Irvine Great Park Inherits Contaminants

(IRVINE, Calif.) - Recent scuttlebutt regarding the Superfund cleanup of former MCAS El Toro is that much of the hardscape will remain in place. Apparently it’s being given some spin by Larry Agran’s ass-covering minions as the homage (tribute) to the historical military use of the site, leaving the runways and possibly even entire arterial streets and sidewalks intact. That’s PR for you when the people in charge have big marketing budgets provided on the backs of taxpayers. Make it look like a favor, a sensitive nostalgic gift. Anything to get around normal regulatory compliance standards, friends helping friends, right?

At press time I haven’t been able to confirm what and exactly where things went South for the original goals, but presently the recycling processes have (pardon the puns) “ground” to a halt. So the original gloriously green BS has de-evolved into limbo---And even the Catholic Church no longer believes in that having “buried” the concept.

Originally the concrete, asphalt, bricks and block were supposed to be completely lifted from the ground then broken into pieces and/or pulverized for recycling onsite as base materials for roads and paths for new projects like Irvine’s Great Park. Fellow Salem-News contributor and former Marine John Uldrich, now an Independence Party candidate for Governor in Minnesota, guestimates the total impervious coverage still undisturbed at around 10% max., not an insignificant amount at 350,000 tons. [1]

Personally, I’m wondering if this isn’t just another way of avoiding proper waste removal and remediation, cutting corners for public health hazards, not to mention fiscal expediency. Having spent 200 of the $220 million, they’re running out of money with pitifully little to show for it. Arguably it would require incredibly expensive and complex logistics for carting the contaminated soil beneath the hardscape long distances by trucks or rail to whoever will take that humungous amount of hazardous waste. If the sediment is as bad as many of us blowing the whistle on this rehab failure believe it to be, it can’t be realistically re-used or recycled onsite. [2]

I must admit though, environmentally speaking, this is a case where letting a sleeping dog lie, not unearthing the carcinogenic substances beneath that hardscape might be a lot less risky health-wise for South Orange County.

Further clouding the analysis and adding intrigue is the contracting firm walked on the site’s recycling phase a while back after a dispute with the commercial and residential element developers, LENNAR, a corporation of dubious distinction. GOOGLE them, you’ll be stunned at their history.

The mounds of already broken debris and rubble sit distressfully, frustratingly as a visual blight in full view from the adjacent State Route 133, a glaring beacon and symbol to further confuse the public. Piles of concrete riprap don’t constitute a Great Park, more like an ominous warning sign or monolithic sentinel from the movie Space Odyssey. Cue up the Strauss please, maestro.

Originally, back in 2002, local demolition contractor Penhall Co. out of Anaheim was to be the removal vendor with Recycled Materials Co. out of Denver to be responsible for the cartage, storage and recycling. To little or no fanfare, just one more mystery among a growing multitude at this base, by 2007 it was a newbie, Tierra Verde, another OC-based group. Here’s the word from an LA Times article in June of 2007 titled "Recycling is part of daily grind at ex-military base" by David Reyes: “The salvage and recycling operation is one of the largest ever undertaken in the United States, according to Lennar and Irvine officials. Part of the work includes ripping out El Toro's four concrete runways, an estimated 3.5 million tons of asphalt and concrete that will be crushed and recycled into miles of new streets and sidewalks in Lennar's development. For Tierra Verde, it means that as the demolition progresses, construction rubble will be trucked to a corner of the former base where the firm is leasing 50 acres for its recycling operation."[3]

The Agran cabal has done some covering up of their own, avoiding disclosure of critical reconnaissance and peer review by invoking confidential attorney-client privileges, making it tough for even concerned City Council members and Great Park Board members like Ms. Christina Shea to get to the bottom of the truth. Silly OC taxpayers, we thought when we voted for this base conversion it was going to be EVERYONE’S park. And before you ask, no, I was NOT in favor of it remaining an airport, OK?

Maybe all of the previous vendors involved in the paving and concrete removal/recycling saw the handwriting on the old concrete wall and bailed before the whole thing goes into EPA courtrooms? After all, LENNAR did take out a $100 million “Errors and Omissions” policy early last year-----With another suspicious Wall Street turkey, AIG no less. And if the rehab is being performed to the standards Larry’s cronies claim, why the additional policy, the yearly premium alone must be a doozy, paid for by a firm that spends more time in depositions, plus civil and criminal courtrooms across the USA than actually building anything.

The mounds of soil are not covered now, plus they are too large to keep covered very well as the pile expands, and once exposed, the contaminants can become airborne pollutants. Upwind, you’d affect large suburban communities like the City of Rancho Santa Margarita. During our Santa Ana devil winds (offshore), ironically the City of Irvine would bear the brunt. Render unto Caesar sounds funny, but the trusting residents and the children of Irvine don’t deserve that fate.

A driving rain would slough and then drain the pollutants into the San Diego Creek and its tributaries. A significant downpour cannot be captured and treated onsite, there are no infrastructural mechanisms in place to handle that volume of sheet flow. Any airborne pollutants would wash into the mainstem and tributaries as well.

This urbanized watershed evacuates into Upper Newport Bay, a highly valued wetland and estuary, home to numerous threatened and endangered species, also a critical migratory way station that is already under close scrutiny and sanctions by California and USEPA due to nearly a half-century of highly contaminated discharges never mitigated. As Americans are learning after Hurricane Katrina and now the BP disaster, we’re losing our wetlands and estuaries already due to greedy over-development pursuits, corrupt politicians (is that redundant?) and poor logistical protection by flood control agencies. In this case pollution has overwhelmed once pristine ecosystems and IRWD, the disingenuously green Irvine Company and the City of Irvine are the primary culprits.

To this day, over 70 years since aggressive pesticides and herbicides were broadcast upstream, most of the named contaminants in Founder Robert (Bob) Caustin (eco-NGO DEFEND THE BAY) federally adjudicated litigation were cited in a mandated Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) pollution budget for the entire watershed. Bob prevailed in the US 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals----If memory serves, the public agencies he litigated were ordered to reimburse his attorney fees (initially paid for by himself I think) plus other critical water quality sanctions and habitat protection mitigations. Bob is a true "eco-warrior", one of my personal heroes and now a close friend. He also set a precedent by achieving this first TMDL enforcement action for Orange County---Setting the protection accolade bar pretty high for the rest of us! And of course our good buddies at Irvine Ranch Water District have felt the sting of his eco-lash in 2001, so you know he’s hit the chronic violators where it hurts. People don't realize it, but ONLY litigation forces change. Deterance drives compliance, kissy face certainly doesn't.

FYI: A Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) is a document that reflects the amount of a pollutant(s) a waterway can absorb, plus a margin of safety, and still meet water quality standards, including designated uses such as drinking water, aquatic life, and recreation (Beneficial Uses & Water Quality Objectives Under Cal/EPA Basin Plan Objectives). A TMDL basically includes a quantitative assessment of water quality problems, pollution sources, and pollution reductions needed to restore and protect a river, stream, or lake to the federally mandated fishable/swimmable prescriptions of the Clean Water Act. [4]

Larry Agran’s happy face and Pollyanna description of gold standard success notwithstanding, this fiasco is more like Oscar Wilde’s goth novel “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.” On the outside, to the uninformed and naïve, it looks as if it’s progressing pretty spiffy, underneath its evolving grotesque ugliness.

Many of us writing about this over the past few years (Tim King, Bob O’Dowd, John Uldrich and Jim Davis et al) believe what’s emerging is the AFTER part of the portrait, what we now have discovered as the reality for decades on this former James Irvine Ranch site.

Agran’s cohorts, basically Irvine’s crypto-fascist wankers, would have you corruptly believe the reverse, that it WAS that grotesquely abusive person the portrait reflected and is being restored to handsome dandy Dorian. His go-to “gits” at the Irvine Ranch Water District are enablers and an integral piece of his support system. They’re making money off of this Nightmare on Irvine Boulevard, worse, the IRWD’s false claims of beneficial use are grossly exaggerated. Once again, marketing and PR at their most expensive and finest---All on taxpayers dollars.

Those of us that continue to play Paul Revere about subterranean waterborne contaminants not being reduced or removed at the rehab of this base probably sound peevish to many-----Hell’s Bells, I sometimes feel that way while writing about the topic myself! Being a Marine is NOT about whining, it’s about winning.

And in case you didn’t know it, “Hell’s Bells” refers to the flowers found on morning glories whose seeds have stored concentrations of hallucinogenic ergot alkaloids. [5]

Which is actually ironic, considering that the agencies and individuals who would have you believe that they’re doing a bang up job there must have consumed some of these psychedelics and are out of their right natural minds-----Plus they cross their fingers and pray that the public gobbled the same mind-altering gunk. They needn’t worry anyway, they bring bottled water to the meetings and live somewhere else. It is insulting that they think the knowledgeable independent investigators are blindly willing to “drink the kool-aid” too.

The base was formerly part of the James Irvine Ranch lima bean spread until the early 40’s, now it’s publicized as a place rich with history, and promoted in folksy, kind of a sentimentally nostalgic, idyllic way. [6]

Recently, without the “benefit” of psychotropics, I had a minor epiphany: We at Salem-News.com have been remiss in not fully educating our readers about the residual carcinogenic pollutants from the agricultural uses at the site, plus those up to 1972 that constitute an integral part of our justifiable alarm.

In many cases they were introduced before we completely understood their impacts, a lot has percolated through the soil and into the groundwater, a great deal washed off and into adjacent receiving watercourses. Much is still showing up as a low level “drip-feed,” slowly transported by sediment. These contaminants were broadcast liberally, actually pell-mell by the US government or its landscapers and weed abatement vendors after the conversion from a ranch to a base until finally banned by EPA.

Organochlorines:

Organophosphates:

Carbamates:

Pyrethroids:

As I’ve pointed out to readers in previous columns, the combined adverse physical health impacts if exposed to several of these contaminants simultaneously, individually or in sequence over time are also poorly understood because (whoopee!) we’re the guinea pigs. [7]

Toxicity is one of the measuring tools, and generally scientists use two categories for their studies and follow-up clinical analyses: Chronic and Acute. Chronic involve long-term durations of exposure, acute usually singular events or multiple exposures in a brief period of time (usually a 24 hour period). [8]

Another evolving scientific tool for organic pollutants toxicological inspection are their environmental persistence, usually referenced as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). These are extremely toxic substances once set loose into the environs and affect not only human health but also that of the flora and fauna. [9]

This might help readers to understand why many ecosystems are dying or already dead. The plants and certain bio-sensitive species are early warning systems, our helpless innocent canaries in the global coalmine. These substance’s physical and chemical properties, particularly their high stability, give them ubiquity and exponential capacity of accumulation for organisms and all of nature.

POPs, meanwhile, are man- made compounds (not naturally found) such as PCB, some pesticides, insecticides and contaminants of paper and hydrocarbon industries, and substances that delay or retard fire. They may also occur as a result of combustion, that is, burning without advanced filtration systems (dioxin, furan). Many 3^rd world countries like China, India, and a lot of them in South America are in a limited budget race to catch up to us. In their haste for resource extraction, they are destroying their own ecosystems and human populations via minimal (if any) filters for known industry pollutants.

In the case of MCAS El Toro, generic Preliminary Remedial Goals (PRGs) for Superfund cleanup parameters were established for this particular site in Region 9, USEPA. These objectives are now called Regional Screening Levels for Chemical Contaminants.

These two concepts have been the basis of many arguments among the scientific community and eco-NGOs, and an awful lot of medical compensation cases. The government’s position is that if the presence of a contaminant cannot be determined, if their instruments can’t detect it in theory it has no adverse impact. Kind of like that “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it then it makes no sound.” The government then folds that detectability factor into prior, antiquated clinical studies as their other benchmark, alleging levels of significance that previous analyses reflected had marginal or zero adverse impact.

The problem here, once again a drum I bang constantly, is that they have no long-term studies for many of these carcinogens individually as exposure occurs, and especially have none for the cumulative impacts of say 5-10 of them. The Great Park site, due to eco-abuse (granted unknowing) by the former tenant Irvine Ranch and by the last one (USMC), has all of the symptoms and classification for a Superfund cleanup but it is not being thoroughly remediated commensurately. [10]

What can Salem-News.com readers take from this? Well, if you live around here you should be upset, you should be alarmed because like a silent serial killer it’s in your locale and the rehab folks at former MCAS El Toro are blowing smoke up your wazoo. If you’ve been following this site closely, you know that legally imposed water quality monitoring for Upper Newport Bay still shows the presence of the contaminants I’ve noted, and that the aquifer below the former base has these same pollutants, discharged by osmosis-----Not to mention the “value-add” of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), additional carcinogenic substances that my Marine Corps brother Bob O’Dowd has (unfortunately) become quite the expert on. Ditto for Jim Davis (Veterans Today) regarding his father, a USMC Gunnery Sgt. who was exposed to El Toro pollutants and Agent Orange. [11] Even if you live someplace else where agriculture once dominated (or still does), where post-agriculture development (ending in 1970s) and home gardeners or their landscapers used or are still using these substances illegally, where your reclaimed and/or potable water are drafted from aquifer wells or surface drainages, you’ve got a systemic problem not being openly discussed or given enough scrutiny. A healthy environment, like our precious democracy, requires constant vigilance.

FYI: If a project near you has some interesting enviro-aspect(s) that you think is/are worthy of Salem-News.com coverage and our readers attention, feel free to contact me with a very brief synopsis. Water-related “Blue Interventions” are my specialty!

His resumé is extensive, try an online GOOGLE search of his personal journey and historical accomplishments. His consultation fees are reasonable and if you've got a major project that alarms you, that needs creative intervention, then he's your man. His credentials and "CV" can be provided upon request.

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Roger von Bütow August 21, 2010 2:45 pm (Pacific time)

John Uldrich sent me this: The station was used for aviation activities for almost 50 years. Activities at the base have generated waste oils, paint residues, hydraulic fluid, used batteries and other wastes. In the past, there were few environmental rules and regulations and disposal technologies were limited. During those times, some wastes produced at station were disposed on the station. Recent recognition that these waste products may be harmful to people and the environment has resulted in new laws and regulations governing disposal. Soil and groundwater contamination at MCAS El Toro is a result of several past operations that were accepted practices. example, in the 1940s, aircraft refurbishing included the use solvents during degreasing activities. Between 1943 and 1955, municipal-type solid waste was generated by station housing (typical residential activities). Early disposal activities included incineration. Later, solid waste disposal was conducted at cut-and-fill landfill sites. Four landfills received solid waste, paint residues, oily wastes, industrial solvents, and incinerator ash. Fire-fighting training exercises were conducted at two burn pit areas and included the use of various flammable liquids such as jet fuel, aviation gasoline, and other waste liquids. MCAS is situated in a semi-urban, agricultural area of Southern California. The majority of the land immediately surrounding MCAS was used to raise oranges, strawberries, asparagus, and other agricultural crops. Portions of the station are leased for nursery use and agriculture use. The University of California, Irvine, has an agricultural field station directly north of MCAS. Located just northeast of the MCAS is a large nursery where fruit trees are grown. Until 10 years ago, the entire area surrounding MCAS was agricultural land; since then, urbanization has brought development closer to MCAS. New housing developments lie about one-half mile to the northeast of Site 1. About one-half mile northwest of the MCAS boundary are the main residential areas of the city of Irvine. The land farther north and northeast of MCAS in the Santa Ana Mountains and the San Joaquin Hills remains essentially undeveloped except for Rancho Santa Margarita far to the east.

Ltpar August 20, 2010 9:08 am (Pacific time)

Seems to me that the toxic soil would play a major role in the plan to build all those housing units at the Great Park? Was that not covered in the Environmental Impact Report by developer , Lenner Corporation or was the report waived by the Agranistas? Has anyone seen Larry Agran lately? He has told so many lies, his nose must be at least a foot long. If by some quirk of fate he is not re-elected to his Council seat in November, Agran would be a natural to go to work for Disney playing the part of Pinochio. Yep, just another day in paradise?

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