Tests are conducted on a hole in the street that is seeping what looks like oil after AT&T workers this week were fixing a communications line in the 300 block of East 244th Street in Carson Calif. (Stephen Carr / Staff Photographer)
Considering what was discovered this week in front of Sonia Cienfuegos' Carson home, she might not let her children play in the yard anymore.
The finding is the latest glaring reminder of the environmental disaster lurking just a few feet below ground at the 50-acre Carousel tract housing development near where Lomita and Avalon boulevards cross.
On Thursday, environmental investigators examined the problem inside a crib-size hole dug by utility workers in the pavement outside the Cienfuegos home. A few feet below the asphalt, a black, shiny, rubbery substance gurgled from
A hole in the street is seeping what looks like oil after AT&T workers this week were fixing a communications line in the 300 block of East 244th Street in Carson Calif. Stephen Carr/ LANG (Stephen Carr / Staff Photographer)
dime-size holes into the pit. Investigators held detectors with gloved hands around the hole and sampled it carefully."Oh, my God, how terrible," Cienfuegos said. "I just wanna leave."
The discovery of an oil-like contaminant under the Carousel tract isn't new, but this is the first time investigators have witnessed it moving through the ground in globs. Oily sludge is so profoundly mixed with the soil below the Carousel tract's 285 homes that a swift wind there commonly holds the stinging scent of petroleum. The contamination has been there since a Shell Oil Co. tank farm was closed in the 1960s. A clean-up effort has been in the works for the past three years, but cleaning has yet to begin.
Shell spokesman Alan
Caldwell said the company has not yet determined what the substance found this week is."It is a tarry-like substance, and it appears to be very small in quantity," Caldwell said. "They've sent it off to the laboratory to be sampled. We're trying to assess if it's from the oil reservoirs or from grading and site development."
Bob Bowcock, founder of Integrated Resource Management Inc., was contracted to do soil testing for the law firm representing residents in a suit alleging cancer, strokes and other health problems resulting from the soil contamination. Bowcock said the movement of the oil-like substance seen in the pit this week shows that the situation underground is volatile because of all the hazardous chemicals. A flame could cause an explosion if enough methane pools into one area underground, he said.
"You've got bioventing (testing) going on there and a hole here - we don't know where the methane is migrating," Bowcock said. "The migration is unknown, and that's why they've got to stop leaving these people in their homes."
The agency overseeing the clean-up process - the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board - has ordered Shell to clean up the soil, rather than pay residents for their homes and flatten the site. The water board has ordered extensive testing inside and outside homes, and to 10 feet below ground, and has not yet found a risk to human health. Recently, the board announced that a panel of experts had been contracted to oversee several agencies involved in clean-up plans.
Shell operated an oil tank farm on the site from the 1920s to the 1960s. The tanks were demolished after a boy fell into one and died while playing with a friend.
A few years later, the Carousel tract housing development was approved there - even though the oil tank remnants and oil waste were only shabbily covered by a few feet of top soil, according to investigators.
The contamination was rediscovered by oil company workers several years ago, and the cleanup ensued. It has moved slowly, and a pilot test program on several homes has yet to begin. In the meantime, residents have erected lawn signs proclaiming their unhappiness with Shell's decision to clean the soil while they live there.
Cienfuegos said she and her husband wanted to expand their two-bedroom home to four bedrooms because they have three children. But the contamination made that impossible.
"When I bought my house, this was the house I was planning to grow my family in," she said. "Then this happened. They suggested not to let the kids outside, but my son loves to play basketball. And I can't move out because my house has no value now."
Shell will test several different cleaning strategies at a handful of homes in the neighborhood. Cleaning could be done by digging narrow, deep holes and removing debris with backhoes, or by digging one huge hole that gets progressively smaller with depth. Once Shell officials determine the best cleaning method, they will submit a final work plan to the water board for approval.
Tom Girardi, a Los Angeles attorney who represents residents in the Shell lawsuit, said his investigators have found extremely high levels of hazardous benzene in the soil at Carousel tract, and he anticipates trial beginning within a year.
"These miserable, rotten, dishonest human beings," Girardi said of Shell officials. "This stuff is the stuff they left there and that they didn't clean up. They said `tough toast' to the people who bought the houses. They're disgusting."
sandy.mazza@dailybreeze.com
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