Agency Briefs Residents on Sludge Study

Westminster residents met Wednesday night with state Department of Health Services officials for a briefing on the status of the agency’s $200,000 investigation into the toxicity of black sludge in their yards.

Homeowners on Sowell Avenue, the neighborhood county and state officials have targeted as the core of the oily slicks, gathered at the Westminster Civic Center Community Service building for the public hearing to ask questions on the substance that has been seeping out of lawns and backyard swimming pools.

Robert E. Merryman, the county’s director of environmental health, has said the “Westminster site is not an emergency situation.”

A county and state toxic waste specialist attended the meeting.

Angelo Bellomo, director of the state Health Services Department’s toxic substances control division in Southern California, said before the meeting that he would be trying to “let the residents know what (work) was scheduled at the site.”

The neighborhood, in which at least 12 to 15 homes have been found to have the tarlike sludge, is “one of several hundred sites that are known to contain hazardous waste,” Bellomo said, “and we want to let them know what is scheduled in the way of field work in the next few months.”

Bellomo added that “we really don’t know yet whether this is a big or small problem.”

Still under way is an analysis of testing for soil and sludge toxicity, Bellomo said, as well as studies to measure the extent of ground contamination in the affected areas. Residents have complained of the substance since the 1960s, Bellomo said.

A dairy company operated on the land during the 1930s and 1940s, when oil waste was being dumped there, Bellomo said. When developers built the homes in the 1960s, the Regional Water Control Board ordered the builders to deposit the waste in trenches 10 feet below the surface, Bellomo added.