Company Backs Out of McColl Test Burn : Toxics: Ogden Environmental Services cites financial and scheduling reasons for withdrawing. Its decision delays the dump cleanup.

A test burn of hazardous waste scheduled for February at the abandoned McColl dump has been scrubbed after the San Diego County company pioneering the technology for it backed out of the project, federal officials said Wednesday.

The decision by Ogden Environmental Services is expected to delay cleanup efforts at the dump, the worst hazardous waste site in Orange County, by six months, federal officials said.

Odgen, which is based in La Jolla, had planned to erect a temporary incinerator at the eight-acre dump site and conduct a monthlong experiment in which the toxic refinery wastes and oil-drilling mud buried there would be burned. But in a letter received earlier this month by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Ogden said it was withdrawing from the project, citing financial and scheduling difficulties.

Ogden officials wanted the EPA to pay the bulk of the $1.8 million Ogden estimated it would cost to prepare for and carry out the test burn at the dump site, which is on the federal government Superfund priority list for cleanup. When the EPA responded that it would spend no more than $500,000, Ogden officials opted to pull out of the project, according to an EPA spokesman.

“We are willing to cooperate and help pay for costs directly associated with the test burn,” EPA spokesman Terry Wilson said in a telephone interview from Sacramento, “but they were attempting to factor in a profit, depreciation costs for equipment and labor costs that we felt were too high.”

Ogden official Bob Wilbourn, however, downplayed the financial dispute between the company and EPA, saying the company withdrew from the test burn because none of its four portable incinerators would be available during February.

The on-site test burn of World War II-era sludge was considered critical to see whether such incineration would actually work and also to determine whether the emissions from it would violate federal air quality standards. Southern California is a heavily polluted area already under a strict federal mandate to meet those standards. EPA officials have said that, as planned, the incineration would pose little health risk.

Wilson denied that canceling the on-site test burn will greatly delay the ultimate selection of a cleanup method for the dump, which is on the western border of the city and a stone’s throw from neighborhoods of expensive single-family homes and the private Los Coyotes Country Club.

The waste was deposited at the site by five oil companies in the 1940s and early 1950s. The soil there is now contaminated with solvents such as benzene, toluene, xylene and acetone.

In February, EPA officials recommended that burning the hazardous waste would be the best way to rid the dump of its toxic contents, the equivalent of 6,000 truckloads. That recommendation was to be subject to confirmation in April, 1990, after the test burn. Wilson now says it may be October before any final decision is announced, prolonging the 10-year battle to clean up the site.

Ogden had been considered a leading choice to handle the on-site incineration, which engineers estimate would take as long as seven years of continuous burning to complete.

Earlier this year, Ogden conducted a three-day test burn of McColl waste at its La Jolla facility. The EPA said the results of that test were encouraging, showing that emissions from key contaminants in the tainted soil could be controlled and kept within health safety standards. The February field test at the dump site was scheduled to confirm those results.

Ogden has pioneered the use of an incineration technique known as circulating bed combustion. In it, contaminated soil is fed into an incinerator with a large circular bed that rotates in an extremely hot ovenlike device. Lime is added to neutralize the toxicity of the waste, which eventually is destroyed, leaving an ashy residue. Another reason for the test burn was to measure the toxicity of the residue, which EPA officials predict will not be hazardous and should therefore be redeposited into the dump.

More traditional incineration methods--rotary kilns, low-temperature thermal extraction and solvent extraction--are also being considered and tested by EPA officials. So far, no on-site tests for those methods have been scheduled.

Wilbourn of Ogden said the company is still interested in competing for the cleanup contract should the EPA decide to go ahead with on-site incineration. Federal officials estimate that that could cost $117 million.

The five oil companies--Shell Oil Co., Phillips Petroleum, Texaco, ARCO and Unocal--will be pressed to pay for the cleanup. A spokesman for a coalition of the companies said cancellation of the test burn provides the “perfect opportunity” for the EPA to abandon incineration and consider other cleanup methods.

The companies would prefer to have the hazardous waste capped in the ground by surrounding the toxic soil with subsurface walls extending below but not under the contaminants. That procedure would cost about $22 million.

BACKGROUND

The McColl dump was opened in the 1940s as a repository for oil drilling muds and refinery wastes. It now lies beneath a vacant field and part of a golf course at Los Coyotes Country Club in northwest Fullerton, and homes border it on three sides. Despite 10 years of hearings, reports, court orders and citizen protests, the site has yet to be cleaned up.