Officials begin planning lagoon cleanup

The clean up of Huntington Beach’s Ascon Landfill Site could begin as early as spring.

The 38-acre landfill on the southwest corner of Magnolia Street and Hamilton Avenue was the dumping ground for industrial and oil field wastes and construction debris from 1938 to 1984. The site has five 12-to-17-foot deep lagoons filled with construction and hazardous waste.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control is overseeing the cleanup and investigation of the site, and will begin an interim cleanup plan on lagoons 1 and 2 to discover what exactly is in them and remove waste in the lagoons up to an estimated 15 feet, said Safouh Sayed, project manager and hazardous substances engineer with the department.

The initial removal will take about eight months. Once that is done, the department can finalize its Environmental Impact Report to begin the final removal measure. The proposed final cleanup will remove the majority of the waste and then cap off the site with concrete, asphalt or a similar substance to stop rain water from getting underground and air from getting out.

The department is proposing not to remove all the waste from the site, because some of the items would be more harmful to bring up than leave, said Sandy Friedman, the department’s public information officer.

The waste will be taken to either the Clean Harbor’s Willow Button Landfill west of Bakersfield or the CWM Kettleman Hills Landfill north of Bakersfield. Items that can be recycled will be taken to a recycling center in Riverside County.

The cleanup is being funded by companies that contributed to the waste throughout the years. Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Shell Oil Co., Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO), the Dow Chemical Co., Northrop Grumman and Southern California Edison are paying for the clean up. No public money is being used for the site, Sayed said.

“At this point, all the parties are in cooperation with the cleanup,” he said.

Once the project begins, as many as 70 trucks per day will be going in and out of the site.

It will take about 5,000 trips to complete the removal.

The trucks will be limited to operating between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and are expected to travel about a half mile along Magnolia to Pacific Coast Highway to Beach Boulevard and onto the 405 Freeway. The official route must be approved by the City Council.

The site will be open 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Department officials said they are looking into monitoring traffic issues, especially concerning students driving to Edison High School in the morning.

The department met with community members at an informal open house meeting Wednesday.

The public comment period for the draft Interim Removal Measure and the project’s draft Mitigated Negative Declaration is Oct. 22 through Nov. 23. All comments will be reviewed and responded to before any work begins.

Project documents can be viewed at the Huntington Beach Central Library, the Banning Branch Library and the Department of Toxic Substances Control, 5796 Corporate Ave., in Cypress.