SOUNDING OFF:

Listening to comments and questions made by Huntington Beach City Council members regarding the latest update on the cleanup of the ASCON landfill was confusing and frustrating.

On one hand the City Council seemed incredulous at the scope and magnitude that even partial cleanup of toxic substances contained in the landfill would entail. Choice No. 4, the one that seems most palatable and most often mentioned during the study session, would still not leave the landfill safe enough for human habitation of a residential nature. Council members expressed their fears and concerns for the neighborhoods surrounding the landfill during the removal process. Noise, noxious fumes, toxic dusts generated by the literally hundreds of truck loads of waste materials being trucked daily through our community streets on its way to other landfills that accept hazardous waste. They lamented that this cleanup could take 3 1/2 to 4 years and affect the lives of folks in southeast Huntington Beach who already have lived through the Orange County Sanitation District pipeline construction, the emissions of the AES power generator, the methane leaks into homes and schools. They felt really badly for us. We bear a lot.

Well, if you really recognize and sympathize with these assaults on our community, why are you supporting a proposal to build a desalination plant and the further trenching of our streets to lay a 48-inch pipeline through four miles of our neighborhood to carry water out of the city? Something has to be done about ASCON and we understand that. The sanitation district needs to improve infrastructure from time to time. AES is here and we deal with it, but to deliberately inflict more construction turmoil on a project whose process becomes more obsolete by the day is, to say the least, foolhardy. That you will allow Poseidon Resources to lay pipeline down Hamilton Avenue directly in front of an area containing deep pits of toxic substances that have already leaked into the soil is unconscionable. Your actions do not support your words. Maybe the Department of Toxic Substance Control will come to our aid. We can only hope.

MERLE MOSHIRI is the president of Citizens for Responsible Desalination in Huntington Beach.