Toxic Crisis: See It From the Beginning

AZUSA —  If you have followed some of the more gruesome cases of toxic pollution, you may have noticed the law of behavior that governs these events. That law says we will discover the problem only when it’s too late. The toxic cops arrive after the perpetrators are long gone and there’s nothing to do but pass around the blame. Then everyone pays the bill.

Well, out in Azusa, we are being offered a rare opportunity. We have the chance to witness a toxic crisis in the making. We can see public officials eager to please an industry offering jobs and dollars, ever willing to ignore the evidence and to let the future take care of itself. We can watch experts warn them of the dangers, of the horrendous risks, and see the experts fail to make an impact.

In Azusa we can see the beginning, and the likely end, all at once.

The basics of this saga are simple. A company known as Browning-Ferris Industries wants to take a small landfill site in Azusa and expand it to become one of the major dumps in the Los Angeles Basin. The difficulty arises from the fact that the landfill happens to sit directly over a huge and extremely valuable underground aquifer.

When Browning-Ferris first submitted its application, most Southern California water agencies believed it would be routinely rejected. The San Gabriel Basin aquifer, after all, supplies drinking water to roughly a million people and already has serious contamination problems.

The dangers from the expanded landfill were obvious. Garbage dumps generate a surprising brew of contaminants that percolate downward. If the poisons hit an aquifer, there’s trouble. One analysis of garbage at the old Azusa site found it to contain amounts of chlorobenzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, ethanol and acetone.

Worse still, the rock layers underneath the Azusa site were known to be soft, porous and leaky. Tom Stetson, a water engineer for the San Gabriel region, once described the proposed dump as a “ticking time bomb.” The plan was vilified and opposed by the San Gabriel Watermaster, the agency that administers the aquifer; the Metropolitan Water District; the state Department of Water Resources; the state Department of Health Services, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

If you know much about water in California, you know this kind of coalition virtually never loses on a purity issue. But the water boys were about to discover that Browning-Ferris is not just any company. Its chief executive happens to be William D. Ruckelshaus, twice administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a man with impeccable credentials and considerable Republican clout.

First Ruckelshaus tried to make a deal with his adversaries. He offered to line the dump with two layers of thick plastic. Nothing doing, the coalition said, and showed him a report from his own EPA that concludes all plastic liners eventually leak.

Then Ruckelshaus offered $20 million to build three water treatment plants just in case the liner did fail. Still nothing doing, the water boys replied, and reminded him the EPA had estimated it will already cost $800 million to clean up existing contamination in the basin.

“The main San Gabriel Basin is priceless and is not for sale,” Linn Magoffin, chairman of the Watermaster, wrote to Ruckelshaus.

Unfortunately, the decision was not Magoffin’s to make, nor anyone else’s in the coalition. That power lay with the state Water Resources Control Board, whose members are appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian. The board actually had two shots at the Browning-Ferris proposal. The first time, in August, they turned it down but gave Ruckelshaus the chance to come back with changes.

In October, Ruckelshaus reappeared with more or less the same plan, sweetened now with the $20 million. The board took the money, and Ruckelshaus got his permit.

“I feel terrible,” said Watermaster Magoffin after the vote. A few days later his agency and the other opponents filed suit against the board.

What happened? It is genuinely hard to say. Perhaps the board could not turn down a man like Ruckelshaus. Perhaps it had something to do with the squad of Sacramento lobbyists the company hired, including Deukmejian’s former finance chief, Michael Franchetti. Or the $19,500 the company sprinkled around Sacramento in the way of campaign contributions.

One thing is certain, however. If Browning-Ferris builds its dump, and an underground plume of acetone and toulene comes slithering out of the site decades later, this water board will not have to deal with it. They will be long gone, forgotten. Others will pass around the blame, and others will pay the bill.