Judge Rules Against Dunes Group : Oxnard: The court says residents have not shown a link between toxic wastes in the soil and their illnesses. Attorneys blame a misunderstanding.

The property owners who have filed suit over ground contamination beneath the Oxnard Dunes subdivision have not shown a link between the toxic substances and illnesses claimed by residents, a Ventura County Superior Court judge said this week in a tentative ruling.

But attorneys for the 175 plaintiffs said they have until May 31 to submit such evidence to Judge Melinda Johnson.

“There was a misunderstanding as to what the judge wanted,” said Fred Rucker, an attorney representing 41 of the plaintiffs. He said he had filed a list of the chemicals present at the former dump and a list of illnesses suffered by residents of the 100-lot subdivision, but had not provided a cause-effect linkage.

“We have experts capable of doing that between now and May 31,” Rucker said.

Before the case, which was filed in 1987, goes to trial, Johnson is trying to determine whether sufficient grounds exist for all of the allegations. The suit claims, among other things, that developers, land owners and the city of Oxnard failed to disclose the existence of the dump and that the contamination has caused a loss of property values, as well as personal injury and emotional distress.

Glen M. Reiser, attorney for one of the defendants, said a previous order by Johnson made clear that the only evidence that could be submitted after Jan. 7 was information not previously available.

In any case, Reiser said he doubts that the plaintiffs can establish a causal link between toxic materials buried beneath the subdivision and residents’ illnesses. The state Department of Health Services completed five years of testing in November and concluded that the dump poses no health risk.

While the lawyers debated the effect of Johnson’s tentative ruling, which she issued Wednesday, some Dunes residents were digging up potential new evidence.

Fleet Rust, a soils analyst for Geoscience Analytical Inc. of Simi Valley, was supervising the excavation of a trench to gather soil samples. When they were 11 feet down in the vacant lot on Dunes Street, the excavators hit a layer of oily liquid with a strong smell of petroleum.

Steve Blanchard, chairman of a plaintiffs’ steering committee, said the trench work is important because the state health agency only took core samples and did not do any trenching.

The county Department of Environmental Health was notified and the diggers filled the trench with adjacent topsoil rather than put back soil that might be contaminated.

Times correspondent Gerry Brailo Spencer contributed to this story.