Residents Criticize Slow Cleanup of Spill Site : Seacliff: One year after the derailment, some say they are still waiting for Southern Pacific to reimburse them for evacuation costs. A spokesman says the railroad is satisfied with its progress.

One year after the Southern Pacific train wreck at Seacliff, spilled plastic pellets litter the crash site, traces of toxic hydrazine taint the rail bed and some residents have not been reimbursed for expenses incurred during the evacuation.

Southern Pacific Transportation Co. says it has paid nearly $750,000 to reimburse emergency agencies that worked on the spill.

However, the railroad still has not finished cleansing the site where 12 cars of a northbound Southern Pacific train derailed at high speed and smashed into an overpass of the Ventura Freeway on July 28, 1991.

And Southern Pacific balked Monday at bowing to the California Public Utilities Commission’s recommendations to strengthen the railroad’s safety rules for hauling hazardous materials.

Many Seacliff residents are unhappy with the railroad’s performance in cleaning up the site and paying them back the cost of evacuating their homes, said Rex Fine, who was kept out of his beachside home for five days.

“The sense I get from them is that basically they’re a large, large corporation that gets to do pretty much what they want to do,” Fine said. “I think they feel a year’s gone by and everybody’s forgotten.”

Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) said Monday that toxic-hauling laws have not changed since the wreck at Seacliff, eight miles northwest of Ventura.

In September, Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed O’Connell’s railroad safety bill that would have required trains hauling toxic cargo to have cabooses and to carry detailed shipping manifests and emergency spill instructions. This week the state Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to review a simpler version that requires trains hauling toxic cargo to carry emergency instructions.

“In my opinion, the trains are not any safer today than they were a year ago,” he said. Southern Pacific has responded slowly to the crash, he added.

“I think we have responded very appropriately,” said Mike Furtney, a Southern Pacific spokesman. “Any time you’re dealing with people who’ve been severely inconvenienced, there’s always going to be some back-and-forth or negotiation until everyone’s satisfied.”

The back-and-forth began one year ago today.

A self-lubricated axle bearing on the 17th car of a 42-car freight train heading north from Ventura heated up, seized and derailed the train.

At 56 m.p.h., the cars jumped the tracks with a thunderous crash, dumping loads of magazines, rags and 1/8-inch plastic pellets onto the rail bed.

A boxcar full of steel drums shattered, splashing the wreckage with hundreds of gallons of hydrazine, a toxic chemical used in jet fuel and manufacturing.

Before the county Fire Department could evacuate the area and shut down the Ventura Freeway, hydrazine fumes sickened a Seacliff resident and a news cameraman who came too close.

Railroad cleanup crews and county and city fire departments worked almost around the clock, spraying common swimming-pool chlorine on the site to neutralize the hydrazine.

After five days it was safe enough for authorities to reopen the freeway, allow Seacliff residents to return home and send rail workers to repair the tracks.

Afterward, Southern Pacific and the California Environmental Protection Agency repeatedly told the residents that nearly all the remaining hydrazine had evaporated harmlessly. Cleanup engineers have spent much of the past year meticulously monitoring the site, digging test pits and measuring the amount of hydrazine left in the soil.

But it was not until this spring that workers actually began the business of clearing the hydrazine-tainted earth from about 200 square feet of the rail bed.

They injected hydrogen peroxide into the soil to break down the hydrazine and churned up the earth to let most of the rest evaporate.

That left 33 parts per billion of hydrazine in the soil, which the railroad plans to dump into a landfill, said Richard Varenchik, spokesman for Cal-EPA.

“These are truly minuscule amounts. There is no health problem out there at all,” Varenchik said, likening the amount to an eyedropperful of hydrazine in an Olympic-size swimming pool. “They’ve done what they were supposed to do.”

But he said Cal-EPA wants the railroad to fulfill its promise to remove all the tainted earth and regrade the railside land to its original state.

Seacliff residents said the cleanup and the settlement of their claims are moving too slowly.

A cyclone fence encloses padlocked test wells penetrating the contaminated earth, which still contains hundreds of thousands of harmless plastic pellets.

“They haven’t touched the dirt,” Fine said of cleanup crews.

He also said Southern Pacific has ignored four letters he wrote asking to be reimbursed the $400 to $500 he and his wife spent during the evacuation on a hotel room for themselves and their golden retriever.

“It’s very frustrating,” Fine said. “I can’t even get a letter back. That’s just inconsiderate.”

Marty and Lily Eifrid moved out of their rented Seacliff home because their Old English sheep dog, Bones, was found dead after the toxic spill. “We felt that was definitely a warning to us,” Marty Eifrid said.

The couple is still negotiating a settlement with Southern Pacific, he said.

Furtney said the railroad has paid 22 claims to Seacliff residents and denied 338 other claims, mostly from motorists who were inconvenienced by the freeway closure.

The railroad agreed to pay Seacliff residents’ claims, he said. But it will not pay the others because the wreck was caused by the failure of another company’s equipment--a burned-out axle bearing on a car owned by Trailer Train Inc.

Of Fine’s claim, Furtney said, “Our claims people are nothing if not thorough. I’d be very surprised if we’d never responded to him.”

He said of the cleanup’s progress: “We can’t just sort of sweep it up in a pile and say, ‘OK, that’s it.’ While it’s taken a year, I think we’ll all be happier with the knowledge that it’s been done properly, instead of a quick-and-dirty cleanup.”

The California PUC has recommended widespread improvements in Southern Pacific’s hauling procedures for toxic material, said William Oliver, director of the PUC Safety Division. These include installing rear-view mirrors on locomotives, hauling cabooses with observers to watch for possible derailments, increasing by 20% the sensitivity of hot-bearing sensors and carrying detailed descriptions of toxic cargo.

Late Monday, the railroad issued a detailed response of more than 200 pages to the PUC. An administrative law judge will hear the matter in San Francisco in September and rule on whether the railroad should be ordered to comply.