Firm Is Suspected in Burning of Toxic Wastes

A National City oil refinery is suspected of incinerating hazardous waste and is being investigated by a task force of federal, state and county officials, authorities said Friday.

The firm, which previously had been accused of storing drums of PCB-laced oil at its Civic Center Drive site in National City near Interstate 5, is now suspected of illegally accepting hazardous materials and then burning the material as a fuel for one of its oil operations, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said.

More than 20 agents and investigators representing the FBI, the state and county Department of Health Services and the San Diego County District Attorney’s office executed a search warrant Friday at the company, Nelco Oil Refinery Co., and left with office papers and samples of the residue left in the oil processing, the spokesman said.

No arrests were made Friday but the search warrant was issued because of possible felony violations of the state’s Hazardous Waste Control Act, said an investigator for the district attorney’s office, who asked not to be identified.

“We were looking for evidence that Nelco was accepting solvent which is a hazardous waste and processing it, and that they were burning the solvent as a fuel which, in essence, meant they were incinerating hazardous waste,” said the investigator.

Neither the owner of the company nor a spokesman could be reached for comment Friday night.

The investigation centered on suspicion that the chlorinated solvents were being used by the company as a fuel for furnaces and boilers as part of the oil processing operation, the investigator said.

The oil processing itself was legal but the alleged acceptance and burning of the hazardous waste is a violation of state law, she said.

It was unclear whether the alleged burning of the solvents was intended as a way to dispose of the material or whether it was intended to be a fuel source in the other oil operations, she said.

In January, 1986, the company moved 1,520 barrels of waste oil from its National City yard after the district attorney’s office sued the company.

Authorities contended that the material, contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs, was stored at the site because of the high cost of disposing hazardous material.

The company said at the time it had hoped to recycle the oil, which included plastic, sulfuric acid and heavy metals, into fertilizer. But the plans were scuttled when a machine needed to recycle the oil was destroyed in a fire.