The facts go back a long way. During World War II, the federal government leased and later expanded the Chino Airport for wartime operations, including the dismantling and melting of surplus aircraft into ingots. Those activities generated significant industrial waste that was discharged into the ground. In the 1960s and 70s, during the Vietnam War, tenants at the Airport 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 drinking water downgradient of the site with hazardous levels of trichloroethylene and ordered the County to investigate and clean up the contamination. The County has been at it ever since – drilling and sampling over 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. The costs keep mounting.
