ALBUQUERQUE — New Mexico Environment Secretary Ron Curry said Wednesday a high-ranking Air Force administrator has assigned top priority to cleanup of a decades-old spill of millions of gallons of jet fuel at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Curry discussed the fuel plume earlier this week with Terry Yonkers, the assistant secretary who oversees environmental issues at Air Force installations.

“It’s gone, essentially, from a 1 priority to a 10,” Curry said.

The jet fuel, from a storage facility built during the 1950s, has slowly seeped into the water table almost 500 feet below Albuquerque’s southeast heights. The Environment Department recently asked the Air Force for an updated cleanup plan.

“We’re very hopeful at this point. We’re also going to make them be very accountable going forward,” Curry said.

Col. Matthew Bartlett, 377th Mission Support Group commander at Kirtland, said Air Force officials are working to fully characterize the fuel plume to meet the Environment Department request. He said the response is due within the next two months.

“Whatever final remediation plan we come up with will be in full concert with NMED approval,” Bartlett said.

The spill was discovered in 1999. While cleanup efforts have continued for years, the project gained a fresh urgency in April when Environment Department officials moved oversight of the spill from the agency’s groundwater division to its hazardous materials division.

“It was time to take action,” Curry said.

Investigators believe jet fuel dripped from underground pipes for decades. The Air Force’s initial response was to remove the leaking pipes, and a $10.4 million project is continuing on the base, which borders Albuquerque, to install safer fuel storage units and pumps.

In February 2007, a test well showed a foot of jet fuel floating on the water table. Over the years, the fuel plume moved off the base and across city limits, creeping under a park and traveling toward two municipal water well fields.

As an intermediate solution, the Air Force began installing soil vapor extraction units in 2004 on Kirtland property to pump fuel from the ground and burn it off.

Military and state analysts are far apart on the size of the problem. The Air Force estimates the size of the plume at 1 to 2 million gallons, while Curry said it’s possible more than 8 million gallons have leaked into the ground.

“That figure is important, but it’s also important that the assistant secretary is going to look at this from a comprehensive point of view and not nitpick the size of it,” Curry said. “We’re all going to find out the size of it, then we’ll start to reduce it.”

President Barack Obama disembarked from Marine One before boarding Air Force One at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday. Photo by The Associated Press

Jeff Chiu