Until recently, Barbara Post struggled to get people to react with urgency to her claims that Shell Oil’s contamination of her Carson neighborhood caused her neighbor’s 132 tumors, her daughter’s flesh-eating disease and her deceased husband’s irregular heartbeat.
By Sandy Mazza, Staff Writer
sandy.mazza@dailybreeze.com l, @sandymazza on Twitter
Posted: 08/07/13, 8:27 PM PDT |
Until recently, Barbara Post struggled to get people to react with urgency to her claims that Shell Oil’s contamination of her Carson neighborhood caused her neighbor’s 132 tumors, her daughter’s flesh-eating disease and her deceased husband’s irregular heartbeat.
After all, state health officials have repeatedly said the extensive contamination found underneath the 50-acre Carousel tract does not pose an immediate threat to human health. Constant exposure to the air may result in a slightly increased cancer risk over dozens of years, experts said. But there was no apparent rush to get people out of the area when large deposits of waste oil were found there about five years ago.
The petroleum was left from a Shell Oil tank farm that operated on the site from the 1920s to 1966, when the Carousel tract was developed. When the tank farm was demolished, concrete oil reservoirs were crushed and left in the ground along with untold amounts of waste petroleum.
On Monday night, the Carson City Council is expected to approve a city resolution declaring a “condition of emergency within the Carousel tract requiring immediate and comprehensive action by appropriate state regulatory agencies and the attorney general.”
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is in charge of the cleanup, which the agency ordered Shell to do two years ago. Since the order, Shell has undergone extensive testing to uncover how much contamination exists and to develop a work plan to clean the soil to a depth of 10 feet. City officials and residents, however, want them to clean the soil to at least 40 feet below ground, because oil has been found as far down as the groundwater.
On July 16, the city officially joined Carousel tract residents in filing a complaint against Shell in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging the company created a public nuisance that causes injury. A report released last month by investigators working with Girardi and Keese, the law firm representing residents and the city in court, found dangerous levels of carcinogenic benzene and explosive methane close to homes.
“These dangerous conditions are spread widely across the site, and the degree of exposure to these chemicals is highly variable and extremely difficult to predict,” according to a report by environmental consulting firm L. Everett & Associates.
The report cites a flammable methane gas pocket found in the neighborhood with a concentration of 59.7 percent by volume, which far exceeds the “lower explosive limit” of 5 percent. Also, benzene levels were found in concentrations much higher than that accepted by the California Human Health Screening Level.
These findings prompted the council to demand an immediate solution from state regulatory agencies. As it is, Shell is still developing a final work plan, which must be approved by the regional water board before cleaning can begin. The process of developing and approving the plan is expected to at least take the rest of the year.
If the council approves its resolution, which it asked staff members to prepare last week, the city will ask Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Water Resources Control Board to help “address and mitigate the emergency conditions at the Carousel tract.”
The city’s resolution also asks the executive officer of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board to “immediately order and require Shell to fully comply” with the cleanup order.
Technical experts contracted by Shell to review environmental hazards and the cleanup process in Carousel tract were not available for comment Friday, but a Shell spokesman said the figures cited by L. Everett & Associates do not represent a threat.
“Based on testing analysis, the water board, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and the Department of Public Health have all indicated that there’s no immediate threat,” Shell spokesman Alan Caldwell said. “We have to leave it in the hands of the regulatory agencies. They have the final say, not Shell.”
Caldwell said the test that found a pocket of methane at 59.7 percent volume and excessively high benzene levels was in the street, rather than under a home, and from a “one-time sample” that does not represent the average levels of contaminates found. Also, the “zone of flammability” for methane is a volume from 5 to 15 percent, which means the methane found in the Carousel tract was not flammable, Caldwell said.
But for residents like Post, there’s no question dangers lurk beneath homes. They have been told not to garden or dig in the soil for any reason. Occasionally, a dug-up hole in the neighborhood reveals smelly, thick black goo.
“This place is a ticking time bomb, with all the methane moving around underneath us,” Post said. “This place could go up. I’m one of the fortunate ones, I haven’t had anything wrong with me yet, but it’s all around me.”
The city’s decision to join the residents in demanding an immediate resolution is something Post has wanted for years.
“It’s just not the same listening to the Barbara Posts of the world as it is the world-renowned experts,” she said. “It gives some credibility to what we’ve been living through for the last five years.”
