Greenham Common Contaminated Land Remediation and Restoration: A Partnership

For the past two years the University of Greenwich has been working with Tarmac Southern limited UK, West Berkshire council and the UK Environment Agency to enable the remediation and restoration of a portion of Greenham common an ex air force base. This decommissioned air base has widespread fuel contamination associated with fuel tanks pipelines and miscellaneous fuel leakage’s. This article is a summary of the unique partnership between business interests, local councils, regulatory agencies and academia in the restoration of one of the worst affected areas of the common.

Greenham and Crookham commons were bought in 1939 for use as an open space and common area for the people of Newbury by the then Borough of Newbury. In 1941 the site was requisitioned for military use by the UK air ministry and it became an active airbase for both RAF and USAF air units during World War Two. The bases most historic moment during this time was it use as a launch area for thousands of airborne troops to support the D-day landings of June 5 th 1944. The base was closed in 1946 and left derelict until it was requisitioned in 1951 as an airbase for the USAF during the cold war years.

The site achieved notoriety in 1980 when it was announced that it was to be used for US cruise missiles , sparking the Women’s peace movement and large and long running demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

The USAF left Greenham common in 1992 and the air base was closed . In 1995 Newbury district council, formed a partnership with private sector interests to form the Greenham common management company. This company submitted a bid to the UK Ministry of Defence for purchase of the base, with the open area of the commons being given to the council, but the technical area becoming a business park..

At this stage, an extensive fuel contamination problem was revealed from leaking NATO fuel storage tanks. A site wide excavation and bioremediation process was started, part funded with revenue raised from the enterprise park, on an unaffected technical area of the site. All of the concrete runways and most of the airbase buildings have now been removed from the site ( Some of the concrete was used in the construction of a local by-pass) and most of the NATO fuel tanks have been removed.

The current work involves the excavation of the last area of the site, known locally as Crookham common. This area has areas of jet fuel contamination and areas of clean sand and gravel.

As aforementioned several areas of the site had already been excavated and treated on site, using a bioremediation process developed and implemented by the local council, local contractors and the UK EA. This process is ongoing. However the area within Crookham common required more extensive excavation and a plan was put forward to remove and remediate the contaminated gravel and restore the remaining land to acidic heathland status in line with a nationwide strategy for the promotion of acidic heathland. In order to do achieve this an area of over 1,000,000 m3 of surplus material, consisting predominantly of sand and gravel needed to be removed.

The contract to remove the gravel was awarded to Tarmac Southern UK limited who proposed to excavate the material and transport it to a local quarry known as Lower farm for storage and use in its aggregate processing facility over the next ten years.
The UK government has been encouraging the use of recycled aggregate in order to preserve remaining natural resources.

A unique plan was developed whereby Tarmac would build a temporary haul road from Crookham common to their facility , and Tarmac approached the University of Greenwich to set up an on site lab with headspace GC-FID facilities and a comprehensive sampling procedure in order to determine clean and contaminated areas of the site. It was necessary to develop a quick and effective headspace method for the determination of jet fuel in sand and gravel that satisfied the requirements of the regulatory authorities and the fast turn around time required for the contractors on site.

The planning procedure for this project was long and complicated. Several major issues were involved. Most importantly Greenham common is situated in an area of the Kennet valley with several areas of special scientific interest. Stringent testing regimes and working procedures have been necessary to protect the local flora and fauna and groundwater.

A stringent soil sampling regime ( 1 sample per 100 m3, expected 8,000 samples in total) has been implemented throughout the duration of the project, carried out by two postgraduate students . One student worked full time in the lab ensuring sampling turnaround and quality control and another full time on site, identifying sampling locations on a 10m grid, taking samples and ensuring contractors were aware of areas of contamination and measures to be taken. All contaminated material was removed to the councils bioremediation facility.

Due to co-operation between Tarmac and the University, the University received bursaries for two three year full time postgraduate students and two Headspace GC-FID units and Tarmac received the benefit of both students working full-time for a year on site. From the students point of view, we have had the unique opportunity to in fact dig up our contaminated aquifer and from Tarmacs point of view they received the workforce and expertise of the universities Centre for Contaminated Land Remediation (CCLR) at a much reduced price compared to environmental contractors. Here research and business interests have been combined to the benefit of both parties.

The excavation work on site is drawing to a close and restoration work will begin soon. During our time on site we have analysed over 8,000 samples, all grid referenced and retained all contaminated samples for further analysis. Groundwater monitoring is ongoing. We will be presenting a paper and a poster at the AEHS conference in London in August and have another year and a half of study to do further work on site and review the data we have already collected.

Many lessons have been learnt during this project. It has been extremely interesting to work both with regulatory agencies and business interests and to observe co-operation between the two. In conjunction with the skills gained from such intensive on-site work we feel we have benefited enormously from being involved in the day to day operations of a full scale contaminated land remediation site that is also essentiallly a quarry!

Top