OCEAN SPINGS, Miss. (AP) — About 30 acres of Horn Island around an area known as “The Chimney” will be closed to the public indefinitely.
The announcement came Monday after BP cleanup workers discovered tiles containing asbestos at a site that was a biological testing site for the U.S. Army.
Gulf Islands National Seashore superintendent Dan Brown said Monday that one of 12 areas tested at that site also came back positive for mustard gas.
Brown said the material was scattered over a site about an acre in size. Park rangers said a larger site would be closed to visitors during the cleanup.
The National Park Service has found broken asbestos tiles left from a military test site from World War II and mustard gas in the sand, Brown and others said at a press conference Monday at the National Park Service Visitors Center in Ocean Springs.
Horn Island is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore.
Brown said the materials were found June 21 during a BP inspection of the island as follow-up to the BP oil spill. Air testing is still being conducted for asbestos in the air, he said.
The military facility was active during World War II and was decommissioned in the 1960s.
“Park Rangers are placing area closure signage around the perimeter around the site, about 1,000 feet in all directions. Additionally, based on the initial records search that was done, we have reason to believe that some containers of mustard gas may have been deposited in the island’s Big Lagoon. We are therefore closing the portion of the lagoon that we own and we are notifying the owners of those nearby privately-owned tracts of the potential hazard,” Brown said.
