Study Urges Fire Officials to Run Toxic Cleanups

A study recommended Tuesday that fire officials run toxic cleanups of county property in order to avoid the sort of costs and delays that have plagued the decontamination of PCP-fouled land at the Pitchess Detention Center.

The county Board of Supervisors ordered the study in April after learning the county has paid nearly $1 million and taken six years to investigate and clean up jail property, although little work has been completed to date. The study was conducted by the chief administrative office.

Though the report concluded that while the county generally does a good job in removing toxics, sufficient oversight is lacking--a problem that sometimes led to work being performed late or without clear priorities.

The report did not specifically criticize the sheriff’s or fire departments--the two agencies most heavily involved in the Pitchess work.

Evidence of PCP trace materials were first discovered at a landfill at Pitchess jail in 1989 during a state-mandated test, but the cause was thought to be contamination in the laboratory of Law Crandall, the environmental and geo-technical company that performed the study, according to the county report.

The PCP was later traced to the illegal burying of seized drug labs near the landfill by law enforcement agencies, including the Sheriff’s Department, in the 1970s. Because some of the PCP was buried in glass bottles, which broke open when they were thrown into the pits during burial, engineering firms have cautioned the county against removing them for now.

County officials have said the buried chemicals pose no health threat.

Most of the 127 burial pits at Pitchess have not been checked yet, so it is unknown how much PCP was buried.

The CAO report stated that the Pitchess site is probably too small to qualify as a federally funded Superfund site. County officials are meeting with federal Drug Enforcement Agency officials to determine if any of the drugs were buried by federal agencies.

The county is conducting its “remedial investigation,” of the site, the second step in a five-phase process that would conclude with eliminating the threat of the leaking chemicals. County officials have conceded that the process could take several more years.

“The remedial investigation at Pitchess has proved to be especially problematic due to the unknown nature of the substance buried in the pits and the discovery of chemicals used for making PCP, for which the state has not yet defined any regulatory requirements,” the report stated.

The study suggested that the Fire Department’s hazardous materials section handle organizing similar toxic-waste cleanups in the future to avoid confusion between county agencies and the private experts they hire.

The report also said the idea of a new agency that would handle the oversight of cleanups should be studied.

Finally, the report said that the county may find cleaning up the chemicals to be unnecessary because preliminary studies suggest that the ether will not reach the water supply. But prohibitive cleanup costs are also a concern.

“Based upon the nature of the contamination, the recommended course at Pitchess may involve containment and regular ground-water testing rather than cleanup,” the report said. “Cleanup costs have been estimated as high as $50 million without any assurance of effectiveness.”

The report estimated that containment costs are significantly less: $2 million originally, plus $1.4 million for monitoring over 10 years.