More Families to Be Moved in DDT Cleanup

In a surprise move, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it is offering to move 18 more families to hotels while it removes DDT-tainted soil from two back yards near a Superfund site east of Torrance.

That means up to 23 families may be relocated at federal expense during the two-week project, which is expected to start next week.

The news led to rejoicing up and down West 204th Street, where some residents had lobbied hard to be relocated temporarily, saying they fear being exposed to DDT during the excavation.

“I’ll be glad I’m out of the range of fire,” said Carmen Herrera, 54, who is among the additional families to be relocated and whose house is directly across the street from the project. She said she worries that construction dust could contain DDT.

“See how the winds pick up? Let’s say they’re putting it on the trucks, and a strong wind comes up,” Herrera said. “I’m happy to be going.”

EPA officials have repeatedly assured residents that the project poses no health threat, and EPA section chief John Blevins stressed Wednesday that the additional families are not being moved because they are at risk.

The agency instead is trying to rebuild confidence among residents, Blevins said.

“This is to be overly protective, to work with the community and to provide them with some confidence that we will protect them,” said Blevins, whose agency has met with sharp criticism from residents who claim EPA has not been attentive to their health concerns.

Nancy Lindsay, chief of the Superfund enforcement branch at EPA’s western regional office, said in a press release Wednesday that the agency does not plan to take such extensive steps “in other potential removals in this community, but we will base any future actions on the experience gained in this pilot project.”

Earlier, the EPA had held firm to moving only the three families who live closest to the back yards where the soil would be removed. But last week, under pressure from residents, it boosted that number to five and postponed the project--originally set to begin April 11--while it held a community meeting to hear neighborhood concerns.

The new EPA relocation plan will include more families than requested by a community group, the Del Amo Action Committee. The expanded relocation area runs from addresses on the north side of West 204th Street from 1017 to 1063 and from 1036 to 1058 on the south side.

EPA has also agreed to build a temporary fence and wind screen in response to community concerns about dust.

The project initially was expected to remove 8,000 cubic feet of soil from two back yards at a cost of $317,866. The exact cost of relocating the additional families was not available Wednesday.

Planning for the excavation project began in March after soil tests in two back yards found unusually high levels of DDT, a banned pesticide and suspected carcinogen.

Neighborhood concern mounted April 8 when new EPA tests showed DDT levels 45 times higher than the level considered safe.

In another development Wednesday, the Del Amo Action Committee said it had ordered an independent test of back-yard soil and received results showing DDT levels twice as high as that found by the EPA.

The testing was done by the Citizens Environmental Laboratory in Boston, which is a project of an environmental group called the Jobs and Environment Campaign, said laboratory director Fred Youngs. The lab is not state-certified but uses EPA-approved methods, he said.

Cynthia Babich, a leader of the Del Amo Action Committee, said that she presented EPA’s Blevins with the Boston lab results Wednesday.

“If anything, it just confirms more so that there’s DDT in the soil,” said Blevins, adding that his agency will study any possible discrepancy between the two sets of results. EPA is investigating possible sources of the back-yard DDT, which some residents believe came from the former site of Montrose Chemical Corp., once a major manufacturer of DDT.

The two back yards where the DDT was found are about a half-mile from Montrose, a federal Superfund waste site. A second proposed Superfund site known as the Del Amo Study Area is directly north of West 204th Street.