There’s a certain amount of trial and error for the crews working to rid Camp Bonneville of the U.S. Army munitions that lay below the earth’s surface. In some cases, there’s been more error than trial.
But after a year of successful digging and clearing potentially explosive munitions at the former Army training site, Clark County engineer Jerry Barnett said cleanup efforts are “finally going very well.”
“Right now, everything is going very smoothly,” Barnett said of the nearly decade-old project.
The past year has been marked by major steps forward in the cleanup of the 3,840-acre site about 6 miles north of Camas, which is funded entirely by the U.S. Army but overseen by Clark County.
Under Barnett’s leadership, crews from Weston Solutions have adopted a new and more thorough system for seeking the buried munitions. Crews have divided the site into 100-foot squares, clearing the area before moving onto the next one. The Army, county and the state then do a quality-control check to ensure every shell has been removed.
“These guys haven’t failed a grid since they moved to this method,” Barnett said.
Crews also reached the halfway point of Phase 1 of the project, which covers what is known as the central valley floor along the LaCamas Valley Creek. That section is likely to be among the most munitions-laden of the four-phase project, as it was the main area Army trainees shot toward. In some cases, Barnett says, it looks like trainees indiscriminately “picked a stump and shot at it.”
There remains some uncertainty about the future of the project, namely how long it will take and how much it will cost. Current estimates put completion of the cleanup around 2019. Eventually, Clark County plans to build a park on the property.
In May, the Army gave the county an additional $4.84 million for the project’s second phase, increasing the overall budget from about $16.68 million to $21.52 million. Bill O’Donnell, a civilian branch chief overseeing the cleanup for the Army, said the budget may change depending on what cleanup crews find.
“In some cases we have to go back to the trough to get a little more funding because we’ve found that the stuff out there is a little more than what we had anticipated,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell also had praise for the current cleanup efforts.
“This is going to get done and it will be done well,” he said. “Clark County is doing an outstanding job of managing the project.”
The project has faced some interruptions in the past. In 2009, work stopped when then-project leader Mike Gage claimed the Army undersold just how much cleanup was necessary at Camp Bonneville. Early in the cleanup, the Army told the county it should expect to find around 15 to 20 dangerous devices in the ground. Instead, there were more than 1,500, county officials said in 2012.
Cleanup stopped again in 2010 after the Army raised issues with Gage for paying for expensive meals, bar tabs and gift boxes. Weston Solutions took over the project in 2012.
