EPA Rated BKK a Peril Weeks Before Evacuation

Last summer, almost a month before a gas leak at the BKK landfill in West Covina caused evacuation of 19 families, the facility was rated by federal officials as among the nation’s most dangerous toxic waste dumps--bad enough to qualify for the federal government’s “Superfund” emergency cleanup program, an internal memo to Environmental Protection Agency officials shows.

Placing the BKK site on the Superfund list would have given federal officials added power to force quick cleanup of waste or gas leaks at the 540-acre landfill. Eventually, it also could have freed federal money for the removal of chemical wastes.

But BKK was not added to the list. The EPA excluded the facility from the program because the officials warned that spending Superfund money on BKK might set a precedent for expanding the costly program to many other dumps.

Under EPA policy, Superfund help largely has been confined to cleaning up toxic waste dumps that are closed. The BKK landfill is still in operation, although it voluntarily stopped taking toxic wastes on Nov. 1.

The internal memorandum, a copy of which has been obtained by The Times, was written last June by EPA officials based in San Francisco. It notified Washington officials that the BKK site had scored high on a complex “hazard ranking system” used to evaluate candidates for Superfund cleanups. The BKK score, 48.24, is well above the minimum of 28.5 needed to qualify for Superfund status and would rank it in the top half of the 536 cleanup sites now in the program.

The ranking, confirmed by a private consultant, was based on “documented ground water and air releases (of toxic chemicals) beyond the facility boundaries,” the memorandum said.

According to the memorandum, however, officials were wary of adding the site to the Superfund list because it is not closed or abandoned, as are most other sites in the program. Adding BKK to the Superfund effort “may set a precedent involving the listing of many other” operating dumps that also are polluting the air beyond their boundaries, the document said.

Most operating toxic waste disposal sites, including BKK, are governed by a 1976 law that requires the sites to control pollution before they receive operating permits. Only a handful of those dumps have been granted final permits, yet most have continued to accept chemical wastes with only a minimum of supervision.

In a December report to Congress, the EPA estimated that 605 of the 4,500 private toxic waste sites in operation could become eligible for Superfund cleanups in future years, an indirect indication that hundreds of toxic waste dumps fall far short of federal pollution control standards.

The June EPA memo urged that BKK be placed in the Superfund program “on an immediate basis” if it should close.

EPA officials in Washington, conceding that they would have gained enhanced powers from classifying BKK as a Superfund site, denied Thursday that such a designation would speed cleanup work at BKK much beyond actions already taken by the landfill’s owner, BKK Corp.

The company has sunk wells to pump vinyl chloride gas out of the dump, and state and federal officials are still investigating whether chemical wastes have fouled the San Gabriel basin’s underground water supply.

The firm’s executive vice president, Kenneth Kazarian, said Thursday that the company will pay for any other cleanup that is needed.

“We are cooperating with all the agencies and putting in all the gas retrieval systems. We are a willing and able and technically qualified party to address the problem,” he said. “There is no reason to bring Superfund in and public money when it’s being handled already.”

Jerry Kotas, an EPA toxic waste enforcement official in Washington, agreed. “At this point, we’re working with a company with a fair amount of assets and a willingness to look at the problems,” he said. “We’d move to Superfund if and when the company is bankrupt or has no resources to do the (cleanup) work.”