EPA Expected to OK Water Cleanup : Newbury Park: Underground supplies are contaminated at the site of the former Talley Corp.

An underground pool of water contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in Newbury Park will be cleaned up over the next several decades under a plan scheduled for formal adoption next week by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The $5-million treatment plan, which will leave the water safe enough to drink, is designed to mop up hazardous-waste pollution at the site of the former Talley Corp. aircraft-parts manufacturing plant, just off Wendy Drive on Old Conejo Road in Thousand Oaks.

Teleflex Inc., which purchased Talley in 1986 and later moved the factory to Oxnard, will pay for the entire 20-to-40-year cleanup, according to Susan Salinas, the firm’s director of safety and environmental affairs.

The contaminated ground water does not threaten residents’ health because most homes in the area receive clean drinking water from sources in Northern California, according to EPA spokesman Dave Schmidt.

But the hazardous chemicals have spread approximately 70 acres underground, inching southeast and flowing under the freeway along the Wendy Drive off-ramps. If the contamination continues to expand, it could pollute a well nearly a mile away that supplies drinking water to some homes, said the EPA’s project manager, Steve Linder.

He emphasized, however, that the cleanup program will stop the migration of hazardous wastes by pumping the contaminated ground water into a treatment plant on the Talley site.

Although the treatment plant can purify 2 million gallons of ground water a month, it will take “definitely past the year 2000” to clean up all the toxic wastes, Schmidt said. He estimated that the effort could last 40 years, although Teleflex officials set 20 years as a more realistic goal.

Aside from the ground water, an undetermined amount of surface soil on the Talley site has been polluted with hazardous wastes, including chromium and trichloroethylene, a known carcinogen. The EPA and Teleflex are working together to draft a soil treatment plan, and officials said that aspect of the cleanup should be completed within 18 months.

In the meantime, the 12-acre sliver of property just south of the Ventura Freeway is enclosed by a chain-link fence to keep trespassers from direct contact with potentially contaminated soil. But an accidental, one-time exposure to the soil would not be harmful, Linder said.

“It’s more of a long-term exposure threat,” Linder said. “It wouldn’t be a problem if you went out there once and ate some of the soil.”

The contamination occurred sometime between 1960 and 1984, when cracks developed in the cement-lined ponds that Talley used to store hazardous wastes. The ponds, called leach fields, were designed to store waste waters contaminated with solvents and heavy metals.

During a routine inspection, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board discovered the cracks, which had allowed chemical-laden water to seep into the soil and trickle down to the ground water. Talley shut the ponds in 1984 and its successor, Teleflex, began to pump and treat the contaminated water five years later.

The EPA’s cleanup plan, slated for adoption after the public comment period ends Friday, formally recognizes Teleflex’s ongoing efforts as the best way to make the ground water safe for future residents to drink, officials said.

While pleased that the site will eventually be purified, local Sierra Club leader Cassandra Auerbach said she was distressed that the contaminated ground water had migrated well beyond the Talley site.

“Ground water is going to be an extremely precious commodity in the years to come, and we need to make sure it’s treated that way,” Auerbach said.

“Ground water has been given short shrift in Southern California--there are too many cases where we let a problem burble away and don’t do anything about it for years,” Auerbach added. “We can’t squander our local resources like this.”

Most Newbury Park residents do not seem to share her concern. Only 15 to 20 citizens attended a community briefing that the EPA held last month in the local library. So far the agency has received just three written comments--all supporting the cleanup plan, Linder said.

“Most people aren’t even aware that a danger exists,” said local activist Ricki Mikkelsen, who drives by the site often but said she knows little about the ground water contamination. “It’s not an issue because people aren’t aware.”

On the gently sloping grounds of the former Talley plant, Teleflex has sunk more than 40 wells that pump the contaminated ground water to a treatment plant at the eastern end of the property, flagged by a neon-orange windsock on the roof.

The plant’s filtration system catches some contaminants and an air-powered cleansing device sucks out others, EPA officials said. By diverting ground water to the plant, the network of wells and pumps can halt the slow spread of contamination, they said.

Now that the cleanup is well under way, Teleflex--which manufactures parts for commercial and military aircraft at 45 facilities in the United States plus 17 overseas--hopes to sell the Newbury Park site.

“We’re doing what we need to do to get closure on the site so we can market it, sell it and hopefully see it developed,” Teleflex’s Salinas said. “I don’t think Teleflex (executives) anticipated finding themselves in a ground water cleanup situation when they bought Talley. But we recognize our responsibility.”

In addition to the ground water contamination, several other hazardous waste violations occurred at the Talley site both before and after Teleflex took over the aircraft plant.

Teleflex agreed in 1991 to pay a $200,000 fine for the violations, many of which occurred when officials moved equipment from Newbury Park to Oxnard and then demolished the old manufacturing facility. During the relocation, some oil and solvents leaked and some were improperly stored, Salinas said.

FYI

The EPA will make a final decision on the proposed cleanup plan after evaluating all public comments. Written statements, postmarked by Friday, should be sent to Steve Linder, project manager, Hazardous Waste Management Division, U.S. EPA, Region 9, 75 Hawthorne St., San Francisco, CA 94105.