Stringfellow Fuss Seen as Backfiring on McColl

Orange County itself is partly to blame for the refusal by Santa Barbara and the Kern County community of Buttonwillow to accept hazardous waste that is scheduled to be removed from Fullerton’s McColl dump, a state health official said Tuesday.

“When Orange County raised the fuss about our putting the Stringfellow waste through its sewers, it awakened everybody else,” said Joel Moskowitz, deputy director of the state Department of Health Services toxic waste control division. He was referring to last fall’s protest by the Board of Supervisors over plans to put treated waste from the Stringfellow acid pits in Riverside County through the county’s industrial sewers.

“And yet, the reaction of the Board of Supervisors in Orange County was identical to that of the Board of Supervisors in Santa Barbara County and the Board of Supervisors in Kern County,” Moskowitz told a luncheon meeting of Fullerton Rotarians.

“They basically said, ‘We don’t want Superfund waste going into our county. This is Riverside’s problem.’ So I think we’re all part of the same club . . . we’re all subject to the same kind of psychological reactions and phobias that our brothers in Santa Barbara are experiencing,” he said.

Plans Blocked

Kern County officials succeeded last month in getting a court order halting the health services agency’s plans to transport more than 200,000 tons of refinery wastes from the McColl dump to a federally approved disposal site near Buttonwillow, a farm community of 1,200 residents in the San Joaquin Valley.

Despite the setback, Moskowitz said the state still intends to remove the wastes from the site and will keep the residents near the dump informed.

“People are coming to us frequently with alternatives for the McColl site, but I can tell you today we are contemplating no alternatives other than our removal action,” he said. “But we are continuing because we’re in the business for the long haul, to evaluate those alternatives. If somebody comes up with a wonderful idea that was just the best thing since sliced bread, we’ll let you know. Do not expect a fiat from Washington or Sacramento telling you what’s going to happen to you.”

DSanta Barbara County also filed a court action to halt disposal of the drilling muds and acids from McColl at a site near Santa Maria. That suit became moot, however, when the disposal site owners’ price for handling the wastes was rejected by the contractor hired by the state to carry out the $26.5-million McColl cleanup, 90% of which is being paid for from the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund.

Run Into Fear

Moskowitz said that while he understands the desires of residents near hazardous waste sites such as McColl or Stringfellow to have the material removed, “You can’t simply take the stuff away because there is no place called ‘away.’ And any place you take it, you now run into what we call ‘chemophobia,’ a fear of chemicals.

“And more than a fear of chemicals, we’re experiencing a fear of Superfund wastes. It’s as though somehow putting the label ‘Superfund’ on waste transforms it into something new and magical. It will bite you from afar.”

The public’s attitude is not reasonable, Moskowitz said, because “the most dangerous chemicals in our society are not Superfund waste. The dangerous chemicals are the raw materials, the hazardous substances that go to feed industry. Those are chemicals in the pure form.”

Routinely Transported

And these chemicals are routinely transported, stored and used in many communities without anyone ever protesting their presence, he said.

By the time the chemicals leave the factories, he said, they have been diluted. And when those chemicals are further mixed in with soil or ground water, they are less hazardous still.

“Superfund wastes are the least hazardous of those three groups, by and large,” Moskowitz said. “Yet the reaction of the public is exactly the opposite of what you would anticipate if they were reacting logically because they’re terrified of superfund wastes.”