Panel Votes to Curb Stringfellow Toxins : Plan to Spend $16 Million on Emergency Effort Goes to Assembly

The Assembly Ways and Means Committee on Thursday voted to spend $16 million on an emergency effort to slow the underground spread of contamination from the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County, one of the nation’s worst toxic wastes sites.

The measure, which was sent to the Assembly floor on a 16-0 vote, also appropriates $10 million for a variety of other toxics programs, including providing safe drinking water for residents of several small San Gabriel Valley water districts that have been contaminated by toxic chemicals.

The emergency financing, already approved by the Senate and strongly supported by Gov. George Deukmejian, is intended as a temporary solution while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completes a major study on how best to permanently stop the spread of contamination and remove more than 35 million gallons of hazardous materials dumped there until 1972.

“We want to make sure that it isn’t going to get worse while we wait for the EPA to clean it up,” said Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), who introduced the bill.

Underlying the urgency of the measure are recent studies showing that the toxic plume has been expanding, moving into the community of Glen Avon and raising fears of possible contamination in a water basin that serves 500,000 residents of Los Angeles and Riverside counties.

Studies also have found radioactive contamination in drinking water wells near the site, although experts are not sure that the source is the Stringfellow Acid Pits.

The health risk has forced many area residents to depend on bottled water. The additional $16 million would be used in part to install a permanent, safe drinking water source and to expand well-drilling efforts aimed at extracting contaminated water from the moving underground plume.

Deukmejian originally had requested $25 million for Stringfellow, but that was scaled back in the Assembly when the state Department of Health Services was unable to say exactly how the money would be spent.

Although Stringfellow is widely regarded as the state’s worst toxic waste site, the Department of Health Services recently downgraded it to 113th on the state Superfund list, largely because of the huge cost of cleanup and the fact that the EPA had already agreed to finance 90% of the project with money from the federal Superfund program.