Ortega Highway to Be Checked for Toxic Waste

Representatives of eight county, state and federal agencies will make a preliminary inspection tour along Ortega Highway today, combing turnouts and wide shoulder areas on about 14 miles of the route in a search for illegally dumped hazardous materials that may have gone unnoticed.

The sweep, to start at 8 a.m., will be coordinated from the air by an Orange County Sheriff’s Department helicopter, according to California Highway Patrol Capt. Steve Malone. The action follows the discovery earlier this week of three separate batches of deadly and explosive materials in as many days on the mountain road that connects Orange and Riverside counties.

After a meeting Friday of all the involved agencies at the San Juan Capistrano Highway Patrol office, Malone said: “We’ve scheduled another meeting at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 21, to recapitulate Saturday’s tour and possibly to develop a more permanent solution to the problem.”

In the meantime, an official of the Orange County Health Department’s waste management section is preparing an advisory to all citizens on what they should do if they spot suspicious containers on any county roadways.

“This can become a countywide problem,” Malone said, “because there’s been so much publicity about Ortega Highway that persons wanting to make illegal disposals might be looking for other locations.”

Friday’s meeting involved personnel from the CHP offices in Orange and Riverside counties, the California Department of Transportation, the Sheriff’s Department, the Orange County Waste Management Office and Health Department, the Orange County Fire Department, the state Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Forest Service.

Malone said today’s inspection tour “is a short-term solution agreed upon by all the involved agencies.” He added that it will be conducted on foot and from vehicles, with about 12 persons taking part.

Of the three incidents earlier this week, he said it was difficult to find any connection regarding them, and that it would be “only speculation” to try to relate the two larger dumpings, one discovered Monday and one Wednesday, both by passing motorists. A smaller batch of chemicals was found on Tuesday.

Malone said there has been no detailed estimate of costs involved in disposing of the extremely dangerous materials, adding:

“But in the Wednesday incident, I was told it cost about $5,000 for a private firm to take the stuff away. The actual cost of all the emergency responses in man-hours and equipment in all three cases could be many times that amount.”

Monday’s incident involved chemicals of such an explosive nature that county bomb disposal squads detonated them on the scene to avoid the risk of moving them. In the other two cases, the substances were taken away by the private waste disposal firm of Crosby & Overton of Long Beach.