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About those fuel cells...
Somewhere in my archives I have a 1946 story as published in The Arizona Republic about Wunderlich Contracting having set fire to a pile of fuel cell rubber off of the airfield in an effort to be rid of them. The resulting smoke was so bad the plume was visible in Phoenix, a couple of hundred miles away. They stopped this a week or two later when Phoenicians started complaining not only about the smoke, but the soot and smell of the burning rubber. So in answer to the question posed, yes, they actually DID try to burn them at one point, but even in 1946 the environmental concerns outweighed this method of disposal. Go figure, right?
In the end, most of them were cut up either with shears or blades and several tons of rubber "slabs" from the scrapping operation were dumped in the desert south-east of the field about 1.5 miles away. They're still there to this day. Back in the 1980s I spent some time going through this pile and found some nice "panels" for B-17 and B-24 aircraft with BF Goodrich manufacturing stencils. I saved the 1943 and 1944 dated ones.
Wunderlich Contractor wasn't overly concerned with being labeled "environmentally friendly" at the site through 1947, but the public relations disaster of the burning fuel cells made them change some of their disposal methods. It appears they hauled off most of the Plexiglas turret domes and a large percentage of the armored glass panels as removed from windscreens and gun turrets. I was only able to find a few areas where this was dumped off-site as garbage. Given the sheer volume of airframes axed here ( give or take 5,500 ) there should have been a lot more in the way of large refuse heaps.
In an effort to be rid of so many of the huge B-17 and B-24 main wing fuel cells, the scrapping contactor often gave them away to interested parties who would haul them off. Some of the working ranches and around Kingman still have some of the 200 gallon-plus capacity cells that had the tops removed, and they were used as cattle watering tanks. Perhaps if you'd purchased a prime rib or a T-bone in 1947 or 1948 it might've had a taste of 100 LL... perhaps one could have ordered a steak "medium rare with just a hint of aeromatic, please..."
There are washes and ditches all around the airport to this day with steel dross that was left from the on-site smelting operation. In it one will find gears, brackets, valves, engine parts, etc. from all kinds of airplanes. Several years ago Mohave County paid a contractor a huge some of money to try to "encapsulate" one area of ground on the airport where the portable smelters were worked. The concern was that this dross area was exceptionally high in lead, cadmium, chromium and all sorts of other heavy-metal hazardous waste. One area was deemed too large to scrape the topsoil and remove, so paving or encapsulating with asphalt was deemed to be the best option.
In the end, the ghosts of the thousands of Liberators and Flying Fortresses and countless other heavy, medium and training aircraft came back to haunt Mohave County and their Board of Supervisors who worried over environmental concerns. The encapsulation method was poor in application and overall design and cracked and humped and bunched in areas, and tenants who anticipated using this new tarmac area complained. The contractor was sued.
You are correct when assuming most of the heavy steel components left the field during the scrapping operation. In addition to landing gear, there was a CONSIDERABLE amount of salvaged steel from armor plating as removed from the bombers and fighters - and prop hubs. All of this was shipped out via rail car and not run through the furnaces, which were designed primarily for processing airframe and wings.
One could metal detect around the area today, but I personally would consider it a huge waste of time. There's just so much metal all around the airfield from the scrapping operation left about there that a metal detector would be overkill. Better to carry an empty 5 gallon paint bucket versus the White detector with fresh batteries, as there's more than enough souvenirs to be found on surface to satisfy the weekend treasure hunter.
- Robert in PHX
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