San Diego County Residents Fume Over Waste Plan

A year ago, Carlos Nava bought five acres in Boulevard in the hope that its pristine air would soothe his failing lungs. Now Nava is adding his halting voice to the outcry against a hazardous waste incinerator proposed for southeast San Diego County.

“I feel a duty to bring my lungs and my voice as testimony to what chemicals can do,” Nava said softly, his words punctuated by sharp gasps. At a public meeting in Pine Valley on Monday night to discuss the proposal for the waste facility on the La Posta Indian reservation, Nava told how his lungs were damaged when a crop duster sprayed pesticides on him.

“It’s too late for my lungs,” he told a hushed crowd of about 400. “But for you, now is the time to fight. There can be no chemical accidents if there are no chemicals around.”

On Tuesday, at a second public meeting in Alpine, Gloria Clark echoed Nava’s words.

“We have sat back for many years,” Clark, a local landowner who suffers from asthma, told the 75 people who had gathered to express their views. “Now it’s time for grandmothers like me to speak out.”

Officially, the two public hearings the federal government held Monday and Tuesday were merely “scoping meetings”--the first in a series of steps to determine the environmental feasibility of the hazardous waste recycling and incinerating station. Three companies are seeking to build the project. But judging from the comments of most of the ranchers, farmers, Indians, lawyers, scientists and housewives who spoke at the two sessions, it sounded more like a call to arms--not just for backcountry residents, but for all San Diego County dwellers.

“They come out here thinking they’re going to have an easy fight, assuming everybody back here is backwoods,” said Frank Santana, one of many speakers who directed comments to the boisterous crowd rather than to the federal officials and project spokesmen present. “We’re backwoods, but we’re not back wards .”