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Soupy Former Landfill Gets a Cleanup

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Times Staff Writer

Six months after heavy winter storms turned a long-closed Huntington Beach landfill into a soupy, toxic mess, an emergency cleanup is underway amid neighbors’ health concerns.

In February, workers pumped nearly 4 million of gallons of rainwater from the site. But the damage had already been done to the 38-acre Ascon landfill, near Magnolia Street and Pacific Coast Highway, half a mile from the beach.

Nineteen cracks were discovered in an 18-foot-high earthen berm along Hamilton Avenue, which lines the two northernmost waste pits. The repairs are needed to prevent the berm from giving way during another storm and allowing hazardous sludge to spill onto streets.

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“Those berms are 60 years old and were not engineered. They basically moved dirt forward into piles to create them,” said Mary Urashima, spokeswoman for Cannery Hamilton Properties, owner of the landfill, which closed in 1984.

The risk has prompted the owner to begin removing as many as 90 truckloads of toxic waste per day from the site so workers can repair the cracks.

Nearby residents welcome the emergency cleanup, which will be followed by a full cleanup of all waste pits guided by a state-mandated environmental review. But some are concerned that the expedited repairs, which received an abbreviated review by the state, could pose some dangers.

“People want the thing cleaned up, but gosh, we’ve been through this so much, everybody tends to be a little skeptical about what’s going on,” said John Scott, 74, who lives half a mile from the dump. “It may well be that there’s a danger, [and] I’d feel a lot better myself if they had gone through with the environmental review ... and have the public hearings that would protect the health and well-being of the people that live in the area.”

From 1938 to 1984, the site was used for hazardous oil waste, petroleum sludge and construction materials. Its waste lagoons contain volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds, and poisons such as arsenic and lead.

Years after the site’s closure, then-owner Ascon Properties Inc. and an oil company disagreed over which was responsible for cleaning it up.

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Two decades and several ownership changes after closure, the site hasn’t changed much. In 2003, seven major oil, chemical and aerospace corporations agreed to pay for the cleanup. The property remains on the state Superfund list, its five hazardous waste lagoons and a styrene pit intact. A full cleanup of the site is still years away, Urashima said. The property is zoned for as many as 500 homes.

The emergency repairs to the 1,300-foot-long berm, and lagoon waste removal, began last month and will take about four months.

In January, teams conducting routine maintenance discovered the cracks in the 25-foot-high berm, along Hamilton Avenue. They found 19 cracks throughout the dirt slope -- ranging from only half an inch wide to 35 feet long, 2 inches wide and 2 feet deep.

To work on the berm, crews will remove 28,000 cubic yards of waste from lagoons 4 and 5, the two largest, lowering them about 3 feet. They will also lower the berm and make its slopes less steep, said project manager Ken Fredianelli.

Workers will also reinforce the berms on the southern edges of the two lagoons with broken concrete.

The waste has the consistency of slightly wet concrete. Excavators scoop black mud into dump trucks. A worker sprays the freshly unearthed mud with foam to suppress odors or gases. Vanilla-scented misters are also used to minimize smell. The dump trucks take the sludge to another part of the site where bulldozers mix it with dirt, making the material safer to transport.

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The waste is loaded into plastic-lined trucks and covered with tarps. To minimize the amount of dirt tracked onto residential streets, the trucks pass over rumble strips, or raised metal bars, that cause vibrations to shake off loose dirt. The waste is being taken to Kettleman Hills Hazardous Waste Facility, north of Bakersfield.

An Orange County Grand Jury report from 2001 says the site’s other three lagoons, which hold oil tar 25 feet deep, and the styrene pit are so hazardous “that there is no safe way to remove the contents of these lagoons without jeopardizing the safety of the surrounding community, including Edison High School” nearby.

Urashima, the Hamilton Cannery spokeswoman, said the company had taken numerous precautions to protect the neighborhood.

The environmental review for the landfill’s full cleanup is months from being finished, while completion of the emergency work is needed before this year’s first winter rains. The cleanup work, safety measures and plans for waste-hauling traffic were approved by the state Department of Toxic Substances Control and must comply with city, state and federal laws, according to Huntington Beach officials.

But some residents still feel uneasy.

To residents of this south Huntington Beach neighborhood, water running off the berm and pooling on the street “is nothing new,” said Scott, the nearby resident, who has lived there 33 years. “We see it every time there’s heavy rains.”

At a July 6 meeting with company representatives, residents were also alarmed to find that the company planned to put up air monitoring stations only along the site’s northeast edges.

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“They said wind would only blow north up Magnolia Street. Anybody who’s ever lived here knows the wind also blows east and west across our cul-de-sacs,” said Carolyn Crockett, 63. “That made everybody in my neighborhood mad.”

Urashima said the company had since set up more air monitoring stations to catch drifts from all directions.

The company is also keenly aware of the residents’ long history with the landfill’s previous owners who tried and failed to clean up the site, she said.

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