Years After Concern First Voiced, City Acts on Toxic Ash at Canyon

Dennis Burns considers himself an expert on the expanse of canyon near Chollas Lake at the eastern edge of San Diego.

“I practically live down there,” Burns said last week as he and his three young sons finished a morning hike along the well-worn trails that crisscross the hilly terrain.

“I’ve logged a lot of hours in here,” said Burns, a muscular chief petty officer in the Navy who bought a home near the canyon about three years ago.

“Sometimes, I come down here at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to run, and I see the old people religiously doing their walks. They walk this whole area. And some weekends it’s hectic--all the bicycles and dogs.”

Kids Have Clubhouses

From a high ridge near Carver Elementary School, the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge and the ocean can be seen on a clear day, Burns pointed out. And down below, on the floor of the canyon, “there’s activity going on through all these areas,” he said.

“Most of the kids come down along the trails here. Over in that wooded area they have clubhouses, and there’s a ditch they play in. I bring my kids down here on bicycles and they jump hills.

“As you can see, you can go anywhere you want here, effortlessly.”

But life at the 80-acre site just west of Chollas Lake is about to change.

Last week, city and county officials suddenly decided it is time to investigate reports that toxic levels of lead have been found in ash deposited in the canyon decades ago, when the city operated a garbage-burning dump there.

Burns and other local residents interviewed in the canyon last week said they were surprised to hear about the lead-tainted ash. No government officials warned the neighborhood about the area and no warning signs have ever been posted, they said.

Yet it is clear that the city received a report last October saying that levels of lead on the site were more than twice the amount considered toxic by state regulators. That same report, commissioned by the Navy, also noted that the canyon is used as an exercise and recreation area.

Further, city and county files indicate that as early as 1981, a citizens group and U.S. Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego), then a county supervisor, raised concerns about lead-tainted ash in the area.

Yet on Wednesday, authorities expressed official shock at the notion that for years joggers, bicyclists and children have been roaming freely throughout the site--which happens to be just across the road from the Chollas Station of the City Operations Center.

Gates will be shut and locked, gaps in the chain-link fence will be closed, and “No Trespassing” signs will go up all around the perimeter, officials vowed.

The city is worried not so much about the lead as it is about being sued--by a jogger, for example, who might trip and break a leg, according to Terry Flynn, director of the city’s General Services Department. The area is not and never has been an official city park, he said.

County health authorities, however, have a different concern. They said last week that they want the exposed areas of ash fenced off and covered to ensure that contaminated dust is not kicked up into the air. They want the city, which owns the land, to do tests at the questionable spots to see if further action is warranted. The city has agreed.

And state environmental officials, who were assured by the city five years ago that there was no problem at the site, last week demanded a report from the city about lead levels there.

While ingestion of lead is known to cause mental retardation and lowered IQs in younger children and a variety of neural symptoms in children and adults, no significant problems have been identified in the areas around the canyon, county officials said. And school officials said there has been no abnormal absenteeism at nearby elementary schools.

The flurry of interest in the site after years of inaction was prompted by Navy officials, who agreed 18 months ago to accept half the area as part of a land swap with the city. The city plans to develop a park on the other half.

The Navy wants to build housing for 300 families on its portion, but began to balk last fall after a consulting firm advised against the project unless something could be done about the high levels of lead found through the firm’s tests, which were made last summer.

Now, because the consultant’s report has become public and because the lead may jeopardize the deal, the city has begun to confront the long-ignored issue.

Fought 7 Years Ago

“This whole situation is incredible,” said Don Day, who seven years ago headed a neighborhood association formed to fight a city plan, since dropped, to turn the canyon into a garbage landfill. The association disbanded long ago, but Day kept a cardboard box full of old reports, letters, and jars containing water and soil samples.

One of those letters, sent by Day to the county Department of Health Services on April 26, 1981, says: “Formal request is hereby made that your agency perform analysis of ash deposits . . . Basis of concern is that these ashes may contain toxic chemical wastes.” The letter goes on to point out what the association considered a high number of cancer deaths in the area.

Bates, who then represented the area on the county Board of Supervisors, also wrote a letter to county administrators in 1981 complaining of a number of environmental problems in the area and noting the toxic nature of the ash. “This area would be considered a hazardous waste dump if permits were being applied for today,” Bates wrote. The complaints were ignored, an aide to Bates said last week.

Day said the county examined one sample of ash taken from the 80 acres and that test results showed a high level of lead. Officials discounted the cancer deaths, saying Day had not properly calculated the cancer rate, according to a report written for the county at the time. Due to the difficulty of properly conducting an in-depth cancer study, the county did not perform one of its own, records show.

‘Nobody Responded’

“They didn’t care,” Day said. “The city would never tell me a thing. Nothing. Nobody responded.”

Day said he “burned out” after working on the issue for several years, and he suffered a mild stroke about two years ago. “Now I don’t have the energy and I also don’t have the ability.”

He said he thinks people allow their children to play in the area because of “ignorance.”

“This is a real mobile community, a big turnover community,” Day said. “And people love forgetting. They think the problem will go away if they just forget it. They didn’t want to hear any more. They were afraid.”

While his concern seven years ago was preventing development of the landfill, Day said, he now has lingering worries about the summer of 1979, when city crews were dispatched to construct a berm to shield the neighborhood from the noise of the anticipated landfill.

Bulldozers churned up tons of ash from the canyon and moved it to an area near Carver Elementary School on Redwood Street.

“It was horrible,” Day said. “I had a good quarter of an inch (of ash dust) on my shed out there.”

Pointing to a hollowed-out area of the canyon, Day said: “This whole bottom here was covered with that burn dump and they brought it up on top. They spread this stuff all over this whole community.”

Day also said that when he heard the Navy was thinking of building housing in the dump area, he warned Navy officials at a meeting. Searching through his box of old records, he found two business cards that were given to him by Navy officers at the time. The officers could not be reached for comment.

“I said, ‘If you’re going to put your people down there in that hole, you better make damn sure that what I’m saying isn’t true,” Day recalled. “And what I’m saying is that you have a hazardous waste dump in that canyon that is as poisonous as anything you can find.”

Precisely what was burned or dumped in the canyon probably will never be known.

The known history of the site begins in 1906, when it was the location of the first water filtration plant in Southern California, according to a report done for the Navy by Woodward-Clyde Consultants, a San Diego engineering, geology and environmental firm.

Before World War II, the city purchased the site for use by the public works department, which ran an operations and maintenance center there that included several buildings, a garage, a warehouse and a fuel pump island.

Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, the city’s Solid Waste Division used the site as a burn dump. The abandoned buildings were torn down in 1965 and, except for the bulldozing operation in 1979, the area has been left undisturbed.

Cmdr. Douglas E. Mann, who assumed responsibility for the Navy’s construction projects here last year, said he was unaware of Day’s communication with the Navy but that concerns about the ash led the Navy to hire Woodward-Clyde last year to analyze the site.

21 Soil Samples

The firm collected 21 surface soil samples, 11 from suspected areas of contamination and 10 from other areas to check background concentrations of possible contaminants.

Three of the samples indicated cause for concern, according to the report. One, on the southern border of the planned housing area, contained a lead concentration of 1,260 milligrams per kilogram. State law defines anything containing more than 1,000 milligrams per kilogram of lead as a hazardous waste. Another sample, collected from the northwest side of the canyon, contained 920 milligrams per kilogram, putting it below the limit but requiring further study, the report said.

But of greatest concern was a spot on the southeast section of the land--in the area where the city is planning to build a park--that was found to have 2,320 milligrams of lead per kilogram, more than twice the legal limit.

That area, near College Grove Drive, is just across the road from a city-owned Little League field. Area residents said last week that children routinely cross from houses on the north side of the canyon to the Little League field on the opposite side, perhaps through the contaminated area.

The findings led the consultants to conclude that lead levels in the ash deposits “could pose a significant threat to the health of exposed humans.”

“The studies have also identified young children below the age of 6 as the population most at risk to the health effects of low levels of lead, because they are still developing their central nervous systems,” the report said.

The simplest solution, the study said, would be to transport the ash from the site and have it deposited in a hazardous waste dump. But that could also be the most expensive solution.

Disposal could cost $250 to $300 per cubic yard, and the amount of ash involved--it could be 30 or 40 feet deep--is not known.

“Burying the ash on site is an alternative we do not recommend,” the study said, “because of the extensive regulatory, human health issues and continuing liabilities to the Navy associated with this alternative.

New Round of Studies

Another possibility could be to treat the ash on site, mixing it with cement to “encapsulate” it and render it non-hazardous.

Whether any of these alternatives is feasible is the subject of a new round of consultant studies whose results are expected in a month or two.

Meanwhile, city and county officials downplay the danger of the ash, saying lead is common in the environment and that unless a child is continually eating or breathing large amounts of it, no harm should be expected.

Officials also downplayed the danger in 1981. In a report prepared for the county that year, John T. Melbourn, chief of the county’s Division of Environmental Health, said, among other things, that the body excretes lead “quite readily” and that “lead from the old burning dump ash is not considered a threat to public health.”

Melbourn said last week that he stills believe that, but others disagree.

Dr. Robert B. Livingston, professor of neurosciences at the UCSD School of Medicine, said it is quite difficult to remove lead from body tissues, especially bone, and that any amount of lead can damage a child’s nervous system and brain.

“Any amount of lead has a deleterious effect,” Livingston said. “There is no threshold as far as a child is concerned in terms of lead.” Livingston has studied brain development and the effects of lead as well as the effects of lack of nutrients.

Lead affects the myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells, causing the nerve cell to swell, thereby interfering with the conduction of nerve impulses, he said.

Ingestion of lead is associated with lower IQs and mental retardation, as well as other disorders of the central nervous system, he said.

Airborne Problem

Lead in airborne dust can be a problem, he said, with the degree dependent on the concentration of the lead.

“Dust blows and gets tracked by people and animals into the household and onto hands, and hands go to food, food goes to mouths . . . Even quite low levels in the environment can begin to build up,” he said.

“Ash itself may be airborne for long distances and time, with enormous vagaries of wind,” he said. “When it gets on foliage and animals and clothing it gets tracked into supermarkets and into the household and onto tables, counters, dishrags, everything.”

Now, with the Navy and the state looking over the shoulders of local officials, some action appears likely.

City officials “have a legal obligation to do something about that,” said Bob Borzelleri, a spokesman for the toxics division of the state Department of Health Services.

In 1983, during a statewide effort to identify potential toxic dump sites, the state questioned city and county officials about the canyon area, Borzelleri said. Based on city and county representations that there was no problem in the canyon, the investigation was closed, he said.

But because of the information that emerged last week, the case has been reopened, he said.

“The city has a primary obligation as the owner of the property,” Borzelleri said. “We will be watching what the city will do with it.”