The creatures released this week on the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station were chosen for a special talent: their ability to breathe chlorine, and to make harmful chemicals harmless.

Navy contractor Sean Gardener adjusts microbe injection apparatus; photos courtesy Gregg Smith, Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

In what Navy officials are calling the largest-ever use of bacteria to destroy pollution, a microbe known as KB-1will be injected into about 200 special wells dug for the purpose.

The wells will channel the bacteria 180 feet down to attack a plume of TCE, a toxic chemical that has contaminated groundwater there; the plume extends over an area two-thirds of a mile long and half a mile wide.

The groundwater is not used for drinking, and poses no threat to the public, said Pei-Fen Tamashiro, installation restoration project manager at the weapons station.

“But if we don’t treat it, eventually it will go deeper, into the drinking-water aquifer,” she said.

The bacteria are pumped into the plume along with the food they’ll rely on, vegetable oil.

KB-1 cannister

“They use vegetable oil as a food source, and breathe in chlorine attached to the TCE,” she said. “They start removing chlorine from the chemical, and change it into something that will not harm humans.” (KB-1 cannister shown at right.)

The wells are arranged so that the bacteria will create a kind of “bio-barrier” to the TCE; as the contaminated groundwater flows past the barrier, the bacteria will cleanse it of chlorine.

It will take about 15 years of active treatment, she said, and the project cost will likely come to between $15 million and $20 million.

Once the chlorine is gone, the bacteria will die off, so they won’t persist in the environment after the cleanup is done.

Click image to see larger view

The bacteria are grown and sold by a laboratory in Canada, she said. Although some naturally occurring microbes found on the weapons station also devour chlorine, there are far too few of them to have any effect on the TCE plume.

The use of bacteria to combat pollution is “pretty routine now,” Tamashiro said, and one other, smaller location on the base, contaminated with similar pollutant called PCE, has been treated. The cleanup there is nearly complete.

Using the traditional method of pumping out the groundwater and pushing it through filters to remove the contamination would have taken a minimum of 50 years, said Gregg Smith, spokesman for the weapons station.

1967 photo shows part of Saturn V booster outside assembly building at Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

The TCE plume came from solvents used during work on the Saturn V rocket in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The solvent, used as a degreaser, was spilled onto the ground in an era when the dangers of TCE contamination were largely unknown.

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