Abex Fined for Sending Wastes to Local Dump : Environment: Toxin-soaked floor mats were taken to Bailard Landfill in Oxnard. The parent firm admits no wrongdoing.

The troubled Abex Aerospace company, already in the process of phasing out its Oxnard plant, has been fined $225,000 for illegally sending hazardous waste to the Bailard Landfill.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren issued the fine and a permanent injunction Tuesday forbidding Abex to continue the disposal in violation of state law, according to the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

Employees of Abex’s machine shops were disposing of toxin-soaked absorbent floor mats by throwing them into trash bins behind its plant at 3151 West 5th St., said Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Brose.

The bins’ contents then were dumped by regular trash trucks into the Bailard Landfill instead of being sent to a hazardous waste disposal facility, he said.

The mats were used to absorb fluids that drip from machines during manufacturing of aircraft hydraulic pumps and valves. They were found to contain cyanide, oils and heavy metals such as nickel, Brose said.

“One of the concerns about hazardous waste, if it gets into the environment and becomes mobile in water, is that it can affect aquatic life,” Brose said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Linda Groberg said investigators also found that the company had illegally disposed of several five-gallon buckets full of copper-laden grinding compound.

In addition, prosecutors alleged that Abex had improperly handled, labeled and stored hazardous waste at the Oxnard plant.

Abex Aerospace’s parent company, Pneumo Abex Corp., a Delaware corporation, agreed to pay the fine but admitted no wrongdoing, Brose said.

A company spokesman declined comment Wednesday.

“Abex has no comment we intend to add or offer in amplification” of the district attorney’s announcement, said Abex spokesman Randy Holliday.

Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn, who has in the past lobbied strongly to keep Abex in Oxnard, called the dumping inexcusable.

However, he said the timing of the judge’s order couldn’t be worse because of ongoing work by himself and other officials to explore various options for the Abex plant and its workers, which he refused to discuss.

Abex is in the process of laying off or transferring about 550 employees as part of a nine- to 15-month plan to close the 30-year-old plant, one of Oxnard’s largest employers.

“Quite frankly, I wish that none of this had ever happened,” Flynn said. “Even though government had to do its job, it makes government look somewhat unfriendly to business, and we don’t want to project an unfriendly attitude.”

However, a Bailard Landfill official called the dumping “real serious,” because California environmental law prohibits dumping any toxic waste into landfills.

“This is the worst kind of event, as far as we’re concerned, where somebody’s trying to get away with something,” said Clint Whitney, general manager of the Regional Sanitation District, which runs the landfill.

Government officials and environmental watchdogs are concerned that heavy metals and other toxic waste could leach deep into the ground and contaminate water supplies.

So far, Whitney said there is no evidence that any toxic material dumped by Abex at Bailard has contaminated the ground water. “We want to make sure it doesn’t happen,” he said.

Toxic runoff from the landfill that makes its way into the Santa Clara River could harm a number of endangered and rare species that live near its mouth, including the California least tern and the tidewater goby, said Cat Brown, a wildlife biologist for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Investigators learned of the dumping last spring when an unidentified informant told the California Highway Patrol that she believed that toxic dumping was going on at the Abex plant.

“The Highway Patrol actually tracked a garbage truck that picked up trash at the company in late April . . . over to Bailard,” Brose said. The patrol officers retrieved some of the large, sausage-shaped mats, called “hog mats” or “pigs,” and took them to a lab contracted by the county’s Environmental Health Department, Brose said.

There, technicians put samples of the mats into fish tanks with either rainbow trout or bathead minnows in a test commonly used to measure water contamination, Brose said.

If half the fish die within 96 hours in such a test, then the material is deemed hazardous, Brose said.

“In this case, the entire population of fish died in 15 minutes,” he said.