Arizonans Angered by Storage of Tainted Soil : Waste: DDT-contaminated dirt is being shipped to Phoenix facility. But some officials are demanding that it be sent back to California immediately.

The same DDT-tainted dirt that sparked an angry furor in a South Bay neighborhood this summer is provoking public outcry in Phoenix, where residents are protesting the fact that California’s waste is being stored in their city.

More than 1,000 tons of contaminated soil dug from behind two homes near Torrance are being shipped to a Phoenix hazardous waste facility for temporary storage and testing.

The dirt’s arrival is creating a tempest among Arizona politicians and environmentalists, and some are insisting that the shipment be returned to California immediately.

“We love their tired, their poor, their earthquake-tossed folks, but we don’t want their hazardous waste, thank you very much,” said Raena Honan, legislative director for the Sierra Club’s Arizona chapter.

“ ‘Orphan’ toxic waste being stored in S. Phoenix,” trumpeted a banner headline Thursday in the Arizona Republic.

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Now, Phoenix and Arizona officials are taking steps to ensure that the bins of dirt do not linger in the storage yard of Greenfield Environmental, a waste firm in southern Phoenix, where they are being transported from another firm in Long Beach.

Arizona Gov. Fife Symington has asked the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to have the waste removed within 30 days. The agency last month had issued a permit allowing the dirt to be stored at Greenfield Environmental for up to 90 days.

In addition, Phoenix officials have notified the owners of Greenfield Environmental that the presence of the soil is a zoning violation and must be removed within seven days.

As of Friday, government officials in the two states were hurriedly phoning one another in search of a compromise, but no one could say where--or when--the controversy-plagued soil will travel next.

“We want to make sure that people’s concerns are heard and responded to,” said John Lyons, assistant regional counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which excavated the soil from two yards near Torrance this spring and is overseeing its transport to Arizona.

“We’re working with (Arizona) to resolve the issue,” said Virginia Donohue, spokeswoman for the EPA regional office in San Francisco. “This is interim storage; it was never intended for long-term storage there.”

The Arizona debate is the latest turn of events in an environmental drama that began this spring when an EPA cleanup unearthed chunks of DDT, some as large as bowling balls, mixed with fill soil behind two homes on West 204th Street in an unincorporated area east of Torrance.

The federal government has relocated 33 families for the rest of the year while it studies the extent of the contamination. DDT, banned for most uses in 1972, is a suspected human carcinogen that can affect the nervous system.

EPA officials insist that the DDT chunks came from the now demolished Montrose Chemical Corp. factory in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles, where the pesticide was produced from 1947 to 1982. The factory, on the federal Superfund list of the nation’s 1,200 most hazardous toxic sites, is three-tenths of a mile from the back yards where the DDT was found.

The EPA on June 21 ordered the Montrose Chemical Corp. to dispose of the soil, which officials describe as so toxic that it must be incinerated at an estimated cost of $2 million or more. Such incineration cannot be done in either California or Arizona because neither state has a permitted hazardous waste incinerator, said the EPA’s Lyons.

Montrose officials have maintained that the government has no firm proof the DDT is theirs, and the tainted soil sat in a Long Beach storage yard while attorneys debated its fate. Late last month, the EPA and the former pesticide manufacturer struck a compromise to allow the soil to be shipped to Arizona temporarily so that Montrose could test it further.

Only 38 of the 67 bins have arrived so far at the Phoenix site, said David Merk, vice president of Greenfield Environmental. He said the soil is safely sealed in heavy metal containers.

But that is not good enough for some Phoenix residents, who are criticizing the state Department of Environmental Quality for issuing a permit without what they call adequate notice.

“Our problem is, why is an emergency in California all of a sudden in Arizona?” asked Scott Meyer, vice president of Don’t Waste Arizona Inc., an environmental group.