Standoff Clouds Burnoff of Waste

The Department of Defense and the staff of the Southern California Air Quality Management District are engaged in a stare-down over which agency should use its emergency procedures to help Space Ordnance Systems dispose of explosive wastes stored illegally at its two Santa Clarita Valley plants.

A lawyer for Space Ordnance asked an air district hearing board Wednesday to grant a variance from prohibitions on open burning so the company can burn about 50 tons of explosive wastes at a leased site in the desert 25 miles east of Lancaster. The lawyer, Howard Gest, said the burning would “have no significant impact on air quality” and would allow SOS to continue operating its plants, which employ about 500 workers.

But a staff attorney with the district complained that SOS’s problem is “being dumped in our laps, inappropriately, by the Defense Department.”

Air district lawyer William Freedman did not raise environmental objections to the burn but said the Department of Defense should solve SOS’s problem, because the wastes were generated in fulfillment of military contracts.

“A good neighbor does not walk their dog on a neighbor’s lawn,” Freedman said.

The board recessed the hearing until March 13 after about 3 1/2 hours of testimony.

SOS, a subsidiary of TransTechnology Corp. of Sherman Oaks, manufactures flares and other products for the military and the space program.

Since last spring, SOS has been under orders from state and county agencies to dispose of more than 1,500 drums of explosive and mildly toxic wastes that have been stored without a permit at its Mint Canyon and Sand Canyon plants. The wastes, which are immersed in water to reduce the risk of explosion, are accumulating at a rate of about one drum per day.

Defense Department Proviso

The firm says that, if granted the open-burning variance, it would destroy the waste inventory over a 90-day period this spring and summer.

SOS officials say they are unable to find a commercial hazardous waste site to take the wastes and have been unable to convince the defense department to use existing military facilities to incinerate the wastes. A Department of Defense directive allows the military to burn explosive waste for a contractor if “no alternative, feasible disposal means are available to the contractor.”

However, in a letter last month to U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who had intervened on SOS’s behalf, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger referred to the possible desert burn to show that SOS had not run out of options.