News of Waste Depot Angers Vista Mayor : Environment: Neighboring businesses and regulators knew all about a firm that stores radioactive waste, but the mayor wants to know why the city wasn’t informed.

The industrial park along South Santa Fe Avenue between Vista and San Marcos is like so many others in North County: acres of identically shaped and designed, one-story buildings housing innocuous businesses.

An upholstery shop, a towing company, a machine shop . . . and a “nuke waste dump,” as one North County newspaper identified it over the weekend.

“What else has the state approved that we don’t know about?” fumed Vista Mayor Gloria McClellan. “I don’t like this at all.”

What raised her hackles was word, first published Saturday in The Times, that a company in the industrial park stores low-level radioactive waste.

It was news to McClellan, whose city boundaries come to within a few blocks of the industrial complex.

“The residents of Vista are not at all happy about this,” McClellan said. “I’ve been getting phone calls all weekend, asking what we’re going to do about this, and to find out how extensive this business is.”

The business is Pacific West Nuclear, situated toward the rear of the industrial park that, closest to the street, is anchored by--ironically--a mini-storage business where people can store their possessions.

At P.W.N., they’re storing low-level radioactive waste until it can be transported to an appropriate, permanent resting place.

Under state monitoring, P.W.N. has been doing business there for years, with its 10 garage doors for the comings and goings of trucks carrying 55-gallon barrels. Like the other buildings in the complex, its is nondescript, except for the classic logo of a whizzing atom that overlays the initials of the firm, P.W.N.

P.W.N. and two other businesses like it in California are in a quandary. They are middlemen in the business of disposing low-level radioactive waste--test tubes, gloves and the other assorted tools of the trade that come in contact with radioactive materials at hospitals, biotechnology firms, medical labs and the like.

Strict state guidelines regulate where low-level radioactive waste can be dumped, and P.W.N. is one of three so-called waste brokers that are licensed and regulated to temporarily store the material until it can be disposed of permanently.

The firms are waiting for a low-level radioactive waste dump to be approved near Needles, and they say they’ll need permission to store even more material inside their buildings until the new dump is approved. The material is already safely packaged in drums before it comes to the warehouse, state officials say.

Not many people, apparently, knew of the business’ operations until word of it spread across the news wires after The Times’ report.

Most outraged was McClellan.

“I didn’t know about this storage, and I don’t think any of the other council members did, either,” she said. “It was certainly put in without the city’s knowledge, but what can we do about it? The county didn’t tell us, either.”

Rick Gittings, the city manager of neighboring San Marcos, said he didn’t know about the business, either--nor was he that worried about it: “I assume some regulatory agency has given them conditions to live by, and they must be living by them.”

Indeed, the agencies that needed to know did know--starting with the Vista Fire Protection District, which provides fire services to the county area east of Vista.

“I’ve been here since 1987, and they’ve been doing business there at least that long,” Fire Chief Roger Purdie said. “They’ve complied with our fire code. We have an outline of where they store the material. It’s all properly marked. There have been no problems whatsoever.”

If there was a fire there, would his crews know what they would be confronting? “Oh, sure,” Purdie said.

Officials with the county’s Department of Health Services know of the business, too, said Gary Stephany, director for environmental health.

“It’s probably safer living near there than it would be living next to a gas station,” Stephany said. “We’ve never had any emergencies there.”

The business is regulated not by Stephany’s office, but by the state Department of Health Services’ radiologic health branch, which inspects P.W.N. annually.

“I don’t know why people are so up in arms,” said Donald Bunn, a senior health physicist for the state. “They’ve been storing material there for seven or eight years, with no problem.”

Workers there don’t even need to wear protective garb--but they carry radioactive-sensitive film badges to record whether, and to what degree, they may be exposed to radiation over time. The place is clean, Bunn said.

“And tell people there are no plans to convert it to a nuclear burial site,” Bunn quipped, referring to some newspaper headlines.

Officials with P.W.N. declined interviews Monday about the nature of their business, but other companies in the same industrial park say they know about P.W.N.’s operations and are not worried.

“We joke about how one day we may start glowing,” laughed Denise Ivicevic, a bookkeeper at Palmac Design & Manufacturing, a specialty machine manufacturer in the building next door.

“When some of their people come to our office, we say, ‘Come on in, you must be safe because you’re not glowing,’ ” Ivicevic said.

George Cassidy, Palmac’s manager, said he was at first concerned about P.W.N.’s line of work, when he went to the neighboring building to buy one of the company’s old forklifts.

“I asked the guy if it was safe to go in,” he admitted. “But I know how often we’re inspected by different agencies, and, if (inspectors) are walking through our doors, I can imagine they’re walking through their doors as well, to look around.”

There are greater villains in the industrial park than the company that stores low-level radioactive waste, Cassidy said.

“There’s a small furniture shop in here that was pouring old paint remover and lacquer thinner into the bushes next to its building, and the fumes got into an electrical utility box and then went through the conduits to our building,” Cassidy alleged. “It was making us all ill.

“I’d rather have a low-level radioactive storage company next door than a furniture shop or a body shop,” he said.