The facts are very old. During World War II, the federal government leased and later expanded Chino Airport for wartime operations, including dismantling and melting surplus aircraft into ingots. Those activities generated significant industrial waste which was discharged into the ground. In the 1960s and 70s, during the Vietnam War, the airport’s tenants produced napalm, bombs, and other incendiary devices for sale to the federal government. In 1990, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board determined that decades of industrial activity had contaminated the site’s drinking water downgradient with dangerous levels of trichlorethylene and ordered the county to investigate and clean up the contamination. The county has been working on it ever since – drilling and sampling more than 280 soil borings, installing seventy-five groundwater monitoring wells, removing underground storage tanks and hundreds of drums of hazardous waste and napalm, and conducting ongoing remediation. Costs keep increasing.
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