Site’s Inclusion on Toxic Cleanup List Was Error

Orange County businessman Robert Guthrie thought he had covered all his bases.

A year ago his company, Burke Development Co., bought a 12-acre site in Orange with assurances that all hazardous wastes from a former wood-molding manufacturer had been cleaned up.

“That’s what I thought, until I read a list in the L.A. Times of the state’s Superfund cleanup sites in Orange County that included our site. I nearly fell off my chair,” Guthrie said, referring to a story on toxic wastes published in Monday’s edition.

On Tuesday, Guthrie telephoned a state health official in Sacramento, who told him the property should not have been included and would be taken off the Superfund cleanup list immediately. The official attributed the error to an internal communications problem between the Los Angeles and Sacramento offices.

“This is embarrassing,” said Robert Borzelleri, a spokesman for the state Department of Health Services toxics division. “But we did apologize to Mr. Guthrie. Our internal updates were not communicated to Sacramento from Los Angeles. Although we update the list annually, Guthrie’s site, which was included, should not have been included for 1987.”

For Guthrie, it felt like “a hundred-pound weight was lifted off my shoulder.”

Before he learned about the error, Guthrie immediately telephoned the former owners of Continental Moulding Co., which had moved and sold the property to Guthrie, who in turn had built a 103,000-square-foot industrial park.

Meanwhile, Guthrie, who has sold 10 of the industrial park’s 18 building sites, began to get calls from some of the buyers.

“We had sold the buildings and disclosed the wastes and cleanup efforts to the buyers. But then the list came out and just floored us. I just hope they don’t include us in the 1988 list,” Guthrie said.