Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach

Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach is a United States Navy ordnance installation at Seal Beach, California, on the Pacific coast at Anaheim Bay, in Orange County. It is operated by the US Navy under Navy Region Southwest, with the Department of Defense as owner, and has detachments at Fallbrook and Norco, both in California.

The station's function is the loading, storage and maintenance of weapons and munitions for fleet units. Ammunition handling is conducted at the waterfront, where ships are armed and disarmed alongside; a new ammunition pier entered service in 2024, permitting larger hulls, including Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and America-class amphibious assault ships, to berth at the station.

The installation covers 5,256 acres and comprises 230 buildings and 128 ammunition magazines providing some 589,299 square feet of ordnance storage. Munitions were formerly moved between the magazines and the piers over 56 miles of internal railroad; the track was closed in 2008 and lifted in 2010, and the station's 130 pieces of rolling stock were scrapped. Movement is now carried out by road over roughly 80 miles of internal routes using around 230 trucks and trailers, with ship loading performed by six mobile cranes rated at up to 90 short tons. The site is bounded to the north by the combined Interstate 405 and State Route 22, to the west by Seal Beach Boulevard, to the southwest by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast and east by the Bolsa Chica Channel. Westminster Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway are the only public roads crossing station property, fenced on both sides where they pass through; other approaches from the east terminate at Bolsa Chica Road, and Edinger Avenue ends at an emergency gate. The Joint Forces Training Base at Los Alamitos lies nearby.

An Installation Restoration programme addresses contamination across the station, working with a Restoration Advisory Board drawn from surrounding communities. Of 73 sites identified, 46 were found uncontaminated, five permitted facilities remained in use and were removed from the programme, and responsibility for two underground tanks passed to other agencies in 2005. Remediation has been completed at seven sites, with the remainder under analysis or clean-up, among them the station landfill and an explosives burning ground. The station boundary also encloses the 920-acre salt marsh of the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge.