EPA Wants to Add O.C. Site to Superfund List : Environment: Toxics have oozed into a Westminster subdivision’s lawns and patios for nearly a decade.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that a neighborhood where black globs of toxic waste have oozed into lawns and patios for nearly a decade qualifies for the Superfund list of the hazardous dump sites.

The 73-home subdivision east of the San Diego Freeway near Golden West Street sits atop two trenches of 60-year-old oil refinery waste. It is considered one of the most unusual toxic waste sites in California and a potentially difficult one to correct.

By nominating the site for the national list, the federal agency is proposing it as a priority for using federal funds and expertise in a cleanup. The public has about two months to comment before the agency makes its final decision.

Nearly all nominees wind up on the final list, and EPA officials said they expect little or no controversy or opposition in this case.

Local officials said they welcome federal involvement because they have been unable to fix blame for the waste. A major cleanup can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

“I think this is very, very good,” Westminster Mayor Charles V. Smith said. “It’s such a tremendously large undertaking to clean it up, and it will take federal help.”

Two other county sites are already on the Superfund list: the McColl dump in Fullerton and El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Sites are nominated when they pose a serious, long-term threat to health or the environment. Unlike the Westminster site, nearly all of the nation’s 1,200 Superfund sites are in industrial areas, military bases or vacant lots.

The long-awaited announcement came three years after the EPA dispatched crews into the neighborhood to sample the waste and conduct studies.

“I am delighted,” said Robert E. Merryman, director of the Environmental Health Division of the county’s Health Care Agency. “With EPA involved, there would be many more resources available. It will be slow, very methodical, but I think it has a better chance of being cleaned up sooner with EPA handling it than the state.”

Some homeowners have lived with the toxic goop for so long that they are not very concerned about the situation. But others are worried about the health threat or the impact on their property values if they try to sell their homes.

“It’s really ho-hum for us,” said Harvey Pelow, 29, who lives on Gulino Circle. “The people who did the testing left and didn’t tell us anything. They have just kept us in limbo.”

Mike Torres, 53, a Sowell Avenue resident for 36 years, said Thursday that his daughter has asthma and that he recently developed it.

He pointed to black ooze on his lawn, next to a swing set, and said he wonders whether it is related to the waste.

The tarlike waste in the 23-acre area contains at least four potential cancer-causing chemicals, including lead, benzene and highly potent sulfuric acid, which can burn skin on contact.

Chemicals have seeped into shallow ground water, but health officials said no drinking water has been contaminated. Also, there are no measurable fumes in the air, officials said, so the waste poses no immediate threat to residents.

The waste at the site, formerly known as the Murdy Dairy Farm, apparently came from nearby oil fields in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the late 1950s, J.T. Hintz Co., a now-defunct Anaheim developer, bought the land to build homes and moved the waste into two foot-wide trenches nearby.

EPA officials said they have been unable to make either oil companies or anyone tied to the defunct developer clean it up. The amount of waste has not been estimated.

The county Environmental Health Division first learned of the problem in 1982, when a woman complained of black globs oozing from the soil into her swimming pool. The county reported the acidic material to the state Department of Health Services, but state officials did not warn residents of the risk until 1988 because the inquiry was lost in a backlog of other investigations.

Although the announcement caught them by surprise, several residents said Thursday that they are not eager for the federal government to get involved because that could prolong the problem. Superfund sites, including McColl, are often so bogged down in complex bureaucratic problems that deciding on a plan to get rid of waste can take decades.

Don Cornell, 60, who has lived in the area for 25 years, said that he does not like the delays but that he is not too worried about the impact on the value of his property. A neighbor recently sold a three-bedroom home for $190,000, he said.

But Cornell said the EPA faces an enormous task. “This is going to cost a whole bunch of money; we’re talking millions here,” he said.

The site poses unusual cleanup problems, especially if the contaminated soil has reached beneath house foundations. State health officials who have begun analyzing cleanup ideas said a likely choice is to seal the waste in concrete where it lies, although digging up yards is an option.

The EPA’s decision took three years, longer than usual because the agency developed a new system to evaluate whether sites deserve to be nominated for the list. Considered in the decision are the toxicity of the waste, the threat posed to the air and water and the proximity of the waste to residents.

EPA spokesman Terry Wilson said the waste’s relatively low toxicity makes the Westminster site less serious than many Superfund sites, including two others nominated Thursday: the Del Amo Facility, a former rubber-manufacturing plant in an industrial-commercial area of Los Angeles, and Stoker Co., a pesticide distributing company in Imperial.