BASE ASKS EMPLOYEES FOR HELP; FORMER WORKERS SOUGHT IN HUNT.

Byline: Jim Skeen Daily News Staff Writer

In its hunt for clues on where to search for hidden hazardous materials - including chemical weapons - Edwards Air Force Base has embarked on a quest for people who worked at the base as long as 65 years ago.

Edwards' Environmental Management office plans to run advertisements in Southern California publications, Air Force and retiree publications, and publications near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Albuquerque, N.M. and other places where testing programs might have been headquartered.

``If we have to drill a hole (to locate waste) and there is someone who used to work here who can say here's the best place to drill a hole, it saves the taxpayers a lot of money,'' said Environmental Management spokesman Dennis Shoffner. ``We're trying everything we can to be as thorough as we can.''

The advertisements will ask for workers from as far back as 1933, when Edwards was an army bombing and gunnery range.

``The Environmental Management Office at Edwards is seeking information to aid in the environmental cleanup of the base. Information is urgently needed regarding training/testing operations involving chemical weapons and other hazardous materials and their disposal,'' the ad reads.

Edward officials have been working for years to locate possible waste sites, which officials said is difficult for several reasons: the base has been in use for decades; in the early years, records either weren't kept or were not as precise as today's records; and archives are scattered throughout the nation.

In 1992, three corroding bombs which officials feared contained poison gas were unearthed on a newly graded section of a bombing range. Experts detonated the bombs where they lay, and base officials later said they believed the bombs were dummies - filled with antifreeze.

But the find prompted a nationwide search of military archives. That identified 11 areas - including a former railroad storage yard near where barracks and a base chapel now stand - as spots where poisonous gases such as phosgene, cyanogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide might have been used or stored in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1996, environmental cleanup workers began using ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors and soil tests to pinpoint any actual burial spots. The effort was expanded to include a helicopter equipped with high-tech sensors that measure minute differences in how soil reflects light and absorbs heat.

Help has already come from one former base worker, a man who worked on the X-2 rocket plane program in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Base environmental officials located a site believed to have been used for rocket engine tests, but weren't sure what engine or fuels were tested. The man was able to provide clues that will help the base narrow down what materials might have been used in those tests, Shoffner said.

Former workers who might have information for the Environmental Management Office are asked to call Shoffner at [phone]. They can also e-mail Shoffner at shoffned%scmhs.elan.af.mil.