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During the public meeting at the Fessenden Center in Buxton Nov. 4, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District, invited the attendees to take a survey to gauge interest in establishing a Restoration Advisory Board for the Buxton Naval Facility, a Formerly Used Defense Sites property located within Cape Hatteras National Seashore, states a media release from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District.

To take the public interest survey, go to surveymonkey.com/r/buxtonpublicinterestsurvey. The deadline for submission is Dec. 4, 2024.

About 60 community members attended the Nov. 4 meeting.

During the meeting, the Savannah District’s commander and team members provided a brief overview about the ongoing response actions at the Buxton property. A presentation about establishing a Restoration Advisory Board was made.

After the presentation, the open house began, offering audience members an opportunity to meet the District’s team and other agency representatives.

The media release describes a Restoration Advisory Board as a stakeholder advisory group that meets regularly to discuss environmental restoration at Department of Defense sites, such as the Buxton Naval Facility property. These meetings are designed to bring the community together, in a more formal and structured manner than a typical public meeting, to enable exchange of restoration information among regulatory agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and interested community members. While advisory board members can influence the cleanup decisions through discussions of ideas, concerns, questions, and providing direct feedback to the Corps of Engineers and regulatory agencies, the Advisory Board is not a decision-making group.

A Restoration Advisory Handbook is available from the Corps of Engineers.

If it is determined a Restoration Advisory Board will be established, then the Army Corps of Engineers will select co-chairs, one from within Corps of Engineers and one from the community. The Corps of Engineers co-chair will create a selection panel from the regulatory community and key local government officials to nominate a diverse group of individuals from the community for board membership.

The former Buxton Naval Facility encompasses about 50 acres the U.S. Navy used as a submarine monitoring station from February 1956 until June 1982. Since 1989, the Army Corps of Engineers has performed various environmental restoration projects at the property and monitoring groundwater, primarily where the Navy had underground and above ground petroleum storage tanks. To learn about the projects at the Buxton Naval Facility property, go to sas.usace.army.mil/Missions/Formerly-Used-Defense-Sites/Buxton-Naval-Facility.

As for the current response actions associated with petroleum, from September 2023 to August 2024, reports of petroleum, sheen and odors at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore FUDS property were sporadic. The Savannah District sent teams to the FUDS property in September, October, November and December 2023, as well as February, May and June 2024, to collect soil samples, perform borings, dig test pits, take air samples, excavate soil to investigate the potential presence of an underground tank, remove a suspect pipe, perform geophysical work, and inspect beach conditions.

After a significant erosion event in September 2024 that produced petroleum sheens on the beach, the Savannah District team developed a two-phase response plan and initiated the ongoing phased response actions.

As part of the first phase, a Corps of Engineers team arrived on-site Sept. 11, 2024, to mitigate any petroleum release into the ocean and performed a test pit investigation to better define the extent of petroleum-impacted soil. While the team was on-site, no active petroleum releases were identified. The second phase is currently ongoing and involves identifying and removing petroleum-impacted soil in the subsurface and performing confirmatory soil sampling in areas along the beach and dunes.

While the primary purpose of the ongoing response action is to remove petroleum-impacted soil, some of the remnant infrastructures that impede excavation access to the petroleum-impacted soil have been removed, too. The team began excavations Oct. 2, 2024. So far, removal of 1,442 cubic yards, 24,126 gallons of petroleum-impacted soil and water, about 138,400 pounds of concrete, 1,153 feet of pipes and 1,088 feet of metal cables and wires has occurred.

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