality of the weaponry that had been test fired.
Norton had a “hot wash” facility, at which the planes, after returning from their missions, were showered with high-pressure water to remove any nuclear debris from their outer sides, particles of which might conceivably have found their way into the aircraft or the tarmac or the area around which they were parked, potentially harming the airmen who might come into contact with it. The water from the hot wash, however, was not directed into an industrial sewer but either permeated the tarmac into the ground beneath it, evaporated or made its way to a wash that led off the base property. That wash leads to a rivulet which is a tributary to the Santa Ana River.
As early as 1989, former airmen Jeff Wright and Frank Vera were exploring the areas at the periphery of Norton, performing radiological surveys using Geiger counters, encountering in multiple areas gamma radiation radically higher than background emanations.
In one infamous incident, Wright was arrested when he grew persistent in seeking to provide documentation to San Bernardino County governmental officials showing the presence of plutonium detected in a stormdrain proximate to the Air Force Base.
Analyses of contaminants in the wash between the base and the Santa Ana River showed the presence of enriched uranium, plutonium and polonium-210. Uranium and plutonium were the fissile materials used in early atomic bombs developed by the United States. Polonium-210 was used in the initiators in legacy nuclear weapons used by the Air Force in the 1940s and 1950s and was later used as a power source in surveillance satellites put into orbit by the Air Force, NASA, the National Security Agency and the CIA. Uranium, plutonium and polonium are extremely toxic. If ingested or inhaled, all three can cause severe damage to internal organs, with as little as the amount that would be present in a particle of dust being lethal.
In 1994, Norton Air Force Base was shuttered by the Department of Defense, prompting the formation of the Inland Valley Development Authority (IVDA) and the San Bernardino International Airport Authority (SBIAA), joint powers authorities which originally involved the County of San Bernardino and the cities of San Bernardino, Colton, Highland, Redlands, Loma Linda and Grand Terrace, which were dedicated to converting the property around the base and the base itself to civilian use. Ultimately, Redlands and Grand Terrace withdrew from those efforts. A prolonged effort to convert the base’s runway and concourse into a civilian use airport and to convert existing base structures or one newly constructed into a terminal for the airport ensued. Other efforts to attract aeronautical or industrial related users to the facility were made.
One misstep that occurred during that process took place when the San Bernardino Police Department established a satellite station at a facility on the former air base property in 1995. In a relatively short order, a shocking number of the officers working out of that facility developed extremely aggressive cancers beginning late that year and throughout 1996 and into 1997, many of which were reportedly fatal. The police department in 1997 closed out the station.
With its 223,728 residents, San Bernardino has the largest population of any of the county’s cities. Nevertheless, with 59.6 square miles within its borders and another approximate 2.4 miles within its sphere of influence, San Bernardino is located near the base of the San Bernardino Mountains, essentially between Cajon Canyon to the west and the more distant Seven Oaks Canyon to the east, both of which form the headwaters of the Santa Ana River, which wends its way though San Bernardino County, Riverside County and Orange County to the Pacific Ocean. In this way, San Bernardino was built on multiple washes, arroyos, riverbeds and rivulets which serve as tributaries to the river. Some 18 square miles of the city’s topography remains in large measure in its natural state as chaparral and scrub brush covered foothills that is undeveloped or underdeveloped with occasional flood control channels crossing it.
The San Bernardino Police Department has already developed an off-highway vehicle enforcement team, consisting of six officers, a single detective, a supervising sergeant and an administrative analyst who are currently devoted part-time to patrolling and enforcement/investigative action in the Santa Ana riverbed areas around the city. The department has a few motorcycles that can engage in off-highway patrols, as well as two four-wheel-drive Can-Am Maverick R.S. off-road patrol vehicles.
At present, the off-highway vehicle (OHV) enforcement team is most often used during those times when the civilian population is itself likely to be engaged in off-highway use, such as week-ends and holidays, although occasional patrols take place during weekdays or in response to reports phoned in from citizens.
While not all off-highway vehicle use is strictly illegal, much or most of travel onto private property or the wildlands contained within San Bernardino’s city limits is unauthorized and in many cases illegal or technically illegal.
Environmentalists, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the California Department of State Parks all have a common interest in preserving the natural habitat of native, in particular threatened or endangered, species. Since 1974, California State Parks has conducted a grant program to assist local agencies in combating illegal off-road use and the environmental damage therefrom, and has distributed over $833 million to California municipalities through an application process coordinated and administered by the California State Parks’ Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division.
The San Bernardino Police Department has applied for a $62,000 grant from the California State Parks’ Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division to carry out an enhanced version of its current enforcement efforts, one that will entail an overall cost of $83,000. In the application, the department said the city will make up the $21,000 difference.
The city’s grant proposal states that “The San Bernardino Patrol and Enforcement OHV Operations Project will conduct patrol operations to address unauthorized off-highway vehicle activity within the city.” The application references “a significant increase in service calls” which have proven to be a burden on a department that, according to the city, already has overtaxed resources. “Based on officer observations and information provided by the San Bernardino County Code Enforcement officers, there are many incidents of illegal riding resulting in damage to the Santa Ana River wash and other high priority riverbed areas.”
According to the grant application, the riverbed is vulnerable to approach from multiple places as “Some enthusiasts access the OHV areas throughout the city by public roadways and often trespass on private lands while riding closed OHV trail systems.”
The $62,000 will be applied to provide for stepped up patrols and maintenance of the department’s off-road vehicles. The increase in patrols will result, it is hoped, in reductions in environmental damage in sensitive ecological areas as well as destruction of private property that exists in the areas in question.
The application, which is now under review by the state, makes no mention of the atomic or nuclear contamination of the wildlands near the Shandin Hills nor the wash between the former Air Force base and the river.
-Mark Gutglueck