One on Santa Barbara County’s seemingly never-ending legal battles has finally come to a close—for now, at least.
On April 4, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it reached a $1.2 million settlement with 49 small parties for the Casmalia Resources Superfund Site, a now-defunct hazardous waste disposal site in Santa Barbara County. This is the fifth in a series of small party settlements.
Located approximately 10 miles southwest of Santa Maria, the Casmalia facility accepted approximately 5.6 billion pounds of waste from nearly 10,000 generators between 1973 and 1989.
The EPA became the site’s lead regulatory agency in 1992 after the facility’s owners and operators abandoned efforts to clean it up. To date, the EPA has collected more than $110 million toward cleaning toxins.
According to an e-mail from the EPA, the agreement mandates the 49 parties pay a “proportionate share of the estimated $284 million total cost of cleaning up the site and resolves their liability for the more than 13 million pounds of waste they collectively sent to CRSS.”
The settlement also includes costs accrued from potential environmental damage claims filed by various government agencies.
The settlement agreement is available for a 30-day public comment period following publication in the Federal Register.
For more information, visit epa.gov/region9/casmalia.
This article appears in Apr 7-14, 2011.