Golf Course Still a Dream as Landfill Waste Is Tested

When Don Lamoureux joined the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation in the mid-1960s, one of his first tasks was to draft plans for the eventual conversion of the Palos Verdes landfill into a golf course.

Lamoureux is scheduled to retire next month, but the project is still on the county’s drawing board.

“I don’t know if I’ll live to see it become a golf course,” he joked.

Though the Palos Verdes landfill was closed 10 years ago, plans to convert it into a golf course have been on hold since 1985, when contaminated water was found to be leaking from the property.

In April, health and sanitation officials hope to launch an elaborate testing program to determine whether hazardous waste buried at the site poses a pollution threat to the surrounding land and neighborhoods.

The program is expected to take three years to complete. If cleanup action is needed, as some experts believe, up to two additional years of work would be required, officials said. Redevelopment of the land is unlikely to begin before 1995, they predicted.

“It takes a long time to get contractors to drill holes, to get the laboratory work done, to do all the computer analysis,” said Steve Maguin, an engineer with the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County. “This is a very big job.”

The 290-acre landfill, located in Rolling Hills Estates, was opened in 1957. The last of its dumping grounds was closed in 1980. Some of the land has already been redeveloped: Ernie Howlett Park occupies 30 acres, and the South Coast Botanic Garden encompasses 80 acres.

The remaining 180 acres includes a small plant that makes electricity out of gas from the decomposing material underlying the site, but most of it is open land bordered by a bridle path.

In June, 1985, a 19-member citizens committee appointed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recommended that virtually all of the remaining open land be converted to a public, 18-hole golf course.

Such a project would please South Bay golfers, many of whom camp overnight in their cars to get a weekend tee time on one of the region’s five public courses. But before golfers can look to the defunct dump for new fairways, questions about pollutants have to be answered.

“If we don’t do this work now, we might be leaving a problem for a future generation,” said Allan Hirsch, spokesman for the state Department of Health Services.

Maguin said that of the 24-million tons of refuse accepted at the landfill, about 750,000 tons were known to be hazardous, most of it oil tank residue, drilling muds and other liquid waste from nearby refineries.

In December, 1985, a plume of polluted ground water was discovered in a portion of the landfill along Hawthorne Boulevard. Sanitation engineers later blocked the seepage by building a 900-foot-long underground barrier but have yet to determine whether there is a danger of similar leaks elsewhere on the site.

It is to answer this question that the county Sanitation Districts, supervised by the state Department of Health Services, is undertaking the testing program.

The work will involve soil, air and water tests to gauge the danger of buried pollutants moving off site and posing a health or environmental threat elsewhere.

For peninsula residents and visitors, the most conspicuous phase of the program will be the use of a drilling rig, officials say. As part of the hydrologic tests, 33 holes will be drilled at selected sites, including Ernie Howlett Park, the botanic garden and nearby neighborhoods, they said.

Maguin says it is unlikely remedial steps will be necessary, but Wael Ibrahim, a state health services official overseeing the project, disagrees.

“In my opinion, it will need some work,” Ibrahim said, speculating that isolated areas will probably require cleanup action. The work would likely involve the construction of additional underground barriers to prevent contaminants from moving off site, Ibrahim said.

Asked why testing was not begun earlier, officials of the Sanitation Districts and the state Department of Health Services said it has taken three years for them to develop the main features of the program.

Even now, they acknowledged, the state Health Services Department has yet to sign off on two of the eight parts of the testing plan. Hirsch admitted he cannot give a definitive starting date for the work, saying only that his agency is hoping it will begin in April.

For those interested in seeing a golf course on the property, such uncertainty is nothing new.

“I have been told ever since I’ve been here that the golf course was going to be built within the next seven years,” said Lamoureux of the county Department of Parks and Recreation.

James Park, head planner for the department, said he had expected work on a golf course to be under way by the end of the 1980s. But Park said his agency recognizes that closing down landfills properly to prevent pollution is vital, even if time-consuming. And a new golf course, he said, is worth the wait.

The county estimates that over the next 10 years, it would have to build 30 to 40 new public golf courses in the Los Angeles basin to accommodate the region’s population growth. So by 1995, Park said, the pressure for new courses will be at least as strong as it is now.

“I guess another five years won’t hurt,” he said.