Toxic Shock

Many longtime residents of unincorporated South Whittier say they hardly remember receiving a notice in the mail nine years ago concerning the existence of an abandoned toxic dump in their neighborhood.

The letter, posted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, referred to a forgotten vat of noxious sludge hidden beneath several feet of dirt near Los Nietos Road and Greenleaf Avenue in neighboring Santa Fe Springs.

But after being invited to a single, initial meeting to discuss the finding, South Whittier residents were kept almost completely out of the loop while EPA representatives, city officials and parents of students at a high school next to the dump debated whether to pave the site or excavate it and haul away the waste.

Suddenly, on the eve of a cleanup agreement between the EPA and eight companies it has blamed for the mess, more than 100 South Whittier neighbors have awakened to the issue. They have jumped into the discussion with questions thought to be resolved years ago about the dump’s potential dangers and the wisdom of burying it for good.

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As president of the recently formed Protect Our Neighborhood Committee, Debbie Smiley( is well aware of the fuss her group has caused, although she dismisses as veiled threats charges that the new opposition could stall any eventual cleanup.

“We want the time to look into it,” Smiley said. “We have to do what is best for the homeowner.”

Her neighbor and fellow committee member Ralph Pacheco added: “If it’s taken nine years to arrive at where we are now, what’s another year?”

But the group of mostly oil companies that the EPA believes dumped carcinogenic waste at the site for perhaps two decades beginning in the 1940s says that time spent dealing with the residents threatens to erode their spirit of cooperation.

Ian Webster, an engineer for Unocal and the project’s lead designer, said his team wants desperately to appease the group. But if by mid-October the residents don’t accept a plan to cap the site, he said, the companies could ask the EPA for an executive ruling.

If it comes to that, he said, the team could even try to drop out of the process and begin preparing for a court battle with the EPA over mitigation costs.

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“I think the community is pressing too hard,” Webster said, “so that they may lose what is really in their best interest.”

The situation worries EPA officials who have worked hard to reach consensus with Santa Fe Springs constituents on the capping plan. They concede that they failed to notify South Whittier residents about the negotiations, and are trying to bring both sides together as quickly as possible.

“What we did wasn’t enough to reach this community,” said Angeles Herrera, EPA’s community relations coordinator for waste disposal. She insists it was an unintentional error that left hundreds of South Whittier homeowners off the project mailing list.

The South Whittier group has only begun to review EPA data indicating that the dump poses virtually no harm to the surrounding community. Leaders on all sides agree, however, that the biggest issue left to decide is whether to cover the most contaminated portion of the 43-acre site with an impermeable layer of clay and concrete, complete with gas vents and landscaping--or dig up the site and dump it elsewhere.

The companies readily admit that cost is the main reason they like the cap design, which the EPA first proposed and has been deemed successful at similar sites.

They estimate that it would cost $12 million to build a cover to make sure rainwater cannot seep through the 42-million-gallon, concrete-lined container and enter the water table. On the other hand, they say, trucking it elsewhere would cost an estimated $300 million.

It was the same argument in 1993 and 1994 when parents and administrators at St. Paul High School joined city officials at a series of meetings on the proposed remedy. Then, too, EPA representatives warned of possible environmental side effects of excavating the dump.

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The EPA maintains that digging up the arsenic, benzene, benzopyrene and polychlorinated biphenyls suspected to exist there could spew deadly toxins into the air over perhaps a three-year period.

That possibility, combined with pledges that the gas emissions and ground water would be monitored for 30 years after the cap construction, finally won over most critics. But some people who followed the discussion since the late 1980s say the community’s attitude was more akin to acquiescence than approval.

“It was the federal government telling us what they’re going to do,” said Don Powell, Santa Fe Springs city manager. He said that even though the City Council agreed with the EPA’s health claims, the city still would rather see the dump removed so it could develop the site instead of turning it into a park or driving range, as envisioned now.

The neighborhood committee recently took a step Santa Fe Springs opponents never did: They applied for a $50,000 grant from the EPA’s federal cleanup account, the Superfund, to pay for a consultant who would examine the proposed remedy as well as soil and water tests around the dump. EPA officials said they are reviewing the application.