Chemical Spill Fear Eased at Acton Site

Toxic chemicals stored in about 190 containers at the former Acton home of a 75-year-old prospector who used them in gold-recovery experiments apparently did not leak into the local water supply, a Los Angeles County health official said Monday.

“There’s a lot of hazardous material, but . . . the containers we saw were in pretty good shape,” said Joe Karbus, director of occupational health and radiation hazard management for the county Department of Health Services.

“We’re not dealing with an environmental contamination problem.”

The containers, including 50 drums, each with a 55-gallon capacity, contained flammable liquids, caustics, acids and oxidizers, he said.

Leslie Lynch, an ore assayer who said he knew a method for extracting gold from “ancient water,” owned the property until he sold it about 1 1/2 years ago and moved to San Diego County, said an attorney for Lynch, Calvin M. Young III.

It is not unusual for residents of the old gold mining region in the northern foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, about 25 miles northeast of San Fernando, to conduct gold-recovery experiments with strong chemicals, Young said.

Workers from Crosby & Overton Co., a Long Beach toxic waste cleanup firm, began removing the material Monday. The state will pay for the cleanup, Karbus said, and then seek reimbursement from Lynch.

Karbus estimated the cost of the cleanup at $40,000.

Karbus said Lynch apparently had a casual attitude toward the chemicals typical of prospectors in the past but was in violation of a state law passed about six years ago. “He apparently didn’t see these as a problem, and he didn’t intend to discharge them into the ground. But under state law, you can’t store materials like this more than 90 days without special authorization, and apparently this stuff has been around a long time,” the state official said.

Karbus said tests for water and air pollution would continue “to make sure we have no contamination.”