County Launches a Cleanup of Eyesore Abandoned Cars : Bailey Pledges That 2,000 Will Be Towed in 2 Years; What to Do With Wrecks Has Become Growing Headache

Everyone’s seen them. You may even have a few of them in your neighborhood.

They sit in helpless heaps, rusting in the rain or gutted by fire, missing vital organs and appendages, spilling obnoxious fluids.

The homeless use them for shelter, while drug dealers and prostitutes exploit them as a shield from prying eyes. They are, most would agree, the ugliest of eyesores.

Abandoned automobiles. They’re an unavoidable byproduct of modern society. And in San Diego County, complaints about the useless hulks have reached an all-time high.

“People are sick and tired of looking out their windows and seeing this junk,” said Supervisor George Bailey, whose East County district is among the hardest hit by the ditched-car plague. “We get more complaints about this than just about anything else.”

Anxious to quell the gripes, the county Board of Supervisors has launched a new program to pluck battered, derelict vehicles out of neighborhoods from Imperial Beach to Vista and inland to Santee.

2,000 to Be Removed

Under the program, spearheaded by Bailey, community block grant funds will be used over the next year to finance removal of more than 2,000 cars from streets and publicly owned property.

People harboring collections of conked-out cars on private property, meanwhile, could face fines tacked onto their tax bills if they fail to heed warnings to haul away the dilapidated shells, considered a public nuisance.

But abolishing the visual blight, certainly a noble civic goal, may in fact exacerbate a less obvious but equally confounding problem--what to do with the mounds of material left over when junked cars meet their final destiny--the auto shredder.

Along with scrap metal that is extracted and sold abroad for recycling, the noisy, dirty business of auto shredding produces great volumes of a soft, spongy, brownish material known in the industry as “fluff.”

Fluff, or fuzz, consists of ground-up steering wheels, batteries, dashboards, seat cushions and other car parts that cannot be recycled. Since 1984, fluff has been considered a hazardous waste in California.

Therein lies the problem. Because the fluff contains levels of lead that violate state limits and can leach into ground-water supplies, it must be discarded in specially licensed landfills. That can cost upwards of $270 per ton; California’s eight shredders produce more than 200,000 tons of fluff per year.

Industry in Turmoil

Most shredders have balked at the regulations. For the past three years, an industry that few people ever give a second thought has been in turmoil.

“When the state changed its method of regulating us back in ‘84, it was a tremendous blow because the economics of dealing with the waste became horrendous,” said Harry Faversham, president of National Metal and Steel Inc., which operates a shredder near Long Beach. “A lot of us are still reeling.”

San Diego has hardly been immune to the repercussions. Pacific Steel Inc. in National City, the county’s only shredder, has been charged by the district attorney with illegally storing a 25,000-ton mountain of shredder waste for more than a year.

The company, which receives virtually all of the county’s abandoned vehicles, also was the site of a May 22 fire that burned for more than 20 hours and forced the evacuation of almost 2,000 people from a school, businesses and homes in the surrounding area.

Though the fire did not involve fluff, it crept dangerously close to a pile of the shredder waste, which is highly flammable and can produce toxic fumes when burned.

For the past few years, Pacific Steel has been trucking its fluff to Mexico. Each day, about nine truckloads of waste--produced by the shredding of some 400 cars--are taken to Mexicali, according to National City Fire Marshal Patti Schiff.

Sifted by Hand

There, laborers sift through it by hand, removing any remaining shreds of copper, zinc, aluminum and other metals that can be sold for recycling. What’s left is dumped in a landfill.

Pacific Steel President Eduardo Gurria, who faces up to a $25,000 fine and one year in jail for each day the waste allegedly was illegally stored at his company, declined to comment on any aspect of the fluff issue.

But some authorities question the propriety of dumping hazardous waste on a neighboring country--even though the company has the Mexican government’s permission to do so.

“As far as we know, this stuff is just being trucked in and left in big piles down there,” said Jim McNally, a fluff expert and program manager for the state Department of Health Services’ Toxic Substances Division. “We can’t stop them, but we don’t exactly endorse the idea of dumping hazardous waste on our neighbors.”

Jack Stanley, vice president of SMASH Auto Wrecking Inc., the firm with a contract to tow abandoned vehicles under the new county program, notes that such a disposal routine could be easily disrupted, creating havoc in the local auto wreck disposal business.

“Pretty soon here, the Mexicans are going to catch on and then they’re going to slam that door shut,” Stanley said. “Then, Pacific Steel would have to go to a qualified landfill to get rid of that stuff, and the economics of this business just aren’t solid enough to support that.

“If that happens, they’d probably go under. Then we’d have cars piling up on our driveways and front yards. San Diego would have a 4,000-car problem stuck in its colon.”

Shredders on the Ropes

Other shredders are already on the ropes.

In Anaheim, Orange County Steel Salvage Inc. is reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy and is facing criminal charges for allegedly storing a 60,000-ton mound of fluff on its property.

State health department officials say the mountain has accumulated for three years, as company officials banked on winning passage of legislation easing disposal regulations for the fluff.

“If you can picture a football field, stacked 25 to 30 feet high with fluff, you’ve got a good idea of what it looks like,” McNally said, describing the Anaheim site. “It’s just incredible.”

Still more troubling, recent sampling by the state health department found the pile of waste contains cancer-causing PCBs at more than twice the safe level. That means even higher costs for disposal of the Orange County fluff mass at specially licensed landfills. McNally put the estimate at almost $25 million.

One shredder, however, has devised a technology for detoxifying the fluff and is now marketing the system to others in the industry.

Hugo Neu-Proler, which is based in Terminal Island near Long Beach and is the West Coast’s largest shredder at about 1,000 cars a day, was hauling its fluff to Arizona--where it is not considered a hazardous waste--before pioneering the technique. Basically, the system involves spraying waste with a chemical to encapsulate the lead, enabling fluff to be dumped in ordinary landfills. The cost of the process is about $12 a ton. Faversham estimates it’s costing his company $100,000 to install.

No Use Fighting Laws

“We finally decided it was no good fighting the laws, so we sunk a lot of money into figuring out a way to solve the problem,” said Jim Wotherspoon, environmental engineer for Hugo Neu-Proler. “By trial and error, we came up with this, and the state approved it.”

Already, Faversham is installing the system in his shredder operation, Clean Steel Inc., and other inquiries have poured in from across the state, Wotherspoon said. San Diego County officials are hopeful that Pacific Steel might also equip itself with the technology.

“These companies say they’re in a box with all our regulations, but here’s a way to deal with fluff that works and is available,” said Dan Avera, acting chief of the county health department’s hazardous materials unit. “We’d like to see (Pacific Steel) install it. But I suppose it’s more expensive (than taking the fluff to Mexico).”

And, while promising, the chemical treatment is not effective against PCBs, which McNally suspects are present in shredder waste throughout the state. Polychlorinated biphenyls were used widely before being banned in the late 1970s, mostly in electrical transformers and capacitors. PCBs are present not only in some car parts and oils but also in motors of old refrigerators and washing machines that are commonly accepted by auto shredders.

Tests at Pacific Steel so far have turned up only traces of PCBs, below the state standard.

Big Problem Possible

“I have a sinking feeling that if we went out and tested all these waste piles, we’d find more PCBs,” McNally said. “If that’s the case, we’ve got a real big problem on our hands.”

Consequently, state health and industry officials are looking for new ways to treat the fluff. Incineration is one idea, but the attendant air quality problems are troubling and unpalatable to communities.

And McNally says he receives about one “exotic” proposal a week from someone who thinks he has the answer to the fluff disposal quandary.

“One guy suggests we make adobe bricks out of it for construction,” McNally said. “Another wants to pave roads with it, and one offered to stuff mattresses with it and sell them to Mexico.”

In an ironic twist, the raging fluff war is in part to blame for the increasing numbers of abandoned cars piling up on local streets. Shredders, under pressure to reduce the lead content in their waste, require customers to strip cars of tailpipes, mufflers, gas tanks, wheels and tires before they will accept them. And even then, with depressed scrap metal prices--less than $25 a ton compared with more than $125 in 1982--shredders aren’t paying much for an auto wreck these days.

“So, a guy figures, ‘Why should I put two hours of work into stripping the thing if I’m only going to make $15?’ ” said Stanley, of SMASH. “It’s not worth it. So they just park it on your street and walk away.”

According to local tow firms, the number of abandoned cars they tow has increased dramatically in recent years. A to Z Towing, which hauls police-cited cars under contract with the City of San Diego, reports that more than 30% of its tows are junked vehicles.

Minor Part of Solution

Hence, the county auto-abatement program, which even its boosters concede is only a minor part of any real solution to a complex problem. Working from a list of complaints, towing firms will pick up cars from unincorporated areas and from cities that have agreed to participate in the program. Among the hot spots are areas of the South Bay, Spring Valley, Santee and the Harbison Canyon area.

The goal of the program, as Supervisor Bailey sees it, is to get the ugly auto carcasses off the streets while searching for ways to stop the problem at its source and safely dispose of the fluff at the other end.

One tactic is state legislation, now pending, that would provide money for the towing of abandoned cars and prevent the Department of Motor Vehicles from reregistering cars encumbered by towing bills.

But some feel that only a rebounding scrap metal market--which would once again enable people to make a buck off disposing of automobiles the right way--can turn things around.

“We’ve got to do something because these things are an eyesore and a safety hazard,” Bailey said. “These people can’t be allowed to get away with this any longer.”