Residents Fired Up Over Toxic Waste Incinerator Plan

They are known as the badlands--260 square miles of parched, buckled earth and rocky canyons straddling the San Jacinto Fault about 15 miles east of Riverside.

In one of the myriad box canyons of this ancient home for rattlesnakes and cactus, Peter Wolfskill Anderson--a member of one of California’s oldest clans, the Wolfskill family--hopes to build the latest in hazardous waste treatment facilities.

Protected on three sides by steep canyon walls and 1,500 feet above a naturally polluted ground-water table, “it is the ideal place,” Anderson said, for the $60-million complex of state-of-the-art incinerators that he calls the Wolfskill Recycling Project.

Though Anderson and others in industry say his incinerator system is one of the safest known means of disposing of the ever-increasing amounts of toxic materials generated by Southern California industries, residents of the nearby community of Moreno Valley don’t want it in their vicinity.

Classic Syndrome

Now, battle lines are being drawn over what state officials say is one of the first attempts to build a commercial incinerator in California capable of burning both solid and liquid hazardous waste.

These officials say this is a classic instance of what has become known as the “not-in-my-backyard” syndrome.

At stake are the economic viability of Moreno Valley, millions of dollars in potential profits for Anderson’s Wolfskill Recycling Technologies Inc. and the political futures of the Riverside County officials who will decide whether to approve the plan.

On one side is Anderson and his team of engineers, attorneys and public relations experts, including Burdon C. Musgrave, environment protection program director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Walter Ingalls, a former assemblyman and now a Riverside attorney; and Clayton Record, who was a Riverside County supervisor for eight years.

They say the facility would provide a public service by burning waste that would otherwise be buried underground, where it could possibly leak. They also say it would become a magnet for sorely needed industrial growth in the area, boost employment and make a profit for investors.

“It is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Anderson said. “Yet,” he conceded, “there is an aura of fear surrounding this project.”

Indeed, worried about the negative effect the facility might have on nearby businesses, the Moreno Valley Chamber of Commerce circulated a petition against it in May and collected 5,000 signatures in one week. Grass-roots organizations such as the Alliance for Responsible Government are waging door-to-door campaigns to stop the project.

Councilwoman Objects

“Anderson has a lot of big guns on his side who keep saying this thing is so safe,” Moreno Valley Councilwoman Judy Nieburger said of the proposed project that would operate just two miles east of the city limits. “It may be state of the art now, but are we going to be able to say that 20 years from now? I don’t want to be a guinea pig.”

Citing the most frequently heard concerns in this bedroom community of 56,000, Mayor Marshall Scott said the facility would sit 2,000 feet away from the San Jacinto Fault line, making it especially vulnerable to earthquakes, would bring more trucks laden with toxic chemicals into the area and possibly pollute the atmosphere and reduce property values.

Many Moreno Valley residents worry that the project would also bring with it some of the “big city” problems that they moved here to escape.

“We moved to Moreno Valley two years ago to get away from this kind of thing,” said Cathy Chant, 27, a mother of three who has devoted hundreds of hours working against the project. “But my No. 1 concern is the safety of my children--there is always a chance of an accident occuring.”

“I don’t think there is a single person in the city in favor of this facility,” said Scott, who received a $500 campaign contribution from a member of the Wolfskill family during the newly incorporated city’s first mayoral election seven months ago. The money, he said, “obviously had not” affected his position.

“We are all against it here!” fumed custom home developer Joseph Canale, who paid $800,000 in 1981 for 63 parcels of land less than a quarter of a mile from the proposed site. If the Wolfskill project is built, he said, “I’m doomed.”

His business is already hurting, he said. Two customers have backed out of sales agreements because of their potential proximity to the Wolfskill project. In one case, a West Covina couple asked to cancel their purchase of a lot 1,000 feet away from the proposed site.

“I gave them back their down payment,” Canale said. “They just didn’t want the property anymore.”

Between these equally determined factions are the Riverside County officials who will make the final decision on whether to let Anderson go forward with the project.

Bearing the brunt of pressure from both sides is Riverside County Supervisor Norton Younglove, whose district includes the proposed site, located off California 60, just east of Moreno Valley on unincorporated county land owned by the Wolfskill family.

“My position is . . . that I am neither for nor against the project,” Younglove said. “It is an extremely important project for Southern California and it behooves us not to make decisions before we get all the necessary information.”

Nonetheless, Ingalls, an Anderson team member, confided, “The key to this whole thing is convincing Younglove that it (his support of the project) would not have a serious political downside.”

Even with Younglove’s support, however, the plan must still be approved by a host of local, state and federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health Services, the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Riverside County Board of Supervisors.

As a result, in the best scenario, Anderson may be two to three years away from building his complex of incinerators in the badlands, said a Riverside County official, who asked that his name not be used.

“He (Anderson) has certainly done his homework,” added the official, marveling at the potential political influence of the team that Anderson has organized to promote the project. “But then, at stake are megadollars. You are talking about an unlimited market.”

The Wolfskill project is based on a “recent European technology” originally designed to destroy cocaine, according to Dennis O’Meara, a consultant on the Anderson team and general manager of Omega Chemical Corp. of Whittier. He added that the “circulating fluidized bed” system is not currently used on a commercial basis anywhere in the nation.

Basically, the system pumps air through the floor of an incinerator unit to create the turbulence and heat needed to break down liquid and solid wastes ranging from paints and solvents to oil sludge and even contaminated soil.

Such waste materials would be hauled to the site from source companies in trucks, presumably through Moreno Valley via California 60, where it would be stored in steel holding tanks before being burned, he said.

The incinerator units and storage tanks would be engineered to withstand a major earthquake, he added.

Byproducts of the incineration process--which EPA experts say is 99.99% efficient--include carbon dioxide, water, inorganic ash and compounds of sulfur and nitrogen. When these compounds reach unacceptable levels, a secondary treatment--afterburning or scrubbing, for example--would be used to lower the concentrations before release into the atmosphere.

The only real toxic byproduct, O’Meara said, would be the residual ash, which would be “mined for the metals it contains” and then shipped to available landfill sites elsewhere.

The process would also produce electricity, which would be sold to Southern California Edison Co. for distribution throughout Southern California, he said.

Wolfskill Recycling Technologies envisions installing four of the $10-million-to-$15-million incinerator units on the site, each of which could potentially burn 15,000 tons of hazardous waste a year, O’Meara said.

Initially, the complex would be geared to accept only the estimated 43,000 tons of toxic waste products produced each year in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, Anderson said.

If the project has the excess capacity, Anderson added, it would consider taking small amounts of the 1.6 million tons generated each year in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Southern California Hazardous Waste Management Project officials say there is a clear need for such facilities. Since the closure of the BKK landfill in West Covina, the state has had to rely almost exclusively on landfills in northern Santa Barbara County at Casmalia and in Kings County at Kettleman Hills. Their future is in doubt because of increasingly stringent regulations.

At present, these officials said, California has only one commercial toxic waste incinerator in operation. Located in Lebec in Kern County and owned by General Portland Cement Co., it uses 30,000 to 40,000 tons of certain organic solvents each year as fuel to produce cement. The Wolfskill project, by comparison, could potentially burn twice that amount of a variety of both liquid and solid waste materials.

Despite these glowing projections, “I don’t even get excited about new projects anymore because they usually die at the local level,” said Jan Radinsky, a waste management engineer with the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento, who favors incineration over landfills.

For Radinsky, among others, the storm of controversy surrounding the Wolfskill project amounts to an all but predictable clash between NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) and developers.

Most Moreno Valley residents, and Anderson, would agree.

“I’ll be a NIMBY until the day I die!” Councilwoman Nieburger said.

“I’m a very determined man,” Anderson said.