Firm Accused in Chemical Dumping Case : Environment: Paint company hid hazardous materials the garbage for 2 1/2 years, D.A. says. It’s called one of the most serious environmental crimes ever uncovered by the county.

An Anaheim paint manufacturing plant and its top executive were charged Tuesday with five felony counts for allegedly hiding several hundred thousand gallons of hazardous chemicals in sawdust and secretly dumping it in the garbage for at least 2 1/2 years.

W.C. Richards Co. saved several thousand dollars per week by disguising the solvents and hauling them illegally to the county-run Brea-Olinda landfill, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gerald Johnston, an environmental-protection prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Environmental officials termed it one of the most premeditated and large-scale cases they have seen in Orange County, and said the dumping endangers public health because county dumps cannot safely handle chemicals. The carcinogenic liquids can slowly leak into the ground water and release toxic fumes into the air.

“This is one of the most serious environmental crimes we’ve had in Orange County,” Johnston said. “It’s serious because they dumped a tremendous volume of the stuff, and we have found these chemicals in the ground water (underneath) the landfill. We can’t say for sure it came from the dumping by W.C. Richards, but it was the same chemicals.”

The district attorney charged W.C. Richards Co., 1116 N. Olive St., and Marion Bruce Hale, 44, of Brea, with five counts of unlawful disposal of hazardous waste. Hale, a vice president of the Illinois-based paint company, is in charge of the Anaheim manufacturing facility,

W.C. Richards employees told authorities that disguising and dumping the chemicals was a common practice for five years, Johnston said, but the statute of limitations restricts the case to crimes allegedly committed in the past three years.

An arrest warrant on the criminal charges was issued Tuesday for Hale, who, along with the corporation, could face fines up to $100,000 per day of violation for 2 1/2 years, or about $90 million. Hale also could be sentenced to serve up to six years in state prison if convicted.

“His attorney says he will turn himself in tomorrow,” Johnston said.

Hale’s attorney, John Burns of Los Angeles, said Tuesday that he could not comment on the allegations.

“We haven’t seen the complaint yet. All I can say is we’re taking this matter very seriously. We’re working it out with the D.A. now,” he said.

Attorneys for W.C. Richards Co., a paint manufacturer with headquarters in Chicago, did not return telephone calls Tuesday.

Johnston said Hale directed his employees on a daily basis to mix unusable sludge and solvents with sawdust, then cover it with ordinary garbage in trash bins that were hauled by garbage trucks to the Brea-Olinda landfill.

Employees told officials that they illegally disposed of 150 to 300 gallons of solvents per day, Johnston said. For years, the plant had told the Anaheim Fire Department it was recycling all its chemicals, fire officials said in April.

In April, the county’s environmental strike team, acting on an anonymous phone tip, diverted the company’s garbage for four days. They said they found hazardous concentrations of metals, methyl ethyl ketone, trichloroethane, ethylbenzene, xylene and toluene, all highly toxic solvents that are suspected carcinogens.

Four of the five felony charges stem from the waste sampled and other evidence collected in that undercover investigation. The fifth charges unlawful disposal daily for 2 1/2 years.

“What they were dumping were sludges and highly contaminated solvents, with lots of metals, such as zinc and lead,” Johnston said. “There were all kinds of exotic solvents.”

The company was raided April 17 by the strike team, which is coordinated by the district attorney’s office and is composed of members of about 10 city, county and regional agencies.

State law requires the chemicals to be disposed of in special toxic-waste plants or landfills, most of which are several hundred miles from Orange County. The cost of legal disposal of solvent waste is about $500 per 55-gallon drum. In contrast, it costs mere pennies to dump a drum in a county landfill.

Frank Bowerman, director of Orange County’s Integrated Waste Management Department, said there are probably other companies that disguise their toxic waste and dump it in the landfills, “but I don’t think there’s a huge number of them.”

He said household chemicals, such as bleach and paint, are also dumped illegally in the trash. The county this year opened a collection center in Anaheim that is the first of several free household toxics roundup sites in the county.

Small businesses are struggling because they are prohibited from using the centers and they have trouble paying disposal costs that larger companies can more easily afford.

“There are probably a few hundred companies in Orange County that are rocking along earning some kind of living, and they can’t really afford the costs of legal disposal. The county should help them,” Bowerman said. “But that doesn’t excuse what this paint company did. They were doing things knowingly in violation of the law.”