Making Haste on Waste : New Hazardous Materials Director Lists Priorities : ORANGE COUNTY NEWSMAKER

Accidents involving hazardous wastes are inevitable, but Orange County is moving to anticipate such problems and to deal more effectively with them when they occur, said Bob Griffith, who was named Tuesday to head the county’s new Hazardous Materials Program.

With a staff of five, Griffith, a 40-year-old Corona resident, began the job of monitoring hazardous wastes immediately after the Board of Supervisors appointed him to the $55,700-a-year post.

A county employee for 16 years, he previously was director in charge of operation of county libraries and the registrar of voters’ office.

Griffith said he will concentrate on three major areas in his new job:

- Continuing work, with officials of eight Southern California counties, on the problem of “locating, funding and building” new hazardous-waste receiving facilities.

- Rounding up toxic wastes, including those generated in the home, that are being dumped illegally.

- Working with the half-dozen county departments that have some responsibility for hazardous wastes, to ensure that they have a clear idea of their roles and are able to handle them.

Griffith said the idea for a single program arose out of a need for centralized hazardous-waste control.

The old roles and state law have kept the handling of hazardous materials scattered through different branches of government, Griffith said. Fire departments, for instance, have both the equipment and training for emergency responses to toxic-waste spills, while county agricultural commissioners are responsible, under state law, for control of pesticides.

As a result, “it’s only in the last few years that anyone has thought of hazardous materials as one program, rather than a part of other programs,” Griffith said.

County officials first thought of combining the hazardous-waste control duties of various departments but abandoned that idea because of the projected cost, said Griffith.

The solution was to shift the management of hazardous wastes into a single department.

Griffith said he sees “the whole variety of concerns relating to the disposal of hazardous wastes” as “the single biggest problem we have to overcome.”

A Composite Problem

Toxic leakage from old dumps, the search for new and safer sites, and the need to get control of materials that never make it to a legal dump are all aspects of the problem, he said.

Orange County soon will begin to address the problem of hazardous materials in the home with its first collection of such wastes, starting in April in Huntington Beach.

“We’re interested in the roundup from two perspectives. First, we hope to gather a significant amount of waste. We also hope to do a lot of educating the public,” Griffith said.

Although household wastes appear to account for a relatively small percentage of the hazardous materials, Griffith said they are a problem out of proportion because there now is no reasonable way to dispose of them.

He said the biggest producers of hazardous wastes usually obey regulations because they are closely monitored. Aside from households, he said, small businesses, such as dry cleaners and chrome platers, “generally don’t have the understanding or the money to handle things appropriately.”