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Contaminated Carson neighborhood braces for messy environmental cleanup

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$90 million legal settlement offered by Shell Oil

Screen Shot 2015-08-08 at 22.58.09By Sandy Mazza, Daily Breeze: 7 Aug 2015

In a notoriously contaminated Carson neighborhood where homeowners have been waiting for years for someone to neutralize the toxic goo beneath their homes and yards, relief is finally within sight.

Cleanup plans were finalized recently after four years of invasive testing and debate over what to do with tons of underground waste oil abandoned in the Carousel Tract in the 1960s and rediscovered in 2008.

But things won’t be fixed overnight. In fact, residents can expect at least six more years of smelly, noisy work before they have their neighborhood — and their lives — back.

Final soil tests are now being completed and the community is preparing for a prolonged, painful cleanup that will begin once timelines for individual properties are worked out.

Many are so frustrated and worried about the project and its health impacts that they just want to move out, but they’ve lost too much value in their once-quiet homes on Carson’s southern edge, abutting Lomita Boulevard between Main Street and Avalon Boulevard.

And a $90 million legal settlement offered by Shell Oil in November is being held up in Los Angeles Superior Court while current and former property owners bicker about who’s responsible for the mess.

“I’ve already had two brain tumors,” a resident who gave her name only as Debbie told government officials overseeing the cleanup at a community meeting this week. “I’m sorry but this is so stressful.”

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health believes the plan to remove the health hazards caused by 14 million pounds of waste oil left from a former Shell tank farm won’t protect residents. While “bioventing” and “vapor extraction” technologies suck out the dangerous bits, they say, it will leave most of the oil-soaked soil in place. What’s more, health department officials say the stress of the cleanup process is also harmful to the community’s health.

But Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board officials in charge of the cleanup plans promise that the most qualified experts and state-of-the-art technologies are being used, and that the health hazards are minimal and will be reduced to harmless levels.

Residents have been skeptical of those promises for years, especially since doctors tell them the environmental conditions could have contributed to their cancerous tumors, asthma and other illnesses.

“I’ll appreciate new soil,” said a resident who gave only his first name, Tom. “But I’ll never grow anything in my yard again.”

Now that the structure of the cleanup has been outlined in an approved Remedial Action Plan and Environmental Impact Report, finalized in June, residents can visualize the cleanup they’ve been waiting for since it was ordered by the regional water board in 2011. They face at least six years of invasive soil extraction, including months when they’ll be forced into hotels while their yards are dismantled.

According to the final plan, workers will remove only the contaminated soil from as deep as 20 feet underground in uncovered yards in groups of eight homes at a time. Residents will be relocated to hotels for about 10 weeks while their soil is replaced and devices are installed near their homes that will monitor and clean the area for years to come.

Mina Acosta has lived in the neighborhood for about 30 years with other family members, and said — though she doesn’t want to give up her home — she’s frustrated and ready to leave.

“If they insist on cleaning it while we’re here, why not evacuate us all at once?,” Acosta said. “If the plan is to clean eight houses at a time, what about the ninth house? It will be exposed to all the construction. I hope they plan this better” than the pilot tests in 2012. Those tests cleaned soil at several homes but, while several mitigation measures were used by workers to minimize the stench of oil and noisy construction, the work was still loud and smelly for neighbors.

The city’s efforts to cajole Shell Oil into buying all the homes so everyone can leave have failed, though the company offered to eventually compensate homeowners for any lost value in their homes if they sell.

Shell “expects to spend up to $191 million in resolving (these) contamination issues,” the Carson City Attorney’s Office wrote to the water board, in response to the final plan. “If (Shell) were to purchase all 285 homes at $450,000 each, (it) would pay $128,250,000 leaving $62,750,000 for remediation.”

The regional water board named Shell responsible for the pollution in 2008 and, in April, also included the developer of the 285 homes — Lomita Development Corp. and Barclay Hollander Corp., which is now owned by Dole Food Co. But they deny responsibility and are challenging Shell’s $90 million settlement offer to residents in November 2014.

Though Shell has led the environmental investigation and developed cleaning plans, the company does not believe it is at fault either because it signed over rights to the land before the sale was finalized to rush development of the homes. The developer agreed to “bear all costs for dispositions of wastes and residues,” according to the company’s lawsuit against the developer. Rather than cleaning it, the mess was knocked down and buried under a few feet of soil.

The suit, filed last year, is on hold while the companies wrestle over the existing settlement offer.

But while the regulators and responsible parties work out solutions, many residents can’t understand why the process is so convoluted and long.

“I really don’t know how to say this and impress upon you the stress and anxiety all of this has caused me,” resident B. Joan Foster wrote in response to the water board’s plans. “I will be 80 years old in February and the thought of moving out of my house for that length of time and the condition my house will be in after all of this digging and equipment …

“The money Shell Oil feels is a compensation for all of this is nothing but a mere (pittance) of what we have to go through.”

MediaNews Group / LA Area News Group / Torrance Daily Breeze 

SOURCE

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