Time Needed on Landfill Report

It is essential that additional time be granted for the community to respond to the draft environmental impact report on the Lopez Canyon Landfill.

Documents sent to those who responded to the pre-draft EIR was approximately one inch thick. Supplemental material was not included. Upon investigation, it was found that the supplementary documents were over six inches thick, not including the transportation report.

The undersigned attempted to buy the supplemental material and was refused by the Sanitation Department and the firm that prepared the report.

Trying to plow through this huge volume of material at a local library is an impossible task when one realizes that only one copy is in a library and most persons have other occupations during library hours.

One of the problems concerning the report is the discovery that one portion is in dispute with another; illustration of the same cross sections do not agree within the documents. There are also many errors including, but not limited to, the exact location of the landfill boundaries; one map does not agree with another; the statement that water from Lopez Canyon goes into the Lopez Dam, when actually it goes into the Hansen Dam then into the aquifer from which Los Angeles, Glendale and Burbank extract drinking water; that an active fault is only on the southerly edge of the landfill, when it actually lies beneath the entire site as depicted by a State Mine and Geology map contained elsewhere in the report.

Also, that hazardous material could find its way northward and eastward to the wells in upper Kagel Canyon, but that those wells furnish water for irrigation and firefighting only when actually they produce the drinking water for that community, and that surface water from the landfill would not contaminate the aquifer to the south when the analytical report indicates that samples of ground water in Bartholamaus Canyon contain solvents such as trichlorobenzene, trichlorophenol and chloronaphthalene as well as heavy metals such as lead, chromium and arsenic.

Omissions have taken time to discover and research, such as diseases contained in sewer sludge including paratyphoid fever, salmonellosis, cholera and hepatitis, which can be carried in the air or by flies, mosquitoes, rodents and other vectors to the nearby residential areas.

We must be granted an extension of time to address adequately this draft EIR.

ANSON BURLINGAME

Shadow Hills