State to Pay $114.5 Million for Cleanup of Toxic Dumps

Ending years of convoluted litigation between the state and federal governments, California has agreed to pay $114.5 million for the cleanup of two infamous toxic dumps, including the Stringfellow acid pits near Riverside, once a receptacle for 35 million gallons of industrial chemicals.

Gov. Gray Davis announced Monday that the state will reimburse the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency $99.4 million for cleanup of the Stringfellow pits and $15 million for the Casmalia Resources Facility in Santa Barbara County--which the governor called “California’s highest-priority cleanup sites.”

“For decades, Stringfellow and Casmalia have posed significant risks to human health and the environment,” Davis said in a prepared statement. “This settlement . . . is an important step toward final resolution of the contentious litigation that has plagued and sometimes hampered the cleanup of these sites.”

Stringfellow was an unlined rock quarry that, from 1956 to 1972, was used as a toxic waste dump by scores of Southern California manufacturers, from McDonnell Douglas Corp. to Montrose Chemical Co. The acid pits, as they became known, have poisoned the ground water in Glen Avon, a blue-collar community west of Riverside, said Kathleen Johnson, chief of the federal EPA’s hazardous waste branch in San Francisco.

Glen Avon residents filed a lawsuit against the state and more than 100 companies that used Stringfellow as a dump 18 years ago. That lawsuit, which involved more than 500 lawyers and produced 300,000 pages of court records, resulted in damages of more than $100 million, and helped produce Monday’s agreement.

In 1993, the state was found liable for contamination of the acid pits because it maintained them and “promoted Stringfellow as a ‘solution’ for industrial and chemical waste,” said William L. Rukeyser, assistant secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency.

The agreement may have a modern price tag, but is a remnant of defunct business practices--and a reminder of the potential destruction of irresponsible industry, Rukeyser said.

“But the prevailing view back then was ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ And, unfortunately, the people who were making decisions for the state back then did not have the clarity of vision or the foresight to realize what they were getting themselves into. So we, the taxpayers of the next century, are stuck paying the bills.”

The agreement reimburses the EPA for cleanup at the Casmalia Resources Facility--a site where the state imported some of the waste removed from Stringfellow.