2 Years After Outcry, Plant Is Still Making Deadly Gas

More than two years after public officials and citizens called for its shutdown or relocation, the Phoenix Research Corp. plant in a La Mesa business park is still conducting business as usual by manufacturing two deadly gases.

Phoenix officials now estimate that it will take another two years to move the plant from an undistinguished building at 8075 Alvarado Road.

Meanwhile, attempts by local pollution officials to close the plant have been stymied by a legal challenge from Phoenix, leaving the Union Carbide subsidiary free to make the deadly gases without any regulatory supervision by the Air Pollution Control District.

‘Absolutely Outrageous’

“It’s outrageous. It’s absolutely outrageous,” Dr. Joseph LaDou, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at UC San Francisco, said Tuesday about the fact that Phoenix continues to operate.

“When the community and the state Department of Health Services and various witnesses go and tell the County of San Diego that they are allowing the manufacturing of one of the most dangerous materials ever used in industry in a congested suburban area--and nobody acts on the informantion--something is wrong,” said LaDou, who testified against the plant’s operation at a pollution-district hearing.

But Phoenix President Randall Kelley said Tuesday that the plant’s operation continues to be safe.

“We’re producing arsine and phosphine exactly as we always have--in a very safe manner,” Kelley said. “The only things we can say is we have taken what we believe to be the appropriate safeguards, and we are comfortable with the safety of this operation.”

Kelley also estimated it may be 1990 when the plant finally vacates its La Mesa building, for which the company has a lease through Jan. 1991. Phoenix is considering several locations in California and elsewhere for a relocated plant, said Kelley, who declined to disclose the locations.

The Phoenix plant operated virtually unnoticed after it moved from New Jersey to La Mesa in 1973. It made the move to be closer to its semiconductor clients in Southern California.

The plant produces arsine and phosphine, both acutely toxic gases used to alter the electrical characteristics of such materials as silicon. Kelley said the gases are made on demand in batches that amount to 60 cubic feet of arsine and 250 cubic feet of phosphine.

Whiff Causes Death

Federal limits for exposure to the gases are low--0.3 parts per million (ppm) for phosphine and 0.05 ppm for arsine. A whiff of 500 ppm of arsine would cause instant death, since that concentration would freeze the hemoglobin in the red blood cells.

The Phoenix plant was lifted from obscurity following the disaster in Bhopal, India, where the leak of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide plant killed 2,000 people. A 1985 Times story reported the manufacturing of the gases, and La Mesa Mayor Fred Nagel urged the company to move out of town.

Relocation appeared to be at hand until Union Carbide decided in March, 1987, to give up efforts to move the plant to Washougal, Wash. because of an unfavorable economic climate there. However, the company vowed to move the plant out of La Mesa before the 1991 lease expires.

Meanwhile, Phoenix officials became locked in an administrative and legal battle with the county’s Air Pollution Control District over whether the plant could operate at all.

The company claimed that it is excluded from pollution controls because of a regulatory exemption for laboratories. Phoenix officials argued that its plant is a laboratory because its equipment is purchased directly from a laboratory warehouse and the gases are produced on laboratory scales.

Obtained Injunction

Air Pollution Control District staff members, however, disagreed and classified the plant a production facility. Phoenix had been operating without a permit, and the company was asked to submit plans for preventing and controlling an accidental gas leak.

When Phoenix officials failed to submit a proposal for any pollution-control devices, the district issued a 1986 order to shut the plant on grounds that it poses a health risk in the event of an accident. A few days after the order, district staff members found the company still operating and issued a citation.

But company attorneys obtained a 1987 injunction that permitted the plant to continue its operation without any controls. That injunction will be re-examined in a hearing scheduled for June 27.

While they fought through the courts, Phoenix officials submitted a second proposal to the district just two months ago to install special scrubbers at the plant as a safeguard against the accidental release of arsine and phosphine.

Paul Sidhu, the air district’s deputy director, said Tuesday he doesn’t know if or when the district will approve the application for the scrubbers.

Until then, Phoenix can simply continue business as usual.

“It is still operating but our hands are tied,” said Sidhu.

Of the chance of an accidental release of gases, he said, “. . . All we can do is hope that won’t happen.”