Sheriff’s Officials Criticized for Slow Approach to PCP Cleanup

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich chastised Sheriff’s Department officials Tuesday for not acting quicker to clean up chemicals that were illegally buried at the Pitchess Jail in Castaic some 20 years ago and have now seeped into ground water.

“Why does it take five years to get a detailed study of this problem?” Antonovich asked Undersheriff Jerry Harper and Sharon R. Dunn, the Sheriff’s Department’s director of facilities, at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

“What is the contingency [plan] in your department?”

Dunn acknowledged that the department has known since 1991 that PCP ingredients seized during drug raids in the 1970s are buried in containers near the Pitchess Jail. But she said it has taken more time than expected to complete studies that detail the extent of the problem.

“It has been on the front burner, but we didn’t know what was down there,” she said “We had some readings that PCP was down there, but other times, we were getting negative readings.”

Unsatisfied with the answer, Antonovich asked, “Wouldn’t you, at the time you discovered chemicals, have a mitigation plan?”

Responded Dunn: “We’ve spent $900,000 on consulting fees to make sure we were taking the proper steps. We are following the advice of the consultants.”

Sheriff’s Department officials maintain that tests at several wells in the area indicate that drinking water has not been contaminated.

“The water that percolates down is not going into the aquifer,” Dunn told the board. “It is staying locally on site. We are monitoring the wells and it is not reaching the drinking water.”

A yet-to-be released study prepared for the Board of Supervisors agreed that the ground water tainted by the chemicals was not now polluting any drinking water. Sheriff’s Department officials, commenting on the report, have said that it could take as much as $50 million to clean up the contamination.

On Tuesday however, Harper downplayed that figure, saying it was “very doubtful” that costs would rise that high.

Harper added that the county Fire Department--not the Sheriff’s Department--is the agency responsible for handling the cleanup and that the project’s consultant has advised the county against removing the PCP out of fear that the containers might break and leak.

A spokesman for the consultant, the Pasadena-based environmental services firm Montgomery Watson(, declined to comment on the project, but confirmed that the firm had been paid $770,000 by the county to conduct a study.

Tom Clinger, a supervisor for the county Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Mitigation Unit, said the Pitchess site is “probably one of the technically most complicated sites I’ve ever seen.”

Although county officials say that they know little about the practice of burying chemicals from drug labs in unlicensed pits situated near the prison’s licensed landfill, they admit that the practice appeared to be standard procedure during the 1970s by both the Sheriff’s Department and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

Also buried at the site are carcasses of animals, such as cattle, formerly raised at the Pitchess complex when it was a jail farm, and weapons seized from jail inmates, officials said.

“They buried a lot of things like this in the old days, including cows from the dairy,” said Clinger. “In retrospect it sounds dumb, but in the old days it was standard practice. They would say ‘let’s get these wastes away from people’ and excavate 15 to 20 feet down and just dump it in.”

The district attorney’s office investigated the dumping several years ago but determined that there was no criminal intent and that too many years had passed to conduct a successful prosecution.

Clinger said that any cleanup effort could be particularly dangerous because of the presence of ether, a highly combustible chemical, and the fact that some of the chemicals from the drug labs are buried in glass bottles.

“It might end up being that the most logical thing is to leave it in place and build some barrier to keep the affected [ground] water from getting into the drinking water,” Clinger said.

County officials say they have identified PCP chemicals in four or five pits, but have yet to check most of the 127 pits in the area.

Dunn told Antonovich that the county Fire Department is currently trying to determine what chemicals are on the Pitchess site. Within 60 days, she said, the county will begin a fiscal study to determine how much the cleanup would cost.

But sheriff’s officials acknowledge that given the county’s financial difficulties, no one knows how long it will take to clean up the mess, or where the funds will come from.

Times correspondent Danica Kirka contributed to this story.