Deal to Clean Up Landfill Reached

Fifteen years after a Monterey Park dump was declared a Superfund site, lawyers Friday announced a $340-million pact in one of the nation’s most costly and tangled toxic cleanup cases.

The settlement for the Operating Industries site involves 177 polluters and provides for containing and monitoring contaminants at the 190-acre former landfill along the Pomona Freeway 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

The agreement brings to more than $600 million the price tag to clean up the site, making it one of the most expensive nongovernmental Superfund sites in the history of the federal program, attorneys said Friday.

The case dramatizes how a simple landfill, managed according to the laws of the time, can turn into a mammoth chemical and legal morass. Nearly 4,000 companies are believed to have dumped commercial and industrial waste at the dump, which opened in 1948 and closed in 1984. Sorting out who should pay for cleanup, and how much, has occupied government and private attorneys for decades.

The result is a 700-page consent decree filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. In coming weeks, the public can review the pact and make comments.

Neighborhood residents have fought 20 years for a solution, fearing that landfill gases and ground-water contamination were causing health problems. Even now, some wish they knew more about the potential effects of the chemical stew near their homes.

“We will never know what, in fact, was dumped there and how the chemicals coming together really affected the air, the water, the soil--and life. That’s the big unanswered question,” said Norma Lopez-Reid, 48, who has fought the landfill for more than 20 years, both as a Montebello resident and as a council member. “And that’s what’s scary for all of us: Is the other shoe going to fall 25 years from now?”

The Superfund program, created to clean up the nation’s most dangerous toxic sites, has been criticized by some activists and scientists for focusing too much on technology and too little on community health. But links between toxic sites and health problems are often difficult, if not impossible, to prove. A state study in the late 1980s found no such link.

At the Monterey Park site, some contamination has seeped into ground water near homes. But the chemicals are many feet underground and too far from any drinking-water wells to pose health concerns, officials said.

So the settlement does not require that contaminants be removed. Instead, they will be allowed to degrade naturally, circled by wells that will prevent further seepage and monitor the status of the contamination.

“With the passage of time, the chemicals will degrade to nonhazardous levels,” said David Giannotti, an attorney involved in the case. The EPA estimates that could take between 30 and 150 years, he said.

‘There Was a Lot of Give and Take’

Friday’s settlement is the eighth since 1986 involving many companies and governments. Cleanup has been going on for 12 years, and federal officials say almost all contamination is contained. A shopping center is now planned for part of the site.

The agreement was announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Two attorneys who each spent more than a decade on the case expressed satisfaction.

“There was a lot of give and take, both by the government and by the private parties,” said Harrison Karr, EPA assistant regional counsel, who worked on the case for 12 years.

The companies and agencies held responsible for the pollution formed a panel represented by David Giannotti, an attorney with the Century City-based Gallagher & Gallagher. He has worked on the case for 15 years.

Giannotti said he felt “a certain level of satisfaction that we’ve been able to address these various issues and do it in a way, certainly not an inexpensive way, but a way that’s less expensive, less contentious” and quicker in dealing with environmental remedies than other options.

The list of companies that used the dump reads like a list of Southern California’s major employers: Exxon-Mobil, Unocal, Chevron, Texaco, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Motors.

A total of 57 companies agreed to hire cleanup contractors themselves. The other 120 companies are paying into a fund for cleanup. Large individual payments include $5.6 million from Southern California Gas and $4.2 million from Anadarko Petroleum Corp. The Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, was among the companies held responsible and will pay $138,000, Karr said.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will pay $1.1 million, and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority will pay $1.5 million. Residents had mixed reactions to the news.

Lopez-Reid, who lives on Iguala Street near the site, recalls that chemicals seeped into yards, stunting vegetation and preventing grass from growing. Some residents left on the weekends to escape the foul smells. Some kept their windows shut during summer months.

Lingering Questions

Residents began fighting the landfill two decades ago, picketing and writing letters to legislators. Getting the EPA to close the dump and designate it as a Superfund site “was our moment of glory,” Lopez-Reid said.

But for her and others, a lingering question remains unanswered: Did the chemical brew have a human impact? Several residents developed cancer, spurring fears that the landfill played a part. For some residents, a definitive study on the health effects of the landfill has yet to be done.

“There was no following of people, especially children, who were born and grew up in the vicinity of the landfill, particularly in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the landfill was at its worst,” said Bill Molinari, a Montebello councilman and longtime resident. “There never was a study on the effects of longer term, low-level effects” of the chemicals.

When the landfill was first created in an abandoned gravel pit, it was supposed to remain at grade level, Molinari said. But over the years, it grew to a height of 640 feet--”literally a mountain,” Molinari said.

“A lot of children grew up in the shadow of that landfill,” he said.