Big Lesson from Small Town’s Waste Fight

At nightfall, this picturesque town near the meeting of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains gets people choked up, but not with emotion.

The culprit is wood stoves. After work, folks like to build a nice, cozy fire. On Main Street the smoke is thick enough to suggest an antique steel mill lurking around some corner.

The roads are a more immediate danger than air quality. The rate of auto fatalities here in sparsely populated Lassen County is almost triple the statewide average.

People care about these things, but what they’re really up in arms about is a proposal to “safely” burn medical waste at an idle trash incinerator on the edge of town.

Their fears are understandable. The man behind the proposal, Raymond Adams, is an ex-convict whose U.S. companies have sometimes run afoul of environmental regulations.

Nor is diplomacy their strong suit. In Hampton, S.C., an Adams company tried to hire the local newspaper editor as a part-time consultant. “They asked me to name my price,” says Laura J. McKenzie, who rejected the offer as unethical. In Missouri, an Adams company filed a $1-million libel suit against a small-town schoolteacher for a letter published in a weekly that circulates 2,600 copies. The company sued someone else for a letter that McKenzie says wasn’t even printed.

All that aside, few of Lassen County’s 30,000 residents are interested in urban California’s medical trash. Many moved here precisely to avoid such things. There is already resentment--and much prosperity--arising from the state prison several miles up the road.

Indeed, opponents admit they’d be against incinerating any trash in town, medical or otherwise, even, it seems, if a saint ran the facility. Strife and death threats have bloomed; the fight over bringing in medical waste is tearing this town apart.

The battle of Susanville can teach business a lot about California. It underscores the contradiction between our profligate use of resources and our desire for a pristine environment. It begs the tough question of what to do with the mountain of wastes we generate. It shows how far we’ve taken government by referendum. And it illuminates the strange relationship between real and perceived danger.

“We worry about the wrong risks,” says H. W. Lewis, a UC Santa Barbara physicist whose new book, “Technological Risk” (Norton), explores the subject. “California is a particularly bad example.”

In Hanford, Calif., for instance, a new $70-million coal-fired power plant that met state emissions standards was closed by a state Court of Appeal, which held that the Hanford City Council failed to adequately consider the impact on regional air quality and to fully weigh less harmful alternatives. The case was brought by opponents of the plant.

Public perceptions of the worst environmental risks, as measured by a Roper Organization poll, are very different from rankings drawn up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.

The public thinks hazardous waste sites are a real threat, for example. But the scientists rank them as a low priority and fret more about habitat destruction and global warming.

A big problem in Susanville is that the incinerator already exists. It was built by Lassen Community College in a visionary attempt to cut its electric bill and train students for the burgeoning waste-to-energy industry.

Few objected when, in 1982, the college launched plans to generate power by burning household trash. Merrill Lynch underwrote $7.1 million in “certificates of participation,” which are like bonds, and First Interstate Bank signed on as trustee.

Lassen Community College is now among the few institutions turning out qualified cogeneration (trash-to-energy) operators, and they are in demand. Around the country, new plants are springing up all the time.

But operationally, the Lassen plant was a joke. Finished late, it produced toxic ash for awhile. Then its turbine broke. Falling oil prices and mismanagement--the college didn’t even secure a reliable supply of trash--killed the scholarly incinerator for good.

In 1986, the school landed in Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It’s been saddled with legal fees of $250,000 a year since then.

In an effort to partially repay debtholders and get itself out of bankruptcy, the college reached a complicated agreement with Susanville Resources Inc., an affiliate of Adams’ Canada-based Decom Medical Waste Systems Inc., a leading disposer of medical refuse.

SRI plans to burn 80 tons of medical and other waste at the facility daily while meeting California’s stringent emissions standards.

SRI has paid the college a non-refundable $1 million for the privilege and would pay another $600,000 if the project gets going. Decom has laid out hundreds of thousands more for environmental studies, legal fees and charity around town. It would also have to spend $5.4 million to retrofit the incinerator.

But the payoff could be big. California generates 12,000 tons of infectious medical waste annually--70% of it burned at regional facilities like the one proposed by SRI.

As a result of tougher state pollution standards adopted last year, the State Air Resources Board says, up to 129 of the 146 hospital-based incinerators that were still operating last July were expected to close.

Unfortunately for SRI, local opposition sprang up and attacked the plant’s safety, location and proposed new operator. It discovered that from 1965 to 1970, Ray Adams was imprisoned in Australia on charges arising from a huge business bankruptcy.

SRI lawyer Treva Hearne scoffs, saying his conviction is ancient history.

“We don’t hurt anybody,” she says. “You have more chance of being struck by lightning than killed by an incinerator.”

Adams adds that California’s laws are probably the toughest anywhere and that he hopes to make SRI’s operation a showplace to be replicated elsewhere.

Few in Susanville are persuaded. Since this is California, the world’s largest direct democracy, an advisory referendum was held in November. Voters disapproved of incineration in Lassen County by better than 4 to 1.

“The vote doesn’t mean diddly,” SRI spokesman Alan Siemer was quoted as saying.

Opponents such as Steve Robertson, a bearded high school teacher originally from Los Angeles, have been vocal, but their best argument is implicit, to wit: Who needs this thing?

It’s not exactly a case of “not in my back yard,” since Lassen County doesn’t remotely generate enough garbage to keep the plant going. The operators would have to truck more in.

SRI now hopes to license its facility through the state, without Lassen County’s approval. An environmental impact report by McClelland Consultants of Sacramento says SRI’s first-year revenue from the facility would be $11.6 million, of which expenses would consume just $7.8 million. That implies a 33% profit margin.

Local people would benefit too. Besides some new jobs, the county was to get $977,000 and the college $82,000 that same first year. The college’s training program would be strengthened too. Bob Bergard, who runs the program and serves as an SRI consultant, says these benefits are being dismissed by people who have succumbed to their own irrational impulses.

Among the least rational: “Every couple of months I get a phone call from someone saying they’re going to kill me or my family,” he says.

And although he’s respected around town, Bergard says some faculty colleagues tried to get him fired for supporting the plant.

In fact, 36 of 39 incinerators proposed in California from 1986 through 1989 were defeated. Susanville dumps its trash into a local landfill, a means of disposal with its own potential problems.

As Prof. Lewis puts it, “We do not match benefits and risks very well.”

But he acknowledges that a medical-waste incinerator hardly sounds tempting. “I wouldn’t want a lot of these things in my own back yard either,” he says. “I’m human. I’m irrational.”