Toxic Waste: Past Misuse That Haunts the Present : Poisoned Sites, Building Reuse Pose Problems

It may look innocent enough--an oil spot in the concrete or a little, darkened area in the soil--but it could spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E to an unwary buyer, broker and even seller of real estate where materials were used that created hazardous waste.

This is especially true of industrial buildings where hazardous wastes were biproducts of manufacturing processes, but it could also be true of other structures. Among them: new office buildings, department stores and hotels built on former industrial sites and old manufacturing or industrial-type buildings now used for other purposes.

With the popularity of what is termed “adaptive reuse,” or remodeling of a building from one use to another, chances that even more people could be affected by toxic wastes have multiplied. Yet, Congress has been sluggish in approving new funds to help clean up hazardous-waste sites.

This week, the House of Representatives may have a $10.1-billion version of a funding bill ready to go to the House floor, where it must be approved before a compromise with the Senate, which passed a $7.5-billion bill, can be reached. In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency has been limping along for two months on a $140-million budget, which would provide for what Robin Woods of the EPA termed “a bare-minimum emergency response.”

With no new funds, the EPA cut back on clean-up efforts at 57 hazardous-waste sites and delayed work expected to start on Oct. 1 at 57 additional sites, although work is continuing on more than 400 sites started before August.

“Superfund,” as the federal financing program for toxic-waste clean-up is called, “already expired,” Woods said, “so it’s important that another bill is passed as quickly as possible. We’re anticipating that we’ll have a new bill by Thanksgiving.”

The bill will only provide funds for 541 toxic-waste dumps on a designated priority list. Gov. George Deukmejian just signed legislation enabling the state to start spending $100 million in bond money approved by voters last November for cleanups around California. He also signed measures allotting an extra $21 million for cleanup efforts at the Stringfellow Acid Disposal Pits in Riverside and at San Gabriel Valley sites where industrial solvent spills polluted drinking water.

There are, however, innumerable other places--in buildings and on building sites--where hazardous wastes pose a threat.

Frank Goss, president of Building System Evaluation Inc. in Sierra Madre, is aware of this. His 4-year-old company is in the vanguard of firms billing themselves as “building doctors.” “We diagnose buildings. That’s all we do,” he said.

He makes diagnoses for clients generally looking to buy or lease. His clients include major hotel chains, fast-food outlets, department stores and governmental and financial institutions across the nation and, in a few cases, overseas. With recent discoveries of the dangers of toxic wastes and toxic situations, these companies have become increasingly concerned about the welfare of their employees and customers.

While checking buildings for health and other hazards, his staff has encountered situations that could cause illness and even death. As Stephen D. Ramsey, former chief of the Environmental Enforcement Section of the U. S. Department of Justice, told an audience of industrial realtors in Century City a few weeks ago, “Hazardous wastes are typically those things that are ignitable, explosive, excessively corrosive and toxic to your health or environment.

“They kill fish, make you sick--make your stomach ache and eyes sting--and if there are enough doses of them at an acute level, they can kill you.”

Goss knows of warehouses turned into office buildings where office workers have gotten sick from substances spilled years earlier onto the concrete floors. Typically, what happens is this, he explained:

“A vat bursts, and the (toxic) substance goes into the concrete. Then a contractor refits the building for office use. He air-conditions and heats it. With heat, pollutants become many more times active and go into the air. Employees breathe the air and show symptoms of nausea, dizziness, discomfort and disorientation.”

Headaches and disorientation are hard to pin down to environment, he went on. “They aren’t tied down until there are so many people with these symptoms in a workplace.

“Less productivity may be traced to it, but what usually exacerbates it is that somebody faints or their nausea is so bad that they must go to the hospital. It’s those people, whose sensitivities are so acute, that become your thermometer for buildings with problems.”

Problems don’t always stem from something in the paint or the carpet. They can come from the asbestos in the walls or formaldehyde in the pressboard shelfing. “There was a brand new library with thousands of yards of pressboard shelves, and the builder put people in it and turned the lights on and had all kinds of problems,” he recalled.

The greatest danger comes from hidden sources, particularly hazardous wastes illegally buried or stored on some old industrial sites. A regional conference for Los Angeles County planners called this “the invisible peril.” It’s not so invisible at hazardous-waste dumps, which have been the focus of much media and public attention, but it could be invisible to a buyer, broker and even a seller of an industrial facility or site.

“There might just be a small metal cap on the surface but underground, a large tank storing chemicals,” Gross said. A dry, underground sump with perforated walls similarly capped might have been used for 30 years, and the contamination in that case would be, as Gross described it, “enormous.”

“With no record of the tanks anywhere, nobody would know about them,” he added.

There could be an open trench where toxic wastes were dumped, then seeped to settling tanks before moving on to public sewers. “These were typical conditions in an industrial facility 10 years ago,” he said.

“We don’t design them like this anymore but then, it was the state of the art.”

The trench would now be “filled in and paved over so nobody would see it,” he added. More visible, but equally dangerous, are liquid chemical and hydraulic fluid supply lines in these buildings.

The lines look just like compressed air and domestic water lines. “Imagine, if a contractor took a blow torch to the wrong lines!” he exclaimed. They would explode.

Angelo Bellomo, chief of the Southern California section, toxic substances control division, state Department of Health Services, showed a slide at a talk he gave to the Building Owners & Managers Assn. of Los Angeles, depicting an industrial property where the user bored holes in the asphalt seven feet deep, then poured hazardous waste into it and proclaimed, “Isn’t it wonderful? The ground is so porous, the waste just disappears into it.”

It wasn’t so wonderful, because hazardous waste poured into the ground is very likely to get into the aquifer and then into the drinking water of nearby communities.

A recent case of ground-water contamination in the San Fernando Valley was first thought to have been caused by “one big bad industry,” as Bellomo put it, “but no. It was the result of many thousands of situations where there was mismanagement of hazardous wastes.”

Bellomo estimates that there are 15,000 industrial establishments in Los Angeles County and 60,000 to 80,000 statewide that generate hazardous wastes, and of these 30% to 40% handle the wastes “in violation of the law,” though a much smaller percentage breaks the law intentionally.

His agency doesn’t even know all of the contaminated sites in the state, which has a larger number than most states by some estimates because California has been a principal location of the aircraft and petroleum industries and a place where there have been many military installations. “We continue to look for contaminated sites, document them and notify local agencies if we think there is a concern, but we don’t know them all,” he acknowledged.

“However, I think our regulatory system in California is the best in the country. It has the ability to minimize problems.”

Talking about a site in Corona where three sumps were used for petroleum sludge, Nester Acedera, a senior waste management engineer in Bellomo’s office, noted that he told a developer who bought the site that the sumps had to be cleaned up before any housing could be built there. “The city had OKd his development plans, but we told him that he had to clean up the sumps first. So we can block housing even if it has approved plans,” Acedera said.

Regarding real estate transactions, Bellomo said: “If we are aware that a sale is about to happen on a site we know is contaminated, we would ask the owner to notify the potential buyer.”

Still, there are no guarantees that a regulatory agency will step in. There are, as Bellomo conceded, “opportunities for continued problems.” Like abandoned gas stations.

Bellomo figures there are 200,000 underground gasoline storage tanks in the state, “and a substantial proportion are leaking. This will be a significant problem we face in the future.” And remember: Some old gas stations have been converted to other uses, such as offices.

When a developer applies for a zone change or a conditional use permit to alter the use of an industrial-type facility or site, local governmental jurisdictions might view the application as a red flag, but quick looks at the property and even soils tests may not reveal hidden hazardous wastes.

Bellomo views “improper waste handling,” which has gone on in some places as long as 50 years, as “the public health and environmental problem of the decade.”

It is also one of the largest concerns to the real estate industry, from a standpoint of economics as well as health and safety.

Bellomo tells of a two-acre site in the Antelope Valley where 18 drums of the cancer-causing chemicals called PCBs were disposed. “Clean-up was about $200,000, and the property wasn’t worth that much,” he said.

In the city, financial losses can be much greater.

“Originally, we looked only at the buildings--their air conditioning, plumbing and structural systems,” Goss said, “but now we’re definitely thinking about what’s under the building.

“If the environment is contaminated, it could be many times greater in cost to fix than simply fixing the air conditioning.”

It might even cost the entire building. Consider Los Angeles. All unreinforced concrete buildings that don’t meet the city’s earthquake standards will be demolished and replaced.

“If somebody builds on soil that is contaminated, they might have to tear the new building down,” Goss said.

Some high-rise office space in other cities has been closed because of PCB exposure. PCBs, which Goss describes as “some of the most hazardous things known to man if overheated,” were regularly used in transformers, found in vaults in buildings and alongside roads.

“Maintenance men often stored flammable things in the vaults, and that’s what closed four or five buildings,” Goss explained. Bellomo said some floors of a San Francisco office tower were closed because of this in 1981 “and are still not occupied.”

Goss found one $20-million property with more than $20 million in liabilities. He sighed. “It will be worthless until the cost of mitigation goes down.”

Costs of eliminating toxic wastes can be high. This can also be true of toxic situations that don’t involve hazardous deposits.

Goss looked at an old store in the Pacific Northwest that one of his department-store clients was considering leasing. “It had all the ingredients necessary to create bacterial contamination,” he said.

That is, bacterial pneumonia or Legionnaire’s Disease. If the lease had been signed, it would have cost his client about $3 million to fix. “So we advised the current owner that he might want to do something about it.”

If his client had been interested in purchasing the building, Goss might have suggested a reduction in price to compensate for the cost of repairs. He has done that in Los Angeles.

A client asked Goss to look at a new $40-million to $60-million high-rise, and Goss’ firm discovered $5 million in problems for the potential purchaser.

“The sellers settled for a reduction in price of half the cost of fixing the problems,” he said. The problems involved code violations and substandard materials, but if they had related to hazardous wastes, his recommendation probably would have been the same.

Frequently, companies have bought properties only to discover environmental problems after escrow closed. “So you might have a new owner who paid $5 million for a site and then has to turn around and pay $2 million to have contaminated yards of earth removed.

Then the new owner can’t sell without making the next owner aware. So he bought a lemon. That’s happened so often, especially with people in the hotel and retail industries who are always buying and moving back into downtown facilities.”

The hypothetical $2 million should be deducted from the $5-million price, he said, and more and more potential purchasers are becoming aware of this and check before escrow closes to see if this might be the case.

Some toxic situations, like the San Francisco office tower, cannot be fixed at the moment at any cost. There are contaminated pieces of land in Wilmington, Carson and the City of Industry that will remain unused until, as Goss put it, “somebody finds a way to take care of them.”

There are remedies for other toxic situations, though. “Asbestos hazards can be treated safely, and methane gas? We’ve learned how to work with it.”

Costs can vary from simply opening windows--”a temporary solution to the asbestos problem, but it works”--to having the hazardous waste carted away.

A container the size of a garbage can filled with PCBs would cost $10,000 to remove from a site, he noted, “and say you have 40 or 50 of these containers in a hotel. To move them, you’re talking about a lot of money.”

Utilities will usually assume the expense of cleaning up leaking transformers, but what if the utility company is not notified and employees are contaminated? It happens, Goss said, “all the time.”

And when it happens, who is responsible? The utility company? Owner? User? Real estate broker? Goss took a deep breath. “It could impact everyone.”