Rush to Close Fuel Cleanup Cases Is Criticized

Ventura County regulators say they will soon begin shutting down cleanups around nearly 100 leaking underground gas tanks in the county due to a sharp cutback in one of the state’s biggest environmental programs.

Under orders from the state, regulators plan to close out investigations on between 75 and 100 of the county’s 480 outstanding sites by December.

About 500 more cases will be closed in Los Angeles County over the next four months, drawing sharp criticism from water quality regulators there, who say they are being forced to shut down cleanups without proper review. The latest orders radically alter the pace of work: In all of Ventura and Los Angeles counties last year, for example, only 100 cases were closed.

Some of the cases are getting as little as 30 minutes of review before they are closed, Los Angeles County workers complained.

“It’s just irresponsible,” said a technician who reviews cases at the Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Monterey Park offices. “The potential for ground water contamination increases and nobody is going to be held responsible. It won’t be tomorrow or the next day, but it’s a potential slow degradation.”

Several environmental technicians with the state’s water agency have protested, in interviews last week, that their bosses and appointees of Gov. Pete Wilson are pushing them to put an immediate end to one-quarter of the cleanups in the Los Angeles-Ventura region.

Officials in Sacramento who urged scaling back the program insist that contamination is only being left in the ground in limited concentrations and where it poses no threat to drinking water deposits.

“The chance of making a mistake that impacts water quality is pretty minimal,” said James Giannopoulos, who is overseeing the underground tank program for the Regional Water Quality Control Board. “There is a significant positive impact on people whose cases are closed. It removes a cloud on the title of their property that makes it difficult to make any kind of transaction.”

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Those handling the Ventura County cleanup were far less critical of the state’s orders to fast track outstanding cases than their counterparts in Los Angeles County.

In Ventura County, underground tank cleanups are regulated by the county’s Resource Management Agency. Bill Goth, supervisor of the local effort, said the agency has handled about 1,000 sites and completed cleanups on 325 since it began the program in 1988. Typically they might expect to finish about 30 cases a year.

Goth did note that the new approach is in direct contrast to orders from the Environmental Protection Agency a few years ago to concentrate on the worst sites.

“Now the state wants us to work on only the easiest sites,” Goth said. “So that is a 180-degree change.”

After years of receiving conflicting orders from the federal and state governments, the local agency has decided to take a wait-and-see approach to the latest edict.

“What we are doing now is waiting for the controversy to shake out,” said Doug Beach, one of five staff members on the local cleanup team.

“We’re trying to hit the middle of the road here,” Beach said. “We’re trying not to be unreasonable with the station owners, but on the other hand we have a certain obligation to the public to ensure their safety before we close a site.”

Controversy around the tank cleanups has been intense for years, but it peaked in December, when Wilson’s administration announced that the majority of more than 20,000 contaminated sites statewide might not have to be actively cleaned after removal of leaking tanks.

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State water officials pointed to a recent study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to justify the slowdown of the far-reaching environmental repair. The study concluded that most highly-toxic hydrocarbons degrade naturally in the soil, or when treated with oxygen and bacteria. The researchers suggested that traditional cleanups--which include massive soil removal and costs of $150,000 to $300,000--would no longer be needed, in many cases.

The head of the state water agency suggested in a memorandum that leaking tanks more than 250 feet from drinking water wells simply could be monitored but not actively cleaned up.

Since that memo, officials at the state Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento said they have continued to receive complaints from gas station owners and others that the Los Angeles region--which covers most of Los Angeles and Ventura counties--was moving too slowly to close low-risk cases.

In May, the state agency sent a team of auditors to review cases at its Los Angeles-area office. The auditors helped designate 570 cases that it deemed ready for immediate closure and another 435 “low-risk” cases to be terminated after that.

Technicians at the office in Monterey Park conceded that cases may have been kept open too long in the past, but they said a new directive from Robert P. Ghirelli, the board’s executive director, is pushing them to end the work with little study.

“You need more than 15 minutes to review a case that has been open for years. Some of these files have very little documentation in them,” said one technician who, like the others, asked not to be named. “We can’t just throw everything out after 10 years of a program, before we have really looked at it.”

Owners of contaminated tank sites typically hire consultants who must detect the location and content of spills in both soil and water. That can mean extensive drilling of monitoring wells and repeated underground sampling and, when contamination is found, removal of truckloads of soil.

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Workers at the regional water boards use site visits and extensive paperwork in an attempt to assure that the cleanups are conducted properly.

On inspections, Goth said his Ventura County team has an advantage over the Los Angeles crews.

“I have five managers and they are working every site we have,” Goth said. “There isn’t a site in Ventura that doesn’t get scrutinized every month. So there aren’t any sitting in inventory that aren’t looked at, whereas that has not been the case in L.A. County; they were extremely understaffed for a long time.”

Representatives of the hundreds of property and business owners who have been struggling with the tank cleanups, meanwhile, said they are gratified that some relief seems to be on the way.

Evelyn Gibson of the California Independent Oil Marketers Assn. called the changes “a very welcome and timely development.” She said some of the group’s 500 members--who sell gas to institutions, large companies and at the retail pump--have been devastated by the costs of cleanups.

The huge cost has also prevented some businesses from meeting another environmental requirement--the replacement of single-wall underground tanks with double-wall tanks to limit leaking, Gibson said. The safety improvement is supposed to be completed by late 1998.

The shutdown of cleanups will free money to pay for the safer tanks and also benefit owners by increasing the value and marketability of their properties, Gibson said.