Cleanup Standard the Issue in Bolsa Chica Negotiations

If only Bolsa Chica was an everyday oil field five miles inland in commercial Orange County, people might not be quarreling so vociferously on how to clean it up.

Modern-day companies have grown savvy in cleaning tainted land and recycling it for factories and shopping centers.

But Bolsa Chica is a fragile coastal wetlands doubling as an oil field. And that, wildlife experts say, makes all the difference. They believe the 880 acres slated for a major preserve must be cleaned more stringently than if stores or even homes were to be built there.

The reason: Soils contaminated with arsenic, nickel and mercury could harm organisms that live in the mud, or the fish and birds that feed on them.

But a Shell Oil Co. affiliate that pumps oil at Bolsa Chica is balking at the notion that it should follow cleanup guidelines even stricter than those protecting human health. The landowner, too, calls those guidelines unduly harsh.

The disagreement will loom large in coming weeks as state and federal agencies attempt one more time to buy Bolsa Chica from Koll Real Estate Group, staving off construction of 900 homes.

The debate over how much cleansing Bolsa Chica really needs points up the special problems in attempting to turn an oil field into a wetlands preserve. This is not your normal “brownfielding,” the 1990s term for transforming old industrial sites into new development. Nor is it a typical wetlands restoration effort.

As a federal report released last week made clear, Bolsa Chica contains the remnants of 50 years of oil pumping that have tainted its soils and waters with oil compounds and metals.

“In most normal situations, we wouldn’t even be interested in Bolsa Chica, if we had a lot of areas out there that were available for wildlife habitat,” said Donald W. Steffeck, regional environmental contaminants coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But with 90% of the region’s wetlands lost to development, Bolsa Chica’s salt marshes and mud flats are all the more valuable.

“The rest of them,” Steffeck said, “have houses on them.”

Steffeck helped craft the 70-page evaluation of results collected this fall at Bolsa Chica during a $450,000 study of soil, sediment, ground water and even fish tissue. In assessing the contamination, experts considered how wildlife might be harmed.

Specifically, they tried to determine how clams, worms, aquatic insects and other organisms that live in underwater mud would be affected. The soil safety level they chose is designed to protect 90% of the mud-dwellers.

Steffeck admits that approach is stricter than federal regulations for protecting humans, but says that is what is needed to protect a complex wildlife habitat like Bolsa Chica, where those worms and insects are food for thousands of migratory birds.

He notes that animals like clams would be living in the tainted sediments 100% of the time, heightening their exposure levels--and making them much more vulnerable than humans hiking by.

Experts also worry about contaminants like mercury traveling through the food chain and building up in the bodies of fish and migratory birds.

They recall how, in such a fashion, the pesticide DDT nearly destroyed the Southern California population of brown pelicans.

But CalResources, the Shell affiliate that has been operating at Bolsa Chica since 1986, reports that its contract calls for cleaning up the site to less stringent human-health standards, so that the land could be used for homes. It is not obligated to pay the extra money to clean up the wetlands to the stricter guidelines being discussed for a wildlife preserve, officials said.

“We think we’re only obligated to clean up to make it suitable for homes,” said Sub Sen, a CalResources staff environmental engineer. He noted that his firm has already spent several million dollars cleaning up contamination that it inherited at the site.

Koll’s attorney took issue with the federal cleanup approach in a 19-page criticism of the Fish and Wildlife report.

Koll calls the cleanup guidelines “unreasonably conservative” and questions if Fish and Wildlife has ever used such a stringent approach in restoring other wetlands.

Once Bolsa Chica is restored with a tidal inlet, the impact of contaminants would be reduced by the tides’ flushing effects, the letter suggests. In general, Koll believes the report overstates the dangers of contaminants at the site.

Cleanup issues were a key issue during four days of intense negotiations in Sacramento last week. But now that the deadline for closing a deal has been extended to Jan. 31, some officials are hopeful that a solution can be found.

“We are trying to work out a cooperative arrangement, not a tight-fisted arrangement,” said Hugh Barroll, assistant regional counsel with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We’re trying to find a way that makes it work.”