EPA Sets New Rules for Transfer of Toxic Waste

In a policy decision affecting future “Superfund” hazardous-waste cleanups nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ruled that extra precautions costing at least $5 million are needed at the landfill designated to receive waste from the McColl dump in Fullerton, federal officials said Wednesday.

Lee Thomas, who has been nominated to replace William D. Ruckelshaus as EPA administrator, decided that any waste removed under the agency’s Superfund cleanup program for toxic dumps must be deposited in landfills that meet stringent new regulations included in a recently reauthorized federal environmental protection law, said Terry Wilson, EPA spokesman in San Francisco.

The regulations, which take effect in May, require new landfills to be equipped with double liners, which would detect and collect runoff from hazardous waste before it can leach into the soil, Wilson said.

Wilson said Thomas made the “policy decision” in reviewing the law’s effect on several cases, including McColl. The cleanup was initially projected to cost $21.5 million--with 90% coming from the Superfund and the rest from the state. Keith Takata, branch chief for Superfund in San Francisco, estimated that the new regulations would raise the cost of the cleanup by $5 million to $6 million, but a top state toxics official placed the figure at $7 million.

The new requirement is the latest hitch in the long-delayed excavation of McColl’s World War II refinery-acid waste, buried beneath a field in a Fullerton residential neighborhood. Excavation is scheduled to begin next month. According to Takata, the new requirement should not delay the excavation.

The Casmalia Resources landfill in northern Santa Barbara County, where the McColl sludge is headed, does not have the double liner, nor does any other licensed repository in Southern California, said Tom Bailey, a top toxics official with the state Department of Health Services.

It will take at least four weeks to construct the double liner at Casmalia, said Bailey, program management chief for the toxic substances control division of the health department. But he said the McColl waste can be safely stored in a temporary structure on the Casmalia site until the double-lined facility is completed.

A chief unanswered question, according to Bailey, is who will pay for the improvements at Casmalia. “There are only two answers: the federal government alone or the state and federal governments combined,” he said.

The new federal regulations are included in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the “cradle-to-grave” environmental law intended to track hazardous waste as it is generated, stored, transported, treated and disposed. The 1976 law was reauthorized last November.