Cleanup of River Spill Nears End

Emanuel O. Pedram sniffs a small jar full of water as if it were a fine wine.

“I couldn’t do this if we haven’t received a clean bill of health,” Pedram said proudly, displaying his vintage water.

Pedram, senior engineer with Ventura-based Applied Environmental Technologies, designed and headed the cleanup of the Ventura River where a tanker truck exploded and spilled its cargo of 8,000 gallons of gasoline last month.

Pedram and government officials say the site immediately below the Ventura Freeway should be completely cleaned by this time next week, six weeks after a 23-year-old truck driver lost control of the truck on an overpass and plunged into the Ventura River.

The subsequent explosion rocked downtown Ventura, and the resulting fireball closed the freeway for three hours on Dec. 2. Fire officials said 4,000 gallons of the gasoline burned while another 4,000 gallons seeped into the riverbed, contaminating 3,000 yards of soil and standing water.

Pedram and workers from his company have used a novel--and they say cheaper--approach to clean the spill at the site, rather than merely dumping the contaminated soil elsewhere.

The crew set up shop in the river bottom, and in two procedures removed the gasoline from the soil and the water.

To clean the soil, workers dug up the gasoline-soaked dirt and piled it atop a series of connected vacuum tubes about 50 yards away. For the past month, the tubes have been sucking the gasoline vapors out of the dirt and into a small incinerator.

To clean the contaminated water at the bottom of the hole, a vacuum tube sucks the water into a treatment tank that resembles a large trash receptacle. The water is pumped through four cans in which it is treated with chemicals before it is dumped back into the pit. The decontaminated dirt will also be put back into the hole.

“It looks simple because it is simple,” Pedram said. “And it works.”

Pedram said the on-site treatment cost Atlas Bulk Carriers--the owners of the wrecked truck --about $150,000--a third of the cost of shipping it elsewhere.

“They have done an excellent job,” said William P. Perales, a hazardous materials specialist with the California Department of Transportation. Caltrans is overseeing the cleanup, and Perales said he expects to issue a clean bill of health in the next two weeks.

The area was deemed highly toxic immediately after the crash and spill, which killed Carlos Humbert Alonzo of Oxnard.