Oil Firm Claims It Had Permits to Burn Wastes

The president of a National City oil reprocessing firm suspected of illegally incinerating hazardous waste said Monday that he has been burning the material for years because he believed his state permit authorized the practice.

Roger Humphreys, whose family has owned Nelco Oil Refinery Corp. for two decades, said he would “never intentionally break the law” and insisted that he is the victim of a “big misinterpretation of what our permits allow us to do.”

On Friday, more than 20 state and federal investigators executed a search warrant at Nelco’s offices near Interstate 5, confiscating 20 boxes of records and 20 samples of oil refining residue and other substances contained in 55-gallon barrels on the premises.

No arrests have been made, but Deputy Dist. Atty. John Massucco Jr., who is coordinating an investigation of the company, said Nelco officials may face felony charges of violating laws prohibiting the receipt and disposal of hazardous materials.

Massucco said the warrant was issued after the four-month investigation yielded information that Nelco was receiving shipments of chlorinated solvents--like paint sludge, methyl ethyl ketone and acetone--and incinerating them as fuel for the oil reprocessing operation.

“It is probable . . . that Nelco may be utilizing these waste solvents as fuel in their boiler or other processes used to recycle used oil,” district attorney investigator Charles Frice wrote in an affidavit filed in support of the search warrant.

Massucco said it is “difficult to specify at this point how long this has been going on or what volume we’re talking about.” According to the affidavit, the company in March received shipments of 550 gallons of oxygenated solvents and 250 gallons of unspecified solvents from a Carlsbad division of Sargent Industries Inc.

Windowmaster Products in El Cajon and Mt. Miguel High School in Spring Valley also have shipped various waste solvents to Nelco for disposal, according to the affidavit.

Impact Unclear

State health officials said it is unclear whether the incineration has had any impact on the health of residents or workers near the oil recycling firm.

Neither receiving nor disposing of hazardous wastes is allowed under Nelco’s operating permit, issued by the state Department of Health Services. According to Stephen Lavinger, program supervisor in the department’s Toxic Substances Control division, the permit allows Nelco to recycle and treat waste oil but makes no mention of burning hazardous wastes in the process.

“It is very, very difficult to obtain a permit to incinerate hazardous wastes because if it is not done in a controlled, monitored way; the emissions may have environmental impacts, on air quality, and public health impacts,” Lavinger said. “There must be a detailed operation plan, which has to go through an extensive review, and then there must be a lengthy public hearing process.”

Humphreys says all of this is news to him.

For years, he said, the company has collected and burned flammable waste solvents from electronics firms, plating companies and other local businesses that use the materials, which are listed as hazardous waste by the federal government.

Claims Permission Granted

The solvents serve as fuel to generate heat needed to run stills used in oil recycling, a distillation process that separates reusable oil from the waste product, Humphreys said. He added that, as far as he knew, Nelco had long ago obtained permission to incinerate waste, which he said has been the “standard process in the refining industry” for years.

“There’s been a refinery at our location since 1936, long before any of these government agencies were even conceived,” Humphreys said. “As they developed new rules, we’ve been caught up in generating new paper work to satisfy the new regulations. . . . We thought the permits we got enabled us to do everything we’ve been doing.

“If they thought we were bad guys, they could have walked in and asked for my files rather than spending taxpayers’ money on a big bust. I have nothing to hide.”

Aside from the permit question, Humphreys argues that Nelco is doing society a favor by incinerating hazardous wastes.

“It serves a dual purpose,” he said, adding that he sometimes purchases the wastes from customers and sometimes receives them free. “We use it for fuel and we keep it from being solidified and sent to a landfill, where it has no value.”

Lavinger said such a position ignores the dangers of uncontrolled incineration of hazardous materials.

“Many of these chlorinated solvents are carcinogens, and when you burn them, they turn into compounds that we don’t fully understand,” Lavinger said.

Congress and the state Legislature “enacted these (hazardous waste) laws because industry was doing its own thing,” Lavinger said. “There needed to be some control over people using their own judgment as to what was best.”

Lavinger said samples of residue from the oil refining process and other substances have been sent to a state lab for testing. Consequently, he called it “premature” to speculate on whether the incineration had threatened the health of people in the area surrounding the firm, which is at 600 W. 12th St. in a commercial area. Workers involved in the burning would have the greatest exposure to risk, he said.

This is not the first time Nelco has been in the news. In January, 1986, the company moved 1,520 barrels of waste oil contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs from its property after it was sued by the district attorney’s office. Company officials said at the time that they stored the material there because of the high cost of disposing of it.

In addition to the district attorney’s office, Massucco said, officials from the FBI, the state, the county Department of Health Services and the county Air Pollution Control District are involved in the Nelco investigation.