He Blazed Trail for Waste Management

It began in 1979 with a telephone call about an unusual odor in a Fullerton back yard.

For Steven Kee Wong, the first to arrive at that now infamous patch of dirt, it would mean a brief stint of notoriety--and more than a decade of public uproar over the eight-acre landfill now known as the McColl toxic waste dump.

“At first, all we knew was that it was a vacant lot with a distinctive odor,” said Wong, an assistant director of environmental health at the Orange County Health Care Agency. “We didn’t even know there had been a dump site there. The amazing thing was how long it took to discover it.”

Wong and his team began by researching the previous uses of the dirt lot that abuts homes near the Los Coyotes Country Club in north Fullerton. They eventually discovered that the site holds 150,000 tons of World War II aviation fuel waste.

Today, McColl has been labeled the county’s worst toxic waste dump, one that has been on the nation’s Superfund list since 1983. In 1991, the federal Environmental Protection Agency delayed a decision on how to clean up the site until late 1993.

But the legacy of McColl has had one positive result, Wong said: a public realization about the problem of waste control.

“At that time, we had to educate people about the dangers of chemicals and the need for regulations,” he said. A public awareness campaign since then “has really paid off. Now, most universities have hazardous waste programs, and the awareness is really tremendous. . . .

“It used to be that waste management meant walking your trash out to the sidewalk once a week. Now even grade school students talk about things like recycling,” he said, adding: “I think we have all learned, both county officials and the public, that we better start managing waste or we will pay for our mistakes many years later.”

Wong traces his interest in waste management to Hong Kong, where “we lived in a very crowded space. There was no one concerned about waste disposal or what they did with their chemicals.”

Wong, now 42, came to Los Angeles at 18. He received a master’s degree at UCLA, where a professor encouraged him to study waste management. By 1979, Wong was working for Orange County.

Today, the county’s hazardous waste problems center on ground water contamination, Wong said.

“Probably the major problem in the county now is leaky underground gas tanks contaminating our ground water,” he said. “We have already been involved in the cleanup of 1,500 tanks in the county.”

The expertise gained in this country by hazardous waste managers is now being exported around the world, Wong said.

“The United States is the leading country in the world in managing hazardous wastes,” he said. “But you do not have to go far, just to Mexico, to see the problems brought by business there. We are trying to help the Mexican government put a system in place to make sure the American companies in Mexico manage their wastes in a responsible manner.”