Groundwater Pollution Found at 2 County Sites

Contaminated groundwater has been found at the McColl hazardous waste dump site in Fullerton and around an underground storage tank system at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Huntington Beach, the Environmental Health department of the Orange County Health Care Agency announced Friday.

But the potentially hazardous contamination has not spread to nearby wells that provide drinking water to parts of Fullerton and Huntington Beach, Environmental Health Director Robert Merryman said.

“We will be conducting frequent monitoring of the contaminated areas, but this is not the kind of contamination that moves fast,” Merryman said. “Still, we’re going to have this contamination cleaned up as quickly as possible.”

To prevent the contamination from spreading underground to wells providing drinking water, cleanup programs will be conducted at both sites, Merryman said.

He said that he does not know when the cleanup will begin and that Friday’s simultaneous announcement was coincidental.

Plan Due Oct. 15

A plan outlining what McDonnell Douglas will do to get rid of the underground contamination at its manufacturing plant at 5301 Bolsa Ave., Huntington Beach, will be submitted by Oct. 15, company spokesman Jeff Feister said Friday.

Merryman said he expects the McColl cleanup plan to be filed with Environmental Health by next January.

Environmental Health is the department that monitors toxic contaminations and coordinates cleanup plans, Merryman said.

This is the first time that contaminated groundwater has been found at the McColl site, Merryman said. But in previous tests, health officials said they had determined that soil at the dump, near the Los Coyotes Country Club, contains sulfuric acid, benzene and arsenic.

But the officials have said the dump still poses no immediate health threat. Officials have determined that the hazards at McColl were created in the 1940s when oil companies used the site to dump aviation fuel wastes and oil-drilling muds.

The contaminated groundwater was detected by the Environmental Protection Agency, which Merryman said last spring drilled 41 bore holes 250 feet deep.

Laboratory tests established that the groundwater is contaminated with high concentrations of the solvents benzene, toluene, xylene, acetone and hexane.

Could Be Toxic

“All of these solvents are mild irritants but can be toxic if ingested in high concentrations,” Merryman said. “And acetone and toluene are highly flammable.”

In 1985, a $26.5-million federal Superfund project to excaate and haul the McColl waste to a Kern County disposal facility was blocked when residents near the disposal site successfully sued to have an environmental impact report carried out. The contaminated groundwater discovery was made as part of that EIR, which Merryman said will be completed next January.

In Huntington Beach, the potentially hazardous situation came to the attention of Environmental Health in August, 1986, when it’s staff members, complying with state law, were overseeing the removal of 18 undergound storage tanks from the grounds of the McDonnell Douglas plan, Merryman said.

The staff members noted that possible soil contamination had occurred. Merryman said subsequent testing found that the groundwater is contaminated with the solvents Freon, trichloroethylene, dichloroethylene, trichloroethane, dichloroethane, methlylene chloride, toluene, acetone and chloroform.

“There is no evidence of serious contamination because drinking water has not been contaminated,” McDonnell Douglas spokesman Feister said.