REGIONAL REPORT : Trash Dumps May Intrude on Desert Serenity

Ten years ago, Donna and Larry Charpied moved deep into the desert to escape the congested urban Southern California lifestyle.

Today they raise jojoba plants on the superheated floor of the Chuckawalla Valley, 60 miles over lonesome highway from such amenities as supermarkets, banks or hospitals.

“Purple mountains’ majesty? We get to live in it,” said Larry, 38, a UC Santa Barbara graduate, staring into the far-off, hilly horizon from his hardscrabble 10-acre farm. “We don’t have to dream about it or see it on TV every once in a while.”

But time, and civilization, march on. And the Charpieds may not have retreated far enough to avoid the tentacles of the spreading megalopolis. Or, at the very least, its detritus.

Soon the view from the window of their home, a converted 1954 Airstream trailer, could include Caterpillars and John Deeres in addition to badgers, barn owls and kit foxes. All to make way for what has been billed as the largest landfill in the United States, a final resting place for 20,000 tons of urban Southern California trash daily.

The Eagle Mountain waste-by-rail plan--calling for 25% of Southern California’s trash to be tossed into an abandoned iron-ore mine a mile from the southeastern edge of Joshua Tree National Monument--is but one of five major regional waste-disposal proposals under serious consideration for the desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

To the north, in the Mojave Desert, a competing trash-by-rail plan at Amboy calls for the dumping of 21,000 tons a day into 30-foot holes dug in flat desert terrain. Outside Needles, a Kentucky firm is on the verge of winning government approval for a low-level radioactive-waste dump, one of only four in the United States and the first to open in a generation.

Elsewhere along Interstate 40, the cross-desert highway that critics warn may eventually be dubbed “Trash Alley,” a pair of commercial toxic waste dumps have been proposed for burial of hazardous waste residues that are now trucked to the Central Valley or Utah. For government officials on the coastal, urban side of Southern California, these inland sites seem an ideal solution to the region’s burgeoning waste crisis.

To them, the desert--hot, dry, inexpensive and seemingly endless--appears geologically and fiscally suited for the disposal of the region’s waste. And with city dwellers increasingly sporting NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) complexes, why not place new facilities in a region that has fewer back yards?

“Certainly we’re better off in Southern California moving all of the pollution we can out of the Los Angeles Basin,” said Dr. Forest Tennant, a former West Covina mayor who has served on several commissions studying solid waste.

But as the various projects move toward government approval, opposition is growing among people for whom the desert is a refuge from the smog, crime and other ill effects of metropolitan life.

At recent hearings on the Eagle Mountain and Needles projects, angry desert residents painted an ugly picture of an insensitive, unwieldy behemoth to the west raining tons of plastic shopping bags, disposable diapers and rotten vegetables on America’s last frontier.

“People who don’t want the filth of the city move to the desert,” testified Patricia Weissleader, a Desert Hot Springs organic farmer, at a hearing on the Eagle Mountain plan. “The (cities) should not be allowed to destroy the purity of the place.”

Even desert dwellers who welcome the dumps as an economic boon acknowledge they will harm the air and aesthetics of the outback. But the problems, they add, are outweighed by the promise of new jobs and the logic of shipping waste to areas where the fewest people live and work.

“We’ve become a people that are preoccupied with our own back yards and we’ve forgotten that we live in a neighborhood,” said Allen Reames, a Desert Center asparagus farmer and attorney. “We have a responsibility to the neighborhood in which we live, which is Southern California.”

The trouble, as many desert dwellers see it, is that people in the cities just don’t have an adequate appreciation of the wild, wide-open spaces here on the lee side of the San Bernardino and San Gorgonio mountain ranges. To view the desert as a dumping ground, they say, is to ignore its true value.

“We live here and a lot of endangered species live here,” said San Bernardino County Supervisor Marsha Turoci. “There’s a rare beauty that we see, the vastness, just to look out and see the horizon and the mountains.”

“Most of the people who drive through the desert are going to a destination such as Las Vegas,” continued Turoci, whose 19,000-square-mile district is the size of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. “They look out the window and see nothing. It probably makes sense to them that nothing lives here and that nothing can--so let’s push our trash here.”

That attitude has been expressed time and again in the popular media, opponents say. Take John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” where the hard-luck Joad family, having escaped the Oklahoma dust bowl, face a final tease when they make it to Needles.

“Wait till we get to California,” says Pa. “You’ll see nice country then.”

Replies Tom: “Jesus Christ, Pa! This here is California.”

Dump naysayers prefer the outlook of author and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who in one of his books about the arid West described the desert as “a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea.”

No part of that sea would be more buffeted, opponents charge, than the 600-population Desert Center area, which faces the prospect of becoming the repository for one-fourth of the household trash from Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego counties.

At Eagle Mountain, once a Kaiser Steel ore mine, the plan by Pomona-based Mine Reclamation Corp. calls for six trains and as many as 200 trucks a day to dump the garbage into what now are open pits. The pits have enough space to receive trash for 100 years, organizers say.

Such capacity is eyed with lust by metropolitan planners. In two years, they say, more garbage will be collected daily across Los Angeles County then there is available space to dump it. Current landfills are so overburdened that dump trucks begin lining up well before dawn at the county’s largest, Puente Hills, to make their deposits before a daily capacity of 13,200 tons is reached.

What’s more, the problem is not limited to the region’s urban core. In northern San Diego County, for example, officials are scurrying for options as the area’s main landfill, San Marcos, reaches capacity in January.

Nevertheless, many desert dwellers say it is unfair for them to suffer the potential consequences.

Citing a recent draft environmental impact report, opponents of Eagle Mountain contend the megadump would harm air quality and threatened species, including the desert tortoise. In a concern of special interest in the desert, they also are wary of underground water contamination despite assurances in the report that installation of a liner and drainage system would provide sufficient protection.

The local gathering spot for opponents is the Desert Center Cafe, a 24-hour roadside restaurant that hasn’t changed, except for an occasional paint job, since the days of the Great Depression.

Stanley Ragsdale, whose parents founded the unincorporated community in 1921, would like to keep the cafe and area that way.

“(The landfill) is not feasible, it’s not practical, it’s not cost-effective,” Ragsdale said. “I was thinking of putting an ad in the Wall Street Journal: ‘Come to Riverside County, home of the biggest garbage dump on Earth.’ ”

Waitress Vickie Adams worried that regional efforts to reduce the solid-waste stream would be ignored if the urban dwellers who generate the preponderance of the trash could ship it off to the desert.

“If every community would try to do their part, I think it would cut the problem down. There’s vacant land around Los Angeles too,” she said. “But I mean, boy, can you imagine them saying you can bury your trash there for 100 years?”

Indeed, opponents point out, no urban communities have expressed a willingness to house transfer and recycling centers for the trash that would be sent by train to Eagle Mountain.

Down the road at McGoo’s Bar and Mini-Mart, owner Ken Statler plays host to supporters of the landfill. The Eagle Mountain project “will provide economic strength for the community,” he said. “It will give me the opportunity to have the bodies to sell things to.”

Proponents also point out that Eagle Mountain is different than the other desert waste proposals because it would be placed on property already scarred by industry. Until Kaiser went bankrupt in the early 1980s, they note, Eagle Mountain was a hub of activity, its ore mined and sent by train to steel mills in Fontana.

“For those of us who live in the desert, the very barrenness is beautiful,” said Riverside County Supervisor Patricia (Corky) Larson. “On the contrary, Eagle Mountain is a big hole in the ground a mile long and 600 feet deep.”

Larson indicated she leans in favor of the project if its sponsors shelve plans to deliver some trash by trucks, whose engines would increase air and noise pollution. A key enticement, she emphasized, would be a fee of $4 to $6 a ton that the county would receive under a 1989 agreement.

“Whenever you’re talking about $25 to $30 million a year being infused into Riverside County, that’s a major plus,” Larson said.

She said a portion of the money would be used to purchase low-polluting public transportation vehicles for the Palm Springs area, an attempt to offset contamination of the desert air by the heavy train traffic.

The Eagle Mountain plan is due for a final vote by Riverside County supervisors early next year. Meanwhile, the state Department of Health Services is expected to decide whether to approve a license for the Ward Valley nuclear dump within the next two months.

In Needles--22 miles from Ward Valley’s proposed repository for low-level radioactive contaminants from California, Arizona, North Dakota and South Dakota--opponents contend that flash floods and underground water contamination could cause leaching into the Colorado River.

At a recent hearing in Needles, more than 200 local opponents--from high school skateboarders to members of a nearby Indian tribe--showed up to protest the plan loudly. At a concurrent hearing in Los Angeles, the proposal was blasted by 50 politicians, anti-nuclear activists and Hollywood personalities including actors Ed Begley Jr., Melanie Mayron and Peter Horton.

Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy and Controller Gray Davis have indicated they will block the project, at least temporarily, in their role as the majority membership of the State Lands Commission.

Environmental impact reports are still being prepared on the other three desert plans. Opposition has already formed against the Hidden Valley and Amboy projects, however, reinforcing the fact that even in the massive deserts of Southern California, it is difficult to find a site immune from residential or business concerns.

The Hidden Valley toxic dump has stirred opposition in Newberry Springs, a community of 3,000 people less than 20 miles from the site. Melodie Owings of Citizens Against Hidden Valley says the landfill is just too close to civilization.

“We’re a down-home community with a volunteer fire department,” Owings said. “We don’t need the traffic and the hazardous materials. It’s not the right spot. They can find stabler ground somewhere else.”

The Amboy trash-by-rail plan, slated for a 4,800-acre site near Bristol Dry Lake, is opposed by owners of nearby citrus orchards and brine harvesting businesses.

“The calcium chloride we produce is a good-grade product used in helping firm up olives, maraschino cherries and tomatoes,” said Lori Johnson, spokeswoman for Cargill Salt. “We’re concerned the weight of the landfill could potentially cause the (ground) to sink and block our brine source.”

Proposed Dump Sites

The five proposed sites for major Southern California desert landfills are near two major interstates, the 40 and the 10, east of San Bernardino and Riverside. Two of the dumps would accept household trash, delivered by rail and trucks. Two others would store hazardous waste residue and one would accept low-level radioactive waste.