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New official to probe Groom Lake activity

The secret Groom Lake air base in Lincoln County now has a secret investigator to continue Nevada's probe into the base's toxic waste activities, Environmental Protection Administrator Lew Dodgion confirmed Tuesday.

Dodgion, citing national security reasons, said he could not name the person he chose to replace Tom Fronapfel last month. Fronapfel, the only environmental official -- state or federal -- with a clearance to enter the base, departed the Nevada Environmental Protection Division for another state job that came with a 9.6 percent pay raise.

"I can't tell you," Dodgion said, when asked the new investigator's name and title. "There's one guy who works for me" with a clearance for access to the base, he said.

Dodgion said Fronapfel's position as Air Quality Bureau chief is currently held by Jolaine Johnson. But he declined to identify the person on his staff who is monitoring the Groom Lake base, 35 miles west of Alamo.

Fronapfel, who was traveling Tuesday from Las Vegas to Reno, did not return telephone messages left at his Carson City office.

But Dodgion said Fronapfel told him he wanted to leave the Environmental Protection Division because he had a more challenging opportunity, one that boosted his pay grade from level 42 to level 46.

According to the pay scale for state workers, that means he received a 9.6 percent or $5,641 pay increase, raising his salary from $58,477 to $64,118.

Before Fronapfel left Dodgion's division on Aug. 20 for his new post as assistant transportation planning director, Dodgion approved a plan the Air Force submitted to Fronapfel for investigating trenches where former workers claim toxic materials were routinely burned in the open air in defiance of state and federal laws.

Dodgion said Aug. 15 that he did not know the details of the plan he approved because "we're talking about an area that requires certain levels of security clearances that I don't have."

He said Tuesday that Fronapfel's secret replacement will continue the probe that Fronapfel launched last October into allegations by former base workers.

Dodgion declined to comment on whether soil samples from the trenches had been collected for determining if toxic materials had been burned in them.

"I don't know how to give an answer to when" the state's investigation would be concluded, Dodgion said. "That's something we've got to look into and find out what we can do and can't do, if we find something or don't find something," he said.

Fronapfel holds clearances from both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. He visited the base at least twice between October and March, seeking records about waste disposal practices.

On March 23, Fronapfel said he was unable to find records of anything other than primarily classified papers that were burned in the open trenches.

Saying then that he had only found evidence of proper off-site disposal of hazardous waste since 1989, he directed the staff of the Nellis Air Force Range complex to "rectify the gap in documentation and develop a plan to determine if disposal of hazardous materials occurred in landfill trenches."

The Air Force's official position is the base does not exist even though photographs of it have been widely publicized and unmarked passenger jets have been seen flying from McCarran International Airport and parts of California to shuttle workers to and from the base.

Virginia Donohue, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman in San Francisco, said her agency does not do a representative monitoring of the base, nor does it have any paperwork or files about it.

Former base workers claim they were injured from inhaling dioxin-laden smoke when they constructed hangars and buildings downwind of the base's burn pits. They have also said in the 1980s thousands of partially filled barrels, many of them believed to contain liquid wastes from coatings used on radar-evading Stealth aircraft, were often dumped in the trenches, doused with flammable liquids and ignited.

Their claims are the basis for two lawsuits, one against the EPA for failing to inspect the base, and another against defense and intelligence agencies for using secrecy to hide hazardous waste violations at the base.

Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University law professor who filed the lawsuits on behalf of the former base workers said, "The state's obligation to protect its citizens from environmental harm will hardly be advanced by blindly accepting the will of the military."

"A secret, public investigation is something of an oxymoron," he said.