EPA Delays Decision on McColl Burn

A final decision on how to clean up 150,000 tons of toxic waste at the abandoned McColl dump in Fullerton has been delayed until April, 1990, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokesman said Friday.

The EPA announced in March that it planned to clean the dump by building an incinerator at the site and burning the contaminated sludge. A final decision on the plan, in the form of three mandatory documents--a record of decision, a remedial action plan and an environmental impact report--was to have been made in August.

But the agency was overwhelmed by responses to the incineration plan during a 114-day public comment period and needs the additional eight months to address all the issues raised, EPA western region spokesman Terry Wilson said.

“We’re still in the process of reviewing all of the comments we received,” Wilson said. “We need to address all of those responses before we make a (final) decision.”

But the delay in no way represents a weakening of the EPA’s position that incineration is the best alternative to clean up the site, Wilson said.

“The proposed plan says thermal destruction--to burn it somehow,” said Wilson. “There are various processes we can use. . . . Our preference is to do it on-site.”

A coalition of oil companies, which may be forced to spend tens of millions of dollars for the cleanup, has opposed the EPA’s plan, offering instead to cap the acidic sludge until a less-expensive, more environmentally secure method of disposal is available.

The EPA’s incineration plan would cost an estimated $117 million, while the oil companies’ proposal to cap the sludge would cost just $22 million. The contaminated sludge is a combination of World War II-era aviation fuel waste products, other refinery wastes and oil drilling muds left in the abandoned dump now ringed by expensive homes and a golf course.

Capping the Sludge

The coalition, called the McColl Site Group, says that incineration would pollute the air and leave ash residue that would have to be transported somewhere else for redisposal.

But the EPA, Fullerton city officials and some neighboring residents say that capping the sludge simply transfers the problem to future generations.

Despite the EPA’s insistence that it still prefers incineration, the coalition interpreted the agency’s delay of its final decision as at least a sign that objections and alternatives are being carefully considered.

“The main reason for the delay is addressing the very significant questions the community raised and the McColl Site Group raised on incineration,” said Bill Duchie, spokesman for the coalition, which consists of Unocal, Phillips Petroleum, Shell Oil and Texaco Inc. “If there weren’t significant questions, there wouldn’t be a delay.”

The McColl Site Group submitted three volumes, each two to three inches thick, of concerns about the incineration plan--plus 25 volumes of supporting reference documents. It also mounted a telephone and mail campaign before public hearings earlier this year to alert residents who might oppose the incineration plan.

Residents Understand

Betty Porras, who lives behind the dump and heads the McColl Dump Action Group, said the residents’ group has no problem with the EPA delay.

“We agree with them that it was necessary,” Porras said. “I saw the number of volumes (of public responses) they have to go through. . . . Mostly they are from the oil companies.”

EPA spokesman Wilson said the agency intends to set up a circulating bed incinerator at the dump this fall and perform a test burn for about a month. Other cleanup methods the agency is still evaluating include low-temperature thermal extraction, rotary kiln incineration and solvent extraction, Wilson said.

After a four-day test burn last March at a La Jolla incinerator similar to the one the EPA proposes to build at the McColl dump, EPA officials said preliminary results showed that air emissions would not be a major problem.

But the oil coalition disputed that, saying heavy metals are not destroyed by incineration but instead become metallic vapors and are released into the atmosphere through the incinerator exhaust.

If none of the on-site incineration methods prove satisfactory, the EPA could consider trucking the waste to a commercial hazardous-waste incinerator, Wilson said. But the nearest facilities are in Kansas, Texas or Arkansas--adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the project.