Hazardous Waste : County Managers Say Problem Is Big, but Can Be Contained

Residents of a quiet Westminster neighborhood didn’t know what was happening when birds began falling dead from the sky early one afternoon last November.

Officials quickly cordoned off the area, ordered children indoors and advised residents to close their windows.

Several hours and much worry later, it was determined that the birds had been poisoned by pesticide sprayed on a cauliflower field nearby. Authorities said there never was a serious risk of injury to humans, but an unusual absence of wind had caused a temporary concentration of fumes above the 40-acre site.

Though not usually accompanied by such a scare, incidents such as the one described above are hardly rare in Orange County.

Incidents on Increase

About every third day in 1984, public safety officials responded to a report of hazardous materials somewhere in the county and found a situation serious enough to warrant summoning a specially trained environmental health team.

There were no serious injuries in those 120 incidents last year, said Robert E. Merryman, county environmental health director. But they represented only the tip of the iceberg of the challenge hazardous materials pose to those trying to control them.

Several major toxic threats already have surfaced in the county. Neighbors of the McColl dump, in Fullerton, are awaiting the removal of 200,000 cubic yards of acidic sludge from the site. Fumes from the dump have aggravated respiratory problems and caused headaches and nausea, health officials said.

Underground seepage from the Stringfellow Acid Pits, in Riverside County, could, if unchecked, reach the Santa Ana River and contaminate much of the county’s ground water, officials say.

And, in October, an Anaheim company, Dixco-Diversified Chemical Sales, was closed down. Public health officials said the firm was storing chemical wastes so haphazardly that they could have combined to create a deadly cloud of toxic fumes.

“The jury is very much out on whether we can get a grip on the wastes produced today,” said Bob Griffith, recently appointed to head the county’s hazardous-materials management program.

“The world being what it is, we can pretty well count on having an accident here involving a significant number of people, at some point in time.”

Recent incidents are symptomatic of a growing hazardous materials problem in the county. Merryman said the special team had been deployed 53 times this year, as of March 27. If problems continue to crop up at that rate, there would be 224 calls by the end of 1985, for an 87% increase over 1984.

Production of new hazardous products, some of which are “super dangerous,” Griffith said, proceeds at a dizzying pace. Keeping abreast of new developments is a daunting task, he said, made all the more difficult by the injection of political and economic factors into the debate.

The economic concerns center on the high and rising cost of treating hazardous wastes. Newly mandated treatment processes can cost four to 10 times as much as dumping, Griffith said, and disposal-site fees also have shot up in recent years.

Griffith said that although finding a new hazardous-waste dump in Southern California is a top regional priority, politics can deter progress. He said most communities have a “not-in-my-back-yard” toward the dump-location issue, and coordinating disposal among 26 municipal governments in the county adds to the problem.

New Public Awareness

Still, Griffith and others see reason for optimism. Officials say a new awareness of the problem is leading people to behave more responsibly in the handling of chemical products, from backyard gardening to major industrial uses.

There also is optimism because that awareness has led to better monitoring and preparation for minimizing accidental damage. Griffith also cited technological advances in dealing with hazardous materials, and a growing national consensus that such wastes must be controlled.

Finally, there is optimism because Orange County only recently became industrialized, so it is less likely to be afflicted with the kinds of environmental mistakes made elsewhere, officials say.

The hazardous-materials issue is a multifaceted one, involving not only industrial production and disposal, but also impact on landfills and drinking water supplies, household disposal, local government efforts to control hazardous materials, and the prospect of new hazardous-waste sites being uncovered in the county. (Officials call a substance a hazardous waste if it can’t be re-used; otherwise it is called a hazardous material.)

Industry, the main source of hazardous wastes, is also the most regulated. Terry Wilson, of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said hazardous-waste generators and haulers, along with treatment, storage and disposal facilities, all must be licensed in “cradle-to-grave regulation” aimed at controlling the wastes from the source through disposal. Random EPA inspections, sometimes in cooperation with local authorities, keep tabs on the operations, he said.

Survey of Industry

A 1982 survey of Orange County businesses that generate hazardous wastes counted about 600 such companies, said Merryman. More importantly, he said, about half those businesses became aware, through the survey, that they were producers of hazardous wastes, and many of them subsequently improved their disposal methods to make them both legal and safer.

What did those 300 firms do with their wastes before they knew they were hazardous?

Merryman says officials didn’t ask, because they were concerned only with future compliance with regulations. Officials of several companies named on the list said in interviews that they previously sent their wastes to landfills or turned them over to waste haulers untreated.

A separate, 1982 countywide study of hazardous-waste generation and disposal methods uncovered a disturbing statistic about where wastes were not going. Although industries reported dumping 17.3 million gallons of hazardous wastes legally, a survey of the landfills permitted to receive such wastes could account for just 10.6 million gallons of it.

Merryman said no studies have been done since then, but added, “There is no doubt in my mind” that such a large discrepancy would not exist today. “I suspect a lot of people have changed their habits” since the county survey, he said.

Nearest Dump Closed

Merryman said he believes that “99 1/2% of the business community wants to do the right thing,” with hazardous materials. “It’s a matter of education.”

Illegal disposal problems have been aggravated, he said, since BKK Landfill, in West Covina, was closed to hazardous wastes last November. BKK was the nearest landfill to Orange County that would accept such wastes, and the change has caused fees for removing even a small amount of waste to skyrocket, to hundreds of dollars a barrel.

“More and more, we’re finding a few (illegally dumped) barrels here, and a few there,” said Merryman. “With the cost of removing it so high, a lot of people don’t want to pay to take it away.”

Frank R. Bowerman, manager of the county’s Waste Management Program, called the BKK restriction “an economic incentive to break the law,” and said there have been numerous “blatant attempts” to dump hazardous materials in the county’s four landfills since then.

Bowerman said he is confident, however, that a new program to monitor the trash brought to the landfills has kept out large quantities of hazardous wastes, and thus reduced the risk of toxic substances filtering through the soil into drinking water.

Wells Monitor Seepage

Wells that monitor the seepage from each landfill have turned up no major problems, though “very, very small quantities” of a toxic chemical have appeared in a monitoring well at Irvine’s Coyote Canyon landfill, Bowerman said.

Small quantities of household trash, such as paint thinner, motor oil and pesticides, pose a potential problem in the landfills that is more difficult to detect, Bowerman said.

Though Orange County has not attempted to measure the hazardous materials in household trash, Bowerman cited a Los Angeles County report that tends to downplay the threat.

Officials there said that a detailed study of the contents of randomly selected trash trucks found that just two-thousandths of one percent of the trash--or about one quart of the trash in every eighth truckload--is hazardous. The surrounding trash can easily absorb that amount, the report said.

Illegal “midnight dumping” on vacant lots and in remote areas still occurs, but penalties for such offenses have been increased, officials said.

In a recent case, a La Palma firm agreed to a $100,000 civil settlement and placement of a full-page newspaper apology for illegal dumping. Two executives of the company and a truck driver also were placed on a year’s probation.

Leaky Storage Facilities

Illegal dumping isn’t the only threat to public safety. Last October, fire officials with a search warrant raided and closed Dixco-Diversified, in Anaheim, after a six-month investigation reported that hazardous materials were being stored illegally on the property.

Merryman said at the time that some of the nearly 300 metal drums there were “leaking, rusting and in various stages of deterioration.” The stored materials posed a “great potential threat” to the neighborhood, he said.

After further investigation, two officers of Dixco-Diversified were arrested in January, and charged with 277 counts of violating hazardous-waste laws. Their cases are pending.

Irvine, with its numerous industrial facilities, requires that businesses disclose whether they handle hazardous materials. They must identify any such materials they use, and must update the information regularly.

The purpose of the Irvine law is to give safety personnel instant knowledge of what they’re dealing with in an emergency, in order to protect themselves and people nearby, said City Councilman Larry Agran, a former mayor of the city.

Computer Data on Chemicals

The county Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Response Team of nine full-time people subscribes to a computer service that supplies up-to-date information on the toxicity, inflammability and explosive properties of new chemicals that are being developed daily, said Battalion Chief Steve Whitaker.

Water officials are closely monitoring the dumping of hazardous materials, both legally and illegally, for potential danger to drinking water.

“At the moment, we, like others, view this as a growing threat to ground-water quality,” said Neil M. Cline, secretary-manager of the Orange County Water District, which oversees most of the 25% of the drinking water supply that comes from the underground water table.

“We don’t have an immediate threat; it’s a long-range threat. The end reservoir for all this material is ground water.”

Some small incidents already have affected ground water, and several larger problems loom, Cline said.

Of greatest concern is a concentration--what scientists call a “plume”--of hazardous waste spreading underground from the Stringfellow dump, Cline said.

Unless it is intercepted--a project now estimated to carry a price tag in the tens of millions of dollars--the plume will reach the Santa Ana River bed, the county’s main source of drinking water, within two to five years, Cline said.

Threat to Water Table

If that happens, “it’s possible we could lose a significant portion of our ground-water supply, which would be terrible,” he said.

Chemicals draining from agricultural fields, a growing problem in recent years, also threaten the purity of ground water, Cline said. And he worries that leaching from mishandled solid-waste disposal sites upstream also will reach the Santa Ana River.

A gasoline spill two years ago forced the permanent closure of one of Anaheim’s 35 wells, he said. The overall situation could get worse, but Cline is hopeful that it will not.

“I don’t lay awake at night thinking that the loss of our ground-water supply to toxics is imminent,” he said. “I think it’s going to be difficult, but I’m optimistic we can keep our water supplies useful. Doing so is going to expand our costs, however.”

Improper disposal of household chemicals emerged recently as a potentially significant problem, partly because of the realization that there is no simple, economical way for the consumer to get rid of them.

Griffith’s office will begin to deal with this problem in April, when it oversees a special collection of household hazardous wastes in Huntington Beach. Residents will be able to bring materials to a central location, and disposal will be free. Griffith said the program probably will be expanded to other parts of the county and become a regular service.

Dumps Slated for Cleanup

Three major hazardous-waste sites in Orange County are named on the “Superfund” list to receive federal clean-up funds. They are McColl in Fullerton, Ascon Landfill in Huntington Beach, and the former Metropolitan Circuits Inc. site in Santa Ana, Merryman said.

The three dumps contain everything from oil refinery sludge to acids, organic materials and toxic metals, officials said. Two other sites already have been cleaned up, and Merryman said he doubts another site like those five will be found in the county.

“We’ve done a comprehensive study of dump sites, abandoned sites and hazardous-waste sites, and turned up nothing major. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another bad site out there, just that it’s a remote possibility . . . I think we’re blessed, because we’re a relatively new county,” he said.

Even officials who were pessimistic about long-range prospects in the county saw some cause for optimism. Merryman said that from his vantage point, “we feel we have a handle on the situation.”

Of Griffith’s prediction of an environmental accident involving a significant number of people, he said, “We’re going to do our darnedest to make sure that prophecy doesn’t unfold.”

Industries Treat Wastes

Waste-management official Bowerman said the newness of many Orange County industrial facilities means many of them are equipped for pre-treatment of wastes, so that what arrives at the dump is considerably less dangerous than the raw wastes shipped in the past, he said.

But Griffith said burgeoning volumes of hazardous materials, rising disposal and treatment costs that prompt illegal dumping, and the “not-in-my-backyard” attitude of most communities toward opening badly needed new landfills are continuing problems.

Irvine Councilman Agran echoed Griffith’s concern about the political aspects of the issue.

“People expect public agencies to protect them (from hazardous materials), but we’re getting to where we need an environmental police force to do it. The public must decide if it’s willing to pay the price for one.”