The Toxic Bomb : State Struggles to Get a Handle on Growing Problem of Hazardous Waste

California is sitting on a toxic waste time bomb, and officials are scrambling to defuse it before it is too late.

“We’re at a critical juncture in history,” said Bob Griffith, director of toxic waste management for Orange County.

“Right now, the problem is big enough to focus our attention, but it’s still manageable,” he said. “If we wait 10 or 20 years, there may be nothing we can do.”

Proposals to clean up the mess dominate Sacramento.

“It’s a real motherhood-and-apple-pie issue in the Legislature this session,” said Elmer Brown, director of governmental relations for the California Trucking Assn., some of whose members haul toxic waste.

Ten bills dealing with toxic waste are pending in the Legislature, the state Senate has created a Toxics and Public Safety Management Committee and Gov. George Deukmejian has proposed creating a statewide czar to oversee spending $100 million to curb toxic contamination.

Illegal Dumping Now a Felony

A new state law makes illegal dumping of toxic waste a felony rather than a misdemeanor.

But it may be easier to make proposals than to come up with workable solutions.

“The fact is, nobody really knows how to clean up these things (toxic dumps) and destroy what’s in them so they will be safe in the future,” said Jack Jones, a spokesman for Dow Chemical Co., which has its western headquarters in an unincorporated section of Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tom Schumacher, executive vice president of the California Trucking Assn., added another caveat:

“The cruelest joke of all may come 50 years from now if we learn the things we are using today to treat the waste are actually more dangerous than the waste itself.”

Recently, federal Environmental Protection Agency investigators seeking the source of noxious chemicals being belched into the air of the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia were unnerved by what they found.

The fumes were coming from that city’s northeast sewage treatment plant, whose operation is aimed at ridding the Schuykill River of a toxic soup created by effluent from chemical, plastics and other industries.

Observations such as Jones’ and Schumacher’s and incidents such as the one in Philadelphia are disquieting, and the public’s reaction in general is fear--and a desire to keep the waste as far away from themselves and their communities as possible.

The sheer scope of the problem boggles the mind.

California has more than 25,000 abandoned sites where toxic waste has been deposited since the end of World War II, when the creation of hazardous byproducts mushroomed. Nobody knows how much waste is in them, but Jennifer Tachera of the Toxic Substances Division of the state Department of Health Services estimates it is hundreds of millions of cubic feet.

One hundred and eighty sites in 39 counties are on the state’s list of those that most urgently need cleaning up--either through hauling the material someplace else, treating it to render it harmless or encapsuling it to prevent leakage.

High-Tech Offenders

Even high-technology business--once touted as a clean industry because it does not have smokestacks--is a major offender. Santa Clara County, home of the Silicon Valley, is the state’s fourth-largest producer of toxic waste.

The biggest hazardous-waste generators are Contra Costa, Kern and Los Angeles counties.

Last April, the state Assembly Office of Research estimated that as much as 40% of California’s ground water is potentially contaminated, mostly in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles regions.

And the problem is only getting worse.

Every year, an estimated 265 million tons of toxic waste are generated nationwide, and the EPA says the figure is increasing 5% to 6% annually--a rate that would about double the volume of hazardous waste by the end of the century.

“That’s more than a ton of toxic waste for every man, woman and child in the country,” said John Skinner, head of the EPA’s toxic waste programs in Washington.

California churns out more than 10.2 million tons of hazardous waste a year, and about one-seventh of that is trucked to special treatment plants or toxic dumps.

The problem of toxic waste is woven into the fabric of modern industrial society.

“Nobody wants hazardous waste, but nobody stops to think that it doesn’t come from ‘somewhere out there.’ It comes from virtually everything we have--the food we eat, the medicine we take, the clothes we wear, the TV we watch,” said California Highway Patrol Capt. Dwight Helmick, who is in charge of routing trucks carrying toxic waste to treatment plants and dumps.

Griffith, the Orange County toxics chief, expanded on that idea.

“Hazardous waste is a consequence of industrial society,” he said. “The only way to get away from it is to go back to a pre-Industrial Revolution society, and nobody wants that.”

The federal government is pursuing a less drastic, but extremely costly, option.

A new federal law mandates that after 1990, no untreated toxic waste will be able to be legally placed in the ground anywhere in the nation.

Toxic waste landfills will continue to exist. But they will be able to accept only the heavy sludge that remains after waste has been treated to remove its toxicity or after it has been turned into a gooey mass that is less likely than a liquid to seep through the earth and contaminate ground water.

Skinner estimated that this step could reduce by 50% to 60% the volume of toxic waste put into dumps. Some say the reduction could be even greater.

The alternative to dumping untreated waste is developing and building facilities to treat it.

Some companies already treat their toxic waste, but most do not because of the high costs, officials say.

In the short run, it is about 10 times cheaper for industry to simply dump its byproducts in the ground untreated. But in the long run, that may be immensely more expensive for society.

Cost in Billions

Skinner estimated that it will cost billions of dollars a year to build, operate and maintain toxic-treatment plants. Those costs eventually will be passed along to consumers.

“The vast majority of waste is treatable to reduce it in volume and hazard prior to disposal,” said Jean Carr, who heads a toxic waste task force set up by the Los Angeles-based Southern California Assn. of Governments.

A recent report issued by Carr’s task force concludes that “continuing the practice of land disposal provides little assurance that the hazardous waste will be contained so as to never pose a future threat to water quality, air quality and human health.”

While many issues in the toxic waste controversy remain fuzzy, one of the most puzzling is why developers build next to toxic dumps and why homeowners buy there.

Some homeowners say they were not told about the presence of the dumps, or that they were told only there was a “sanitary landfill” and that sounded safe.

Taking a Loss

Now, some of those homeowners who can afford it are getting out, selling their houses at a loss or at least not at the profit they would have made had it not been for the proximity of the toxic dump.

Others are forced by financial pressures to stay, while a few have adopted the fatalistic view that they have already been exposed to dangerous chemicals and any damage to their health has already been done.

Meantime, speculators remain willing to buy the properties near hazardous waste dumps, hoping to buy in cheap and sell out later for a tidy profit.

“A seller might be trying to sell for less than the market value of the property, and buyers are speculating that sometime a year from now the issue might cool down and the price may go up again,” said real estate broker Noel A. Wychico who not long ago sold one of the homes near the controversial BKK landfill in West Covina.

Jones, the Dow Chemical official, did not mince words in discussing the issue of residential developments near toxic dumps and toxic waste producers.

“I don’t think it’s stupidity on the part of the homeowners. People who buy homes are just looking for the lowest down payment and lowest monthly payments,” he said.

Zoning Officials Hit

“It’s stupidity on the part of developers and the zoning commissions that permit it. Zoning rules are being eroded by political pressures, and big developers are able to exert a lot of influence.”

A major hotel and condominium development is being proposed in Antioch near Dow’s plant if zoning on the land can be changed from industrial to residential.

Dow expects that once the hotels and homes are built, pressure may be brought to curtail Dow’s operations.

“It happens all the time,” Jones said. “Industry is there first, then homes are built. As soon as people move in, they get mad at industry for being there.”

TOXIC WASTE BY COUNTY

Here is a county-by-county breakdown of toxic wastes generated in California. The figures, compiled in 1983 by the state Department of Health Services, were included in a January, 1984, report to Gov. George Deukmejian by the California Hazardous Waste Management Council.

The actual volume of wastes has probably increased 10% to 15%, but the proportion produced by each county has probably remained the same, according to Jennifer Tachera of the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento.

The numbers are in tons of waste produced per year.

Alameda 435,407 Alpine none Amador none Butte 353 Calaveras 1,188 Colusa 6 Contra Costa 2,798,850 Del Norte 1 El Dorado none Fresno 44,084 Glenn none Humboldt 15 Imperial 26,256 Inyo 60 Kern 2,242,037 Kings 8,684 Lake 1,176 Lassen 1,825 Los Angeles 1,494,014 Madera 3,188 Marin 634 Mariposa none Mendocino 5,303 Merced 479 Modoc none Mono none Monterey 17,190 Napa 696 Nevada 3,018 Orange 489,041 Placer 307 Plumas none Riverside 30,968 Sacramento 150,928 San Benito 5,794 San Bernardino 52,259 San Diego 334,455 San Francisco 14,935 San Joaquin 33,272 San Luis Obispo 19,292 San Mateo 222,930 Santa Barbara 29,481 Santa Clara 1,315,540 Santa Cruz 8,384 Shasta 1,552 Sierra none Siskiyou 108 Solano 90,211 Sonoma 139,739 Stanislaus 81,571 Sutter 61 Tehama none Trinity none Tulare 5,503 Tuolomne none Ventura 34,175 Yolo 543 Yuba 28,789 Total 10,172,821