“We said if you rode the race, you had a blast,’’ Bill Boles, president of the Friends of Wompatuck, said of the fund-raising event. “But if you wandered off the trail, you might have a blast of another kind.’’
Now a federal project to clean up the “burning grounds’’ at Wompatuck is expected to conclude a decades-long effort by the Army Corps of Engineers to resolve all the park’s contamination issues dating to its history as an ammunition storage and weapons development site.
Begun three years ago, the project to study and propose solutions for the contaminated area, about one to two acres, where the military disposed of old munitions and weapons materials during and after World War II, raises hope that all of the parkland property acquired by the state more than 40 years ago will finally be open to the public.
“One would hope this [the project] is coming to the end of a very long process,’’ Boles said.
Corps officials are studying a report received in May on the project’s analysis of the contamination and a range of proposed solutions, which range from removing contaminated soil to simply posting warning signs and taking down the wire fence that bars people from the site, not far from the park’s campground.
Located within the boundaries of four towns - Cohasset, Hingham, Norwell, and Scituate - Wompatuck State Park was once part of the Hingham Naval Ammunition Depot Annex, used from 1941 until 1965. The nearly 3,600-acre park contains more than 110 now-filled storage bunkers, including - according to the site’s historians - one that housed parts of the Navy’s first nuclear depth charge.
Acquired by the state in 1967, the park offers some 40 miles of wooded mountain bike and hiking trails, 12 miles of paved bicycle trails, more than 250 campsites, and open water for boating and fishing.
Cleaning up contamination resulting from ammunition and fuel storage and disposal has been a long story for the park, Boles said.
The site’s concrete munitions storage bunkers, some designed with loading docks, were filled and closed by the Corps. But before they were capped, youngsters would climb inside to hang out, play music, and sing.
