EPA Fines County, Dredger $735,000

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has fined Orange County and a contractor $735,000 for ocean dumping violations, the second-largest such penalty ever levied against a public agency in the country.

The violations occurred during a massive two-year dredging operation in Upper Newport Bay when the sludge was taken to sea and dumped at least half a mile from the designated site.

It is possibly the largest environmental penalty the county has faced and marks the greatest number of violations ever found by the EPA in a case involving the dumping of dredging material, said Brian Ross, dredging projects coordinator for the EPA in San Francisco. The Port of Los Angeles and a contractor were fined $1 million in 1995 for dumping polluted sediment.

The federal agency found Orange County and Soli-Flo Partners LP, which is co-owned by Fluor Daniel Inc. of Aliso Viejo, guilty of more than 1,000 violations, Ross said, dwarfing the Port of Los Angeles and Manson Construction and Engineering Co.’s 163 violations.

In a separate EPA case, a federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Gardena hazardous waste trucking company and a top employee--a Garden Grove man--charging them with violating the federal Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants into the sewer system.

Authorities say corrosive liquids, wastes with excessive levels of oil and grease, and sulfide were released directly into sewers instead of being treated and properly disposed of so they posed no threat to the environment.

Among those indicted were Arnell Maxey, 32, of Garden Grove and the Radford Alexander Corp., which also does business as Chemical Transportation Co. Inc., a hazardous waste-trucking company known as ChemTrans. Penalties include up to three years in prison and fines reaching $250,000.

In the Newport Bay dredging case, the EPA ordered Orange County to pay $360,000 and Soli-Flo Partners to pick up the rest. But the county intends to negotiate the division of penalties and probably will sue the contractor, said Lon Watson, the county’s attorney.

Problems arose in the dredging operation when crews punched the wrong coordinates into a global positioning satellite navigation system used to locate the dump site, five miles off Newport Beach.

“Literally, for the next 975 dumps, they went to the wrong place,” Ross said.

On several occasions, even when crews had the right coordinates, they would “do a short dump,” dropping sludge just short of its destination, Ross said.

More than 600,000 cubic yards of silt ended up covering several square kilometers of ocean floor at a depth of 1,400 feet, killing shrimp, crabs, clams and other sea life, Ross said. Because of the depth, the sediment cannot be cleaned up, he said.

Soli-Flo alerted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to the error in January 1999. The contractor did not return calls on Wednesday seeking comment.

“The good news was this was relatively clean material, so the area will recover,” Ross said.

The dredging mishap prompted the county to adopt added safeguards whenever a contractor’s tugboat heads to sea to dump materials, Smith said. Dredge crews, who once did the disposal on their own, now must be followed by a “surveyor boat” equipped with a satellite navigation system, said Ken Smith, the county’s deputy director of public facilities and resources. “We can’t afford to allow a contractor to make these mistakes again,” Smith said.

Orange County has agreed to pay a large chunk of its fine--$270,000--to the California Coastal Conservancy, which buys and protects wetlands. The money will help the conservancy buy 17 acres of wetlands in Huntington Beach owned by Southern California Edison.

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Times staff writer John Meyer contributed to this report.