Auto Salvager Fined $6,100 by Water Board

A state water board on Friday fined an Anaheim auto salvage operator $6,100 for failure to comply with orders to test for soil and ground-water contamination beneath a 40,000-ton pile of hazardous salvage residue.

On a 6-1 vote, the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board reduced a recommended penalty of $61,000 against Orange County Steel Salvage Inc. Board member Timothy Johnson proposed the lower fine of $6,100, questioning operator George Adams Jr.’s ability to pay a larger amount. He said it had not been proved that Adams had acted with “malice.”

“Ultimately, what we all want is a solution to the disposal problem,” Johnson said.

The pile of auto shredder waste--known in the industry as “fluff”--has been found to contain the suspected carcinogen PCBs. State health officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are awaiting results of test samples gathered last week to decide whether levels of PCBs are high enough to require costly disposal in a toxic waste facility.

“We’re disappointed,” Adams’ attorney, Sarah Flanagan, said of the fine at the conclusion of a nearly two-hour hearing Friday in the Newport Beach City Council chambers. “We don’t think there should have been any penalty at all. But $6,100 is less onerous than $61,000.”

Still, the San Francisco-based attorney said, “We don’t think we’ve done anything wrong.”

“He has not been thumbing his nose at the board,” Flanagan told board members during the public hearing. “He didn’t always do the Cadillac (maximum) job, but he is not required to under the law.”

Adams, speaking in his own defense Friday, apologized to board members, adding, “I kind of look like a jerk.”

But he later insisted he hadn’t “done anything wrong,” and charged that he was being driven out of business by conflicting orders of various government agencies.

“We’re just grinding up old junk cars. We are not trying to do something illegal,” Adams said. “All of a sudden, I changed from being an environmentalist to being a toxic waste baby killer.”

Adams has been stockpiling the fluff at his yard since July, 1984, after the state Department of Health Services ruled it had to be disposed of as moderately hazardous waste because of its lead content. Since then, Adams has been working with lobbyists, consultants, engineers and others to be allowed to resume dumping in local municipal landfills.

The stockpiling prompted the concern of the water quality board--well before the January, 1986, finding of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls--because the salvage yard in the 3200 block of Frontera Street is located near drinking water wells and natural water storage basins for the Orange County Water District.

Adams was asked to investigate whether chemical contaminants were seeping into the soil. He eventually did furnish soil test results showing that contaminants had penetrated no more than 18 inches below the surface and did not threaten nearby water supplies.

But those results were not received until July, seven months after tests were requested last Dec. 24 by the board’s executive officer, James R. Bennett.