Toxics Tester : Hazardous Spills Specialist Tracks Oil Contamination in Oxnard

While other environmentalists are picking up trash, planting trees or demonstrating for clean air during Earth Day observances on Sunday, Paula Batarseh hopes to be relaxing at the beach.

That’s because weekdays are earth days for Batarseh, 24, who is in charge of cleaning up two potentially dangerous toxic chemical spills that have troubled Ventura and Los Angeles county officials for years.

Batarseh is a hazardous materials specialist for the state Department of Health Services. Her work will determine whether dozens of families have to abandon their homes in Oxnard and whether ground water becomes contaminated in an arid canyon north of Los Angeles.

In Oxnard, she is carefully testing for contamination from an abandoned oil sump beneath a 99-lot subdivision. She is using equipment that is so sensitive that it once detected whiffs of natural gas leaking from a homeowner’s defective clothes dryer.

In Canyon Country in the Santa Clarita Valley, she has kicked the owner of an oil recycling plant off his property until she finishes analyzing hundreds of barrels of oils, acids and sludge that she has gathered from his 32-year-old petroleum processing site.

Batarseh needs special gear to protect her against dangerous chemicals--and a thick skin to deflect the strong criticism that she occasionally receives from hostile property owners.

She wears a plastic jumpsuit over her designer jeans as she collects samples from chemical tanks at the Lubrication Co. of America recycling plant off Soledad Canyon Road.

A gas mask hides her face when she walks near open drums of oils and acids. She wears a hard hat when she ventures close to towers filled with chemicals at the 5-acre site.

Batarseh’s heavy rubber boots leave few tracks in the dirt around the 119 chemical storage tanks, however. That’s because dust has been matted down by oil that has spilled from valves and pipes.

“The first thing you want to do at night when you get home is take a nice, hot shower,” she said.

Batarseh ends the day by curling up with a good book at home in the San Fernando Valley. This week it’s “Alternative Techniques for Treatment of Hazardous Wastes,” a volume she finds particularly engrossing. “It can keep me up all night.”

State officials say Batarseh is the youngest woman in charge of a multimillion-dollar toxic cleanup project. They say her femininity works in her favor on the job.

“On the surface, she looks quiet and soft-spoken,” said Steve Lavinger, who heads the state’s hazardous waste removal program for Ventura, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties.

“She works real well with the contractors and the public. But on the other hand, she stands pretty firm on issues when work has to be done a certain way.”

Although there is daily potential for danger in her work, Batarseh says, she doesn’t consider it as risky as her last job.

That was at the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station near Sacramento, where her assignment involved “investigating and resolving nonconformance occurences” at the atomic plant.

Her husband’s job is more dangerous, Batarseh said. “He owns a liquor store.”

A Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, Batarseh says she became hooked on environmental work while studying chemical engineering in college in Canada. She had joined an asbestos-removal project because it was the only summer job available to students, she said.

“I find it’s really interesting to go out there and see what a real mess our environment is in,” she said.

State health officials have assigned Batarseh to determine how much work is needed at the Oxnard and Canyon Country sites and then to oversee cleanup work by private contractors. The final combined cost of the projects is expected to be in the millions.

Batarseh has fielded criticism from Oxnard property owners who complain that the oil cleanup in their neighborhood is moving too slowly. Homeowners in the half-built 99-lot subdivision a few blocks from the Oxnard Shores beach area have known since 1985 that they live atop a long-buried oil sump.

That’s the year that a builder struck oil--or at least a gooey substance that smelled like gasoline--when he dug a hole to start work on a new house.

Local health officials at first thought that tanks at a nearby gas station were leaking. But it was soon learned that the dunes had been used in the 1950s as a dumping ground for wastes from oil fields. Although the sump had been removed in 1962 when the land was subdivided, some of the oil apparently remained.

The state became involved in late 1987 after Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) authored a bill authorizing health officials to use state money to investigate the dunes danger. The study began last year.

Geologists have probed soil samples taken from several lots in the subdivision. Earlier this month, Batarseh and other workers used special air sniffers to check for signs that gas is leaking from the sand into houses.

They did not find any sign of gas wafting from the ground. But they alerted a Dune Street resident that a gas valve on her clothes dryer was leaking and that natural gas was building up inside her home.

Last week, test holes were driven so that salty ground water 10 feet beneath the dunes can be tested for petroleum content.

“We should come to our conclusions about the risk to residents by the end of May,” Batarseh said. “Everyone is waiting for our decision. They feel their hands are tied. People are very upset when they call me.”

She said the study has been slow because funding delays have required the work to be done in phases.

So far, low levels of toluene, xylene and ethyl benzene have been found in soil samples. To Batarseh’s relief, no benzene has yet been discovered. It is a known carcinogen.

“We would consider everything, if it’s found to be hazardous,” she said. “Excavation of the contaminated soil, even demolition of the houses here.”

Residents and lot owners are waiting anxiously for the results. A moratorium on new construction in the dunes area has been imposed by Oxnard officials until the issue is resolved.

“We don’t drink the water out of the taps here,” said Frank Tresierras, who lives next to the vacant lot where Batarseh has drilled two test wells. “Everybody up here basically gets bottled water. You just don’t know what is going to surface. Even when I shower, I’m concerned.”

Property owner Dennis McGrath said the officials’ investigation has taken far too long.

“The state came in and scared people,” McGrath said. “We’re going into the fifth year of this. For four years a cloud has been hanging over this neighborhood. It’s still hanging there.”

The cleanup already has begun at Batarseh’s Canyon Country site.

At the Soledad Canyon Road recycling plant, workers are removing rows of oversized steel barrels that enclose leaky or rusting 55-gallon drums of chemicals that Batarseh decided were too risky to move by themselves.

Tests have indicated that some of the chemicals contain PCBs, heat-resistant compounds that once were used in hydraulic fluids and electrical cooling oils. Now banned, PCBs are a suspected cause of cancer.

Before she is finished, Batarseh will have sent 229 chemical barrels to a hazardous waste landfill near the San Joaquin Valley town of Kettleman City. She will also have drilled test wells 70 feet to the canyon’s water table to determine whether the aquifer is contaminated.

Removal of some of the above-ground wastes may be difficult, however.

Batarseh said some tanks are glued shut by dried oil sludge that has hardened to the consistency of the sandstone in the hills that surround the plant.

“We may have to cut them open and use jackhammers to get it out,” she said. ‘We’ll probably be here all summer.”

That’s bad news for recycling plant operator Grant Ivey.

The cleanup has forced Ivey to close the facility, which was built in 1958 by his father to recycle oil from moth-balled Navy ships by turning it into lubrication fluid and truck diesel fuel.

With the plant shut, Ivey and his mother and two sisters are trying to sell the site and an adjacent 56-acre parcel. The land is on the market for $6.7 million, although potential buyers will not be allowed to inspect all of it until the cleanup is finished.

As part of an agreement with state health officials, Ivey will pay cleanup costs of up to $1.4 million from profits from any future sale. Costs above that will be covered by state toxic waste cleanup bond money.

A angry Ivey contends that he could have cleaned up the site himself for $495,000. He said the amount of spilled oil is small and is less harmful than the residue found on supermarket parking lots across Los Angeles.

“By the time they get through, they’ll have spent $3 million or $4 million,” Ivey predicted. “It’s overkill.”