Pellets on Beach Raise Concern for Wildlife

Six months after cranes dragged the wreckage of a Southern Pacific train from beneath the Ventura Freeway at Seacliff, rainstorms unearthed thousands of plastic pellets that had been buried in the cleanup and left behind.

Now, environmentalists and Seacliff residents warn that the 1/8-inch-diameter beads of clear plastic, which have washed into the Pacific Ocean, may endanger aquatic wildlife.

Seacliff resident Eric Stowe said most of his neighbors are no longer worried about the toxic chemical hydrazine, which was spilled during the July 28 derailment and later cleaned up.

Officials from the California Environmental Protection Agency assured them that any hydrazine left in the ground after the cleanup had evaporated harmlessly.

But Stowe said the residents worry that the pellets littering their back-yard beach will float among the rocks for some time and may kill fish and birds that eat them.

Stowe said he has already seen a sandpiper eating one of the pellets.

“I haven’t seen them on the beach before the rains,” said Stowe. “Then the last time it rained, last Wednesday, there were just zillions of them.”

Southern Pacific spokesman Mike Furtney said the railroad plans to have a Los Angeles contractor go to Seacliff this weekend to clean up the beads.

“They’re inert and they’re nontoxic,” Furtney said. “I guess in an ideal world, you wouldn’t want small birds or fish to ingest them, but the (state Department of) Fish and Game people seem satisfied there wouldn’t be any damage.”

Last summer, an axle bearing on a Southern Pacific train overheated and disintegrated, derailing 12 cars about eight miles northwest of Ventura.

Many of the cars smashed into a concrete freeway overpass at Seacliff and burst open, flinging their contents onto the ground.

The wreck forced emergency officials to close the freeway and evacuate the 49 homes at Seacliff for five days during cleanup of the hydrazine, a toxic chemical used to make products ranging from photo chemicals to pharmaceuticals.

Soon thereafter, cleanup crews removed the mangled freight cars and carted away most of the spilled plastic pellets, along with bales of rags and pallet-loads of magazines that had littered the crash site.

However, on Friday six burst paper sacks could be seen directly under the freeway overpass, surrounded by a 10-foot-diameter carpet of plastic pellets lying in the rain-rutted dirt.

Hundreds more pellets were scattered at least 60 feet along the tracks on either side of the sacks, and some could be seen at the tide line on the beach several hundred yards away. The pellets would have been used in manufacture of a variety of plastic objects, according to railroad officials.

“I think Mother Nature turned a few more up for us when it rained,” Furtney said of the pellets. He said the cleanup crews probably buried the pellets by the tracks inadvertently.

“They’re not hazardous waste, they’re inert plastic,” said Rich Varenchik, spokesman for Cal-EPA’s department of toxic substances control. “I would assume that if an animal ate a whole bunch of them, it would make them sick. But whether one bead would kill a fish . . . ?

“We don’t consider them really dangerous. It’s the kind of thing where you could step on them and slip, I guess, but as far as real danger, they’re just pieces of plastic.”

However, the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal wildlife watchdog group, will test the ocean water and the soil around the crash site to determine whether the pellets are dangerous, said Rex Thomas, a spokesman.