EPA Testing Waste From Old Smelting Plant in Oxnard

Except for the waves crashing nearby, the slag heap at Ormond Beach in Ventura County could double as a moonscape.

Ragged berms and cracked plains spread over 28 acres top a 45-foot-high mass of compacted gray ash. Nothing grows there -- not even a weed.

For decades, community activists have said that the waste pile and the now-shuttered foundry in Oxnard that created it are a scar on the coast and a threat to an adjacent lagoon brimming with bird and sea life.

Their goal of seeing the pile removed, and the entire area restored as a wetland, gained unexpected momentum last week with the arrival of a team of inspectors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Using sensitive monitoring equipment, geologists are testing nearby residential tracts, soil, sand, groundwater, the air and even fish from the lagoon for evidence of radiation and other pollutants.

If an analysis shows that the former smelting plant and its wastes pose significant public or ecological risks, the 43-acre property could qualify as a federal Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup site, bringing much-needed federal dollars with it.

“We’re looking at everything under the sun,” said Mitt Mitguard, a spokesman with the EPA’s emergency response section. “But the bottom line is we won’t know what’s there until we analyze all of the data.”

Testing will continue for another week, said Robert Wise, the EPA’s on-site coordinator. By September, the agency should know whether contaminants are serious enough to warrant a federal cleanup.

Community advocates are thrilled at the EPA’s intervention. Local activists and environmentalists have long supported removing what they say is a relic of California’s industrial past.

“It’s a very important turning point,” said Jean Harris of Ventura, a longtime leader in the fight to shut down the plant. “Getting rid of that pile, should it be found to be to toxic, will be enormous.”

Harris has no doubt that high levels of pollutants are present and that they are leaching to nearby lands. She recalls the time she watched as workers at the plant dumped waste solids into unlined settling ponds. Within days, she said, plant life on adjacent ground began dying.

“It’s really maddening what they’ve gotten away with,” Harris said.

Halaco Engineering, owned by Clarence Haack and his sons, John and Robert, began smelting operations in 1965. For nearly 40 years, its foundry melted down old engine blocks, televisions and other scrap metal to extract pure ore for resale. The remaining wastes were slurried to settling ponds and, when dried, dredged up into high berms.

In 1969, Halaco obtained a radioactive material license to handle magnesium-thorium alloys found in some of the scrap metals. Officials fear that traces of radioactive materials may still be present in the massive plateau of dried waste, in the groundwater or in dust that coastal winds blow toward residential communities a quarter-mile away.

“The winds get pretty stiff there off the ocean and there’s an ability to transfer particles from the site to a large spread of area,” Mitguard said.

Beginning in 1980, regulators sued Halaco to limit its operations or change the way it handled waste deposits. Dumping continued until March 2002, when the plant was ordered to stop by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Halaco then began storing the caked solids inside sheds at the smelting plant. In 2003, the regional water board said the practice threatened to pollute Ormond Beach and ordered the Haacks to clean it up.

Halaco, which filed for bankruptcy in 2002, shut down the plant two years later. The property is being liquidated in a Chapter 7 proceeding.

Since it closed, graffiti artists have painted numerous bright murals over the rusting hulks of buildings and equipment. The heap itself is being illegally used as an off-road playground, evidenced by dirt bike trails traversing its surface.

“Basically they are inhaling whatever is ambient here,” Mitguard said during a recent tour of the plant. “The existence of this graffiti art shows they were here for quite a while.”

Depending on what EPA investigators find, the waste pile could remain and be encapsulated to make way for redevelopment, or be moved to a toxic waste dump site, officials said.

Either way, developers and conservancy groups are likely to line up to take control of a rare slice of the California coast. Builders have made a number of pitches for the land over the years, Harris said, none of them successful.

The California Coastal Conservancy has purchased more than 500 acres of wetlands surrounding the closed facility, said Peter Brand, the conservancy’s point man in Ventura County.

Together, the Ormond Beach wetland, an adjoining 900 acres of freshwater wetlands and the 1,500-acre Mugu Lagoon make up Southern California’s largest coastal wetland, Brand said.

Working with the Nature Conservancy, the state agency hopes to restore the entire area as a haven for several endangered species, including the western snowy plover and the California least tern.

Acquiring Halaco’s 43 acres would be a critical link to reaching that goal, Brand said.

“Three bodies of water converge in and around this industrial development,” he said. “Clearly water is trying to return to that area.”