Toxic-Waste Facility Sparks Fear, Anger : Environment: Athens residents want transfer station to move despite a county report that it poses no immediate health risks.

Danger. Hazardous Waste Area. Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out.

So read the signs outside Statewide Environmental Services Inc., a hazardous-waste storage and transfer facility in Athens.

But many people who live near the half-acre operation at 12618 S. Main St. say the dangers it poses aren’t confined within its eight-foot-high concrete-block walls.

Among other things, they say pungent, chemical-laced fumes occasionally waft over the walls and through the open windows and back yards of their mostly working-class residential neighborhood, causing headaches and even nausea.

Statewide Environmental Services, however, maintains that the odors are more an inconvenience than a health risk. Officials of the private company say they have recently taken steps to reduce the smells to an “absolute minimum.”

“The way we handle the waste, the community is not exposed to any health risks,” company attorney Daniel Romano said.

The facility takes hazardous waste from more than 4,000 clients countywide and mixes it with similar substances for shipment to landfills and incinerators.

Company President Matt Stewart said the facility mostly handles oil-soaked water and soils but also works with “extremely small percentages” of such lethal substances as benzene, arsenic and cyanide. On average, about 300 55-gallon drums of waste are stored above ground at the facility.

The closest homes are only feet from the facility’s eastern wall.

A multi-agency county task force inspected the facility late last year and concluded that although the company had committed “a number of minor violations” of its county operating permit, the business posed no “immediate health or safety threat to the public.”

The violations included storing drums of waste near the wall closest to the homes.

But the task force’s conclusions haven’t placated an increasingly vocal group of residents who want to run the facility out of the area.

“If it weren’t affecting the neighborhood, it wouldn’t be a problem,” said Marta Hernandez, who said she often has had to shut her trailer windows to the smells coming from the facility next door.

Hernandez, 29, said she fears the vapors will stunt the growth of her two daughters, ages 4 and 8.

Hernandez is one of scores of community members who last year joined to fight Statewide Environmental Services after learning that the facility had applied for a permanent operating permit from state regulators.

Her group, an amalgam of 17 block clubs and other organizations called the Community Coalition for Change, says a residential neighborhood is no place for a hazardous waste facility, despite assurances that it is safe.

The Athens coalition has won support from Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who has asked the county Planning Commission to determine whether the facility has become a public nuisance.

The commission’s review could lead to revocation of the company’s local operating permit, which would derail its effort to get a permanent state permit.

In addition, the coalition has elicited the help of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nationwide environmental advocacy group that has presented legal arguments to justify revoking the local permit.

Statewide Environmental Services has delayed the Planning Commission review with a lawsuit saying the commission cannot hold a hearing to revoke the permit unless it has evidence that the facility has become a health hazard or public nuisance.

The legal challenge has forced the commission to postpone a second public hearing on the matter. The first hearing May 17 at the Athens Park Recreation Center drew hundreds of residents.

Meanwhile, a court hearing on the company’s lawsuit has been delayed while county and company officials discuss a possible settlement that could lead to relocating the facility.

Stewart said he would be “happy to move” the facility, but only if the county can find a suitable site and secure the necessary permits.

The roots of the conflict stretch back decades to when county zoning allowed industry and homes in the same areas. The facility has handled hazardous waste since 1973. Statewide Environmental Services bought it in 1990.

Hazardous waste handlers first had to apply for the permanent state permit in the 1980s when the federal government required the state to regulate the industry on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last year, the state Department of Toxic Substance Control sent letters to 550 residents who live within a quarter-mile radius of the facility, saying it planned to begin reviewing the company’s application for the permanent permit. The facility now operates under an interim permit.

The letters sparked concern among residents, some of whom had not known what the facility did, said Rahman Shabazz, president of Community Coalition for Change.