The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will host a public meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 6, to take public input on a proposed plan to treat ground and surface water, along with contaminated soil at the Casmalia Resources Superfund Site.
Agency officials will present the plan at Orcutt Academy Charter School at 3491 Point Sal Road, Casmalia, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Suggested iterations of the plan have a varying cost that ranges from $54 million to more than $93 million, depending on how aggressive the public deems the EPA should act in cleaning the site. The agency’s’ “preferred alternative” has an estimated cost of about $60 million and involves landfill capping and liquids extraction. It estimates the mitigation work would take around five years.
The EPA began working on the 252-acre toxic dump in the northwestern corner of Santa Barbara County in 1992, three years after the facility shut down due to financial issues. Since then, the agency has collected millions of dollars from companies, municipalities, school districts, and other entities it said contributed to the contamination at the Casmalia Resources Hazardous Waste landfill.
The Sun published a cover story in 2015 for its April 21 issue, “Toxic Canyon,” highlighting those lawsuits and how the area still needed mitigation work.
From 1972 to 1989, the Casmalia site took in more than 5.6 billion pounds of waste from at least 10,000 waste generators. It accepted anything from oil field waste to polychlorinated biphenyls, a suspected carcinogen that Congress banned in 1979, the Sun previously reported.
EPA officials say more than 300 chemicals have already been detected, including volatile organic compounds and metals.
In a resource packet detailing the proposed plan, the agency highlighted several “chemicals of concern” including arsenic and myriad substances identified as suspected or known carcinogens.
The site sits just 4 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and is only 10 miles from Santa Maria and Orcutt. Guadalupe is 8 miles north, while Lompoc sits another 16 miles to the southeast.
While a geologic survey determined most of the soil—besides specific “hot spots or high risk areas”—had low chances of the chemicals seeping to the aquifer below it, the EPA said it was placing a priority on preventing human exposure and also listed threatened and endangered species potentially impacted by the site. The animals range from the California red legged frog, to the tiger salamander and the Western spadefoot toad.
The agency is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service along with California Department of Fish and Wildlife to observe effects on those animals.
Those unable to attend the meeting can send comments that must be postmarked by Jan. 22, 2018, to Alejandro Diaz at U.S. EPA, Region 9, 75 Hawthorne St., San Francisco, or to his email at diaz.alejandro@epa.gov.
A transcript of the Dec. 6 meeting will be published on the agency’s website at epa.gov/superfund/casmalia.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 7, 2017.