Following months of speculation, officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week dispelled rumors that Malibu High School was once used as a military defense site.
“The results of the five-month investigation find that there were no military installations where [Malibu High School and Juan Cabrillo Elementary School] are located in Malibu,” said Jerry Vincent, chief of the formerly used defense site program for the Army Corps branch in Sacramento.
The Army Corps launched an investigation into claims made by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in February, when attorneys wrote a letter to Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) on behalf of a concerned group of Malibu High/Juan Cabrillo school teachers asking for a thorough site assessment of the campus.
Citing historic WWII accounts that include Malibu as an active military area, they believed the schools could have been constructed on a formerly used defense site.
“Based upon published reports and interviews with long-time residents who were present during those years, it appears that the U.S. Army opened a training center in the area and fenced off much of the coastal area,” PEER leaders wrote in February.
Malibu High, Middle School and Juan Cabrillo Elementary have been the subject of severe environmental scrutiny since last October when 20 teachers came forward with several health concerns, including three suffering from thyroid cancer. It was later revealed that building materials and soil contained elevated levels of human carcinogens known as PCBs, and that the contaminated soil was removed from the school quad in 2011 without the school district notifying parents. It’s unknown if the cancer and contamination are linked.
Bolling W. Smith, an archivist with the Coast Defense Study Group (CDSG), assists with preservation, documentation and interpretation of coastal historical defense sites. Smith helped research and prepare a report on the history of military installations in Malibu after the Army Corps opened its official investigation in February. He said he searched archives of each service branch of the military looking for any new or existing documentation through photos, books, declassified letters, newspaper clippings, eye-witness documented accounts and every other available source that could verify the military was based on or near the campus site.
“I found nothing near the school,” Smith told The Malibu Times. “It would be a bit embarrassing if [the Army Corps] tried to hide something, and then at a later date, it showed up in an archive.”
The report is available as a PDF at left.
Paula Dinerstein, senior counsel of PEER who works with advocacy groups in energy and environmental matters, said formerly used defense sites are known to leave toxic substances behind which could explain some of the health problems revealed by teachers at the school. PEER cites that chemical substances from munitions or other military uses could potentially explain the thyroid cancers reported by three teachers at MHS since PCBs alone are not generally linked to those types of cancer.
When told of the Army Corps’ conclusion in the investigation, Dinerstein remained skeptical.
“I don’t know what to say about the statement [from the Army Corps] but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t an active area,” Dinerstein told The Malibu Times. “We would like to see a grid over all the schools and test every part of them.”
Vincent said there are thousands of formerly used defense sites across the US. They go through an extensive validation process and do detailed record searches and analysis to find these sites.
And while the area Malibu High is situated on may not have been a military site, there are plenty of other sites in Malibu once occupied by the armed forces during wartime.
Declassified historical documents and eyewitness accounts support the belief that Malibu had a military presence during and after WWII. Radar stations, artillery training and firing depots, high frequency signal stations and US Coast Guard beach patrols are installations that have been identified at Point Dume and a Nike missile site was set up in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu.
However, Smith believes the sites would not have left any contamination behind.
“They didn’t have the need for large amounts of chemicals for these types of military operations,” said Smith. “Plus, we did not use depleted uranium ammunition in WWII.”
Sam Stokes, one of the founding members of the Fort MacArthur Military Museum agreed with Smith.
“Everything was in trailers and was temporary, so when they [military] left, they removed everything. Most of what was stored was stored above ground,” Stokes said.