Is Johnston Island Still Contaminated?
Exerpt from conversation with Steve Palmer - USAF Employee overseeing johnston island environmental cleanup
The following is provided by Steve Palmer. Be sure to subscribe to his youtube channel to see great videos taken from Johnston Island
Okay. So, the history of the island, you know, from what I understand, and and I'd love to kind of maybe hear your side of it. You know, what is it? Late 1800s, then, you know, 1930s, then through World War II. Um, then it really kind of started picking up steam, and then, you know, obviously the 50s was hitting the the nuclear testing really hard. Then, you know, through the 60s was kind of cleaning some of that up, or maybe not so much. Um then you kind of had the the Agent Orange period in the 70s post Vietnam. Then it was kind of the you know the chemical warfare type stuff, biological warfare type stuff where it was JADS uh dismantling and and kind of incinerating all that and then current state. So when you say remediation, I guess that kind of implies that there's still quite a bit of things to remediate.
There's actually not a lot really. The the heavy lift lifting for almost all of our restoration sites around the Air Force was done in the the 90s and the early 2000s. And now what we're at is just mostly just monitoring. Um, some places we've got systems that are still trying to clean up some things that just take a long time. And that's the thing about environmental remediation is you can do it quickly or you can do it cheaply. And both are effective, but uh, you know, the the government doesn't have unlimited money. when there's the option of we can spend $50 million and clean it up in a year or we can spend a million and a half and just let it clean itself up for 30 years and then it's good. You get the same results. It just takes longer. So, you know, they're going to go with the cheaper uh the cheaper option like that.
And uh place like Johnston where there aren't any people, you know, it's kind of a no-brainer for them.
But they did they did get all the uh the really nasty stuff um cleaned up there. Um uh you want to you want to go back in the history and give a quick high level give me you want me to give you a quick high level overview of I know how it how it goes
Yeah. Well, prior to the second half of the 1800s, there wasn't nobody went to Johnston. It was a lot smaller than it is now, only about 46 acres. And Sand Island was a couple acres and that was it. And nobody went there. Primary reason was there was no water. So, you know, a lot of these little islands, you know, the Pacific Islanders knew of them, but they almost never went to them.
And Johnson was one of those. There was no reason for them to go. But once the guano act was put into place in the late 1800s and America said, "Hey, you know, we really need this guano, so we're going to let our people go out and and claim these islands." Basically, like, you know, staking a gold claim. and uh they would mine the guano and ship it back to the states for chemical manufacturing. So they did that with with limited success on Johnston. Um the birds have always been there. They love it. It's like the only land in about 7 to 800 miles of open ocean. So always been a lot of birds there. So they mined that for a while. uh they had a small that kind of petered out and then they then they went after the birds for a little bit uh poaching the birds for feathers and stuff and then in 23 uh the government you know officially said you know all right this this is definitely ours.
Our folks claimed it back in the 1800s and now we're going to do a bird sanctuary with it. So, it was turned over to the Department of Agriculture to uh run as a bird sanctuary. They didn't have any boats to get out there. So, they kind of said, "Hey, Navy, would you kind of run this for us? Would you monitor this for us?" And the Navy said, "Yeah, we'll do that." And, "Oh, by the way, this is a pretty decent lagoon. We're going to build a sea plane base here." And uh everybody was like, "Yeah, cool. We'll do that." So, they started increasing the size of Johnston. They blew up all the coral heads kind of in the middle of the lagoon. So they did in all the atoles wake had that as well. They just, you know, they they wanted like 10 ft of depth and so everything above that they they blew it up. And so then they started building uh they had some they had the seaplane base, they had a a cable station, uh some communication stuff and uh they most of it was actually on Sand Island.
Sand Island kind of ended up in World War II is it's called described as just you know Sand Island being covered completely covered with buildings. Uh and they were getting there on Johnston the main one. They were getting stuff built there. They had a big fuel dump there and uh after World War II they kind of left Sand Island to the Coast Guard and all the the Army Air Force mission moved over to Johnston. Johnston was attacked once during World War II. The Navy destroyer showed up one night and uh proceeded to bombard the place. Uh they knocked down an antenna tower uh you know knocked down a couple buildings, declared complete victory and went on their way and never came back. Johnston folks there, nobody was hurt. They set up the antenna and uh went on life as normal. After the war, they started using it as a stopover refueling point. And uh then in the 50s, that's when they kind of started going like, "Hey, this we could we could uh use this for the nuclear program. We can we can do missile launches. We can watch missile launches. We could do the do some here. We can do all kinds of testing." And so it wasn't until the very early 60s that they actually did some tests. And if I recall correctly, they did four of them. Um, and uh, only one of them was actually successful. Um, and then one was mostly successful. They they uh, had to blow that one up like way way down range. And then the other two, one of them blew up at like 30,000 ft over the island. uh we'd have to check the documents and see what the actual numbers were for that. And then the last one blew up on the launchpad and after that they're like, "Okay, let's maybe we should do this somewhere else." So they cleaned up at the time they gathered up all the plutonium from off the island and they gathered up a fair amount of it from the lagoon as well, as much as they could find.
And so they kind of that was kind of a mess for a little bit. So, you talk to the folks that were there in the 60s and they've got, you know, they're the ones that have got the the story about, oh yeah, we were going to, you know, we had to have radiation this and that and all this training and drills and everything, but uh it really was cleaned up pretty quickly such that it wasn't a factor for folks as long as you were outside of the disposal area. And they ended up burying that in what they uh lovingly called Mount Pluto. Uh they buried all the plutonium debris, all the all the stuff from the landing sites, they buried it and then put the two feet of gravel on top of it and called it good. Now to jump ahead a little bit, when I went in 2024, the team I went with, they were concerned about that. Everybody that hears about it is. and they brought doceimeters, they brought geiger counters and the whole time we were there they reg registered nothing above background radiation.
So uh current status the radiation is not an issue not a factor. Just don't dig in that landfill and you'll be just fine. So following the the nuclear mission, they still used it for observation launch uh observing missile launches out of Lake Quadrilene for example. Uh they still used it for observation, for telemetry, all that kind of stuff. And uh interestingly enough, the jock, have you seen the videos with the jock?
Seth Brees: Um, I don't think I've seen that video Yeah.
Okay, I've got one video of the jock that's still up. Um they I took down one. I need to re-edit it to get all the people out. Uh and uh but up on the roof there's two main observation points or rooms and they actually the rooms one of them opens up like a clamshell and the other one the whole roof just slides off to the side so that you can get a view of the sky and then when you don't need it the instruments are all protected. That's pretty cool.
Um, my my personal channel is Around the World with Sally and James. And if you look at that one, uh, you'll see I've got a playlist of all my Johnston stuff, all my Wake stuff. So, you can see what we had in 2021 and 2024.
Seth Brees: Yeah, I started watching some of those. It's really cool. You were walking around the island and the old um ammunition dumps, you know, they have these gigantic cinder blocks in front of them and you're just kind of making sure that everything's still shut. Um I imagine there's absolutely nothing in them. But it's interesting to hear your stories about Pluto Beach, right? Because when I talk to these people, they all kind of wonder if their health issues are related to their time on the island.
Quite possibly. Um, Pluto Beach and Mount Pluto are two different spots.
Seth Brees: Okay.
Pluto, the beach on the lagoon that's it's a couple hundred yards down from where Mount Pluto is. Um, but that's why they called it there because it was near there. Um, so after after the uh uh you know the nuclear stuff, that's when they get into the one that really I think I think personally is causing people problems and that's the agent orange. And uh in I think it was 74 uh all the Agent Orange was stored on Okinawa and they had an accident that's still there and the Japanese said you got to get this stuff out of here. So they sent it all to Johnston and they stacked it all up. They just kind of stacked all the drums up, had them all laid out in a big storage yard out in the open, exposed to the the tropical weather, and steel drums don't do so well under those conditions. Uh they got a Dutch ship, uh the Volcanis, was uh kind of designed to burn that stuff, dispose of it. So they got that got permission from the Dutch to use it. So they sailed it out to Johnston and in 70 I want to say it was 76 they started disposing of it and it took about a year I think to burn it all.
They would load up the boat with the drums of Agent Orange, sail it out 10, 12, 15 miles, burn it and then sail back. Well, when they went to load the boat, there was a number of drums that were empty because they had rusted holes in them and it had all drained out into the island. U there was a couple I hear that uh you know they were loading them they dropped them so they were in the lagoon just 55gallon drums of Agent Orange delightful. Uh so there was a fairly significant release of Agent Orange into the environment at that point. So following the agent orange then in the 80s I believe it was they started storing maybe even before they started storing chemical weapons there and that's the Red Hat bunkers and uh that's what you see in the in my inspection video is about half of them in there. There's like another twice as many that I didn't go and inspect. And so they stored them there. They had BX gas there, chemical weapons, biological weapons, all the nasty stuff.
And that's why the folks had to wear the gas mask in case there was an accident with those in case there was a leak. And to my knowledge, there never was. That was that was there that was all safely handled. Um, but that may be, you know, it's it's possible that someone else knows that whether or not there was, but none of my documentation that I've got lists anything like that, just the Agent Orange one. So, they stored it there for a while and then in the late 90s they well early 90s they started building it. the Johnston ATL Chemical Ammunition Destruction. What does the S stand for? Something like that. Destruction site. Uh let me look here real quick. See if I can figure out what JCADs is. Uh so JCADS is what they called it. And it was to destroy chemical weapons. And it was, you know, the the governments of the world decided that chemical weapons were not the way to go. So, we're going to get rid of them all, which was, you know, that was a good idea.
Uh, they built a state-of-the-art facility. Uh, Johnson's whole chemical agent disposal system, that's what JCAD stands for. So they did a uh it was state-of-the-art and for all the different munitions they processed them appropriate for to render them nerd and they worked through the whole stockpile of that and they finished in the early 2000s and at that point that was pretty much the only military mission left on Johnston. Uh so the military air force the air force was in was the in control of it at that point and uh the army's like hey you know once we're done with this we don't need it we're going to leave and the air force said well we don't have a mission for it so we're going to leave too and they decided that they would dispose of well no they they uh they're like okay we don't need it let's see if there's any other takers in the government Great. And the only ones that really wanted it were the Department of Interior who said, "Yeah, hey, we, you know, we'd love to have it back for our birds. We want the birds to go back with it." And they did some negotiations and they decided, "Okay, we're going to demolish everything but about 10 buildings that the fish and wildlife wanted to use when they were when they were out there." So, they start working up their plans and then it comes along and they're like, "Oh, hey, by the way, we have these um we have these restoration sites that are still contaminated that you're going to have to monitor. You know, you take over the island, you're going to have to monitor it. You're going to have to to do any of the the lasting restoration cleanups." And at that point, Fish and Wildlife Department of the Interior says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't want that. You can keep it. And so the transfer never happened and the Air Force kept it. I did hear at one point that it ended up on on like a military surplus sale site for a very brief time where they tried to to uh sell it off as surplus property.
And then I think when it came to light with the uh environmental cleanup that was still there, um they took it off and they're like, "No, we're not going to do that. We'll just hang on to it." So that's where we are now. Uh in 2004, they took down everything but the jock and the tide station shed. Um they left the bunkers. So, you know, people hear that everything was removed. The igloo bunkers were not. they stayed um just because it was too much. And there was also another bunker building 790 that was like, you know, two foot reinforced concrete walls that they're like, we're going to leave this too, you know, taking that down. But everything else was taken down and the Air Force had a uh construction rubble disposal areas that they put it all into. And for the main one for the Air Force was where the golf course stood. They dug up the golf course. They put all the building debris in it. Then they put dirt back on it.
The army was responsible for removing the JCATs, all the buildings on the JCATs Peninsula. They didn't bury it. They stuffed it in the bunkers. So that's what's in the that I was inspecting is the debris from the JCAT system. It's clean. Uh it may have a small amount of asbestous. Um, but everything else was supposed to have been removed. All the PCBs were supposed to be removed. Um, well, lead paint, it's still got that. So, it's got a small amount of nonfryable asbestous, which is the, you know, the stuff that's not broken up. It's unless you break it up, it's not going to hurt you. And lead paint. And, uh, yeah, they put those in all those bunkers there. And then they didn't weld them shut. They just put those big concrete blocks in front of them. and uh called it good. So, one of the things I was inspecting in 2021 or my team was looking at was is anything is any lead leeching out of these construction rubble disposal areas um from all the lead paint that was left there.
And for most of them, the answer was a definitive no. There was a couple of them on the North Island, for example. We couldn't get we couldn't get enough water to we couldn't get enough water to reliably sample. So, we got to go back on our next trip. We're going to try to devise another another test to uh figure out for certain. And I don't think it is. U because none of the others have. They've all been coming back lead free. Um so that's where we're at now. are we've got the uh uh over by where the agent orange stuff was. They dug up and removed a lot of the soil uh such that the island is considered clean now. Uh and what we're still monitoring is the sediment and the groundwater in the lagoon right at that point. Uh we've actually there's it's pretty close to being declared cleaned up there. the levels that we measured last time were slightly above what the EPA allows for the stuff we were testing with.
So, so it's it's good over there. The cleanups have been effective and it just it just needs a little more time and it will be cleaned up and uh that spot will be back to normal. We've got the it's kind of the the mixed metal disposal area they called it. And that's where they disposed of a lot of ash. Um a lot of lead, a lot of other burned metals and put it there, made a big acre landfill, buried it all. Um we go and inspect that every five years. So far, nothing's leaking out of that. Um, and it's it it should hold that one. You know, I don't have any concerns about that one either. Um, over in the uh the main area east of the Navy Pier between the Navy Pier and the uh the commander's house, that section had some pretty significant fuel spills back in the from, you know, the early days. you know, they didn't concern themselves that the fuel tank was dripping. They just let it just let it do what it did.
And, you know, then again, we realized, hey, you know, we've got six inches of fuel sitting on top of the groundwater. That's not good. So, they did some big things there. They had some some systems pumping up the groundwater, slurping off the fuel, and uh cleaning it out. And uh that's at the point now where again we're just kind of monitoring it. We've removed all the free product. There's no oil floating on top of the the water anymore, the groundwater. There's some in the lagoon sediment still that hasn't uh been broken down. Um but it's heading in the right direction. and other ones are so everything else that we had had been closed down and closed out. It all met the the EPA's requirements for our permit and uh they signed off on it. So, we still go monitor those. Oh, and there is one the old tank farm from World War II is in the middle where the swimming pool is. Yeah. And there was a lot of tanks and Yeah.
There was more leakage there. So again, there's no free product in there. We're monitoring it to make sure it's it's degrading as as it should and it is, but we're not uh you know the actual timeline of when that's going to be all cleaned and it can be closed out. I don't know what that'll do. It kind of depends on on the weather on the bacteria that are grow there. But uh important part of this is the the levels are being reduced.