Atlas of Contaminated Sites

Notable case, Đà Nẵng, Đà Nẵng, Vietnam

Da Nang Airport (former airbase)

Sân bay Đà Nẵng

The Vietnamese airport where defoliants were stored and loaded during the war. It is the first major Agent Orange dioxin hotspot cleaned up jointly by the United States and Vietnam, by heating the soil inside an enclosed pile.

Status
Remediated
Area
32 ha on land1
Media
soil, sediment, living organisms
Kind of site
military, agrochemicals
  1. Area. More than 32 hectares of dioxin-polluted land treated inside the airport (Wikipedia, citing Vietnam+, 2018).

Contaminants

Organic compounds

Status

Remediated

Clean-up completed in November 2018: more than 90,000 m³ treated by thermal desorption and about 50,000 m³ of low-concentration material confined in an on-site landfill, which still needs monitoring.

Story

During the Vietnam War the Da Nang airbase was one of the points where Agent Orange and other herbicides were stored and loaded. The dioxin they carried stayed in the soil of the storage areas and in the sediment of the ponds that received their drainage, at high concentrations.

The clean-up, funded and run by USAID with Vietnam's Ministry of National Defence, lasted from June 2012 to November 2018 and cost 110 million dollars. Excavated soil and sediment were stacked in a covered pile the size of a football pitch and 6 metres high, and heated to about 335 °C with 1,254 heaters until the dioxin was destroyed (in-pile thermal desorption, IPTD). Treatment was done in two successive phases.

The goal was to get below 150 ppt toxic equivalent. According to the company that carried out the treatment, the second phase went from concentrations of up to 2,461 ppt to an average of 0.199 ppt. The less contaminated material, about 50,000 m³, was confined in a landfill within the site.

Timeline

  1. 2012June: the USAID–Ministry of National Defence clean-up project starts.
  2. 2018November: the clean-up is completed.

Remediation

  1. 2012in-pile thermal desorptionExcavation and in-pile thermal treatment (about 335 °C) of more than 90,000 m³ of soil and sediment in two phases, 2012–2018; overall project cost 110 million dollars.
  2. 2018landfill containmentOn-site landfill containment of about 50,000 m³ of low-concentration material.

From the literature

Species that acted on one of this site's contaminants in at least one study. The list is automatic and takes no account of this site's soil, concentrations or climate.

Plants

Fungi

Sources

  1. VN kicks off first phase of dioxin remediation at Bien Hoa Airbase Area (includes the Da Nang figures), Government of Viet Nam (Báo Chính phủ), 2019
  2. Dioxin treatment: Da Nang Airport (project summary), TerraTherm
  3. Da Nang International Airport, Wikipedia, 2026

Draft compiled from public sources, not yet reviewed.