The Seal Beach Environmental Quality Control Board on Wednesday, March 3 determined that the best alternative for decontaminating Bridgeport neighborhood soil is to add chemicals to groundwater to breakdown hydrocarbons.
The Environmental Quality Control Board is a little-known city agency, similar to the Planning Commission or the Parks and Recreation Commission. Each of the five members of the environmental board is appointed by the City Council and represent council districts.
The Environmental Quality Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of the third of four alternatives spelled out in the Preliminary Cor-rective Action Plan for cleaning up the area near the ARCO station on Pacific Coast Highway.
Board member Lorraine Navarro was absent.
Alternative 3 is formally known as “On-Site In-Situ Chemical Oxidation and On- and Off-Site Soil Vapor Extraction.”
Director of Development Services Mark Persico said the city will send a letter to the Orange County Health Care Agency that will state which of the four clean up alternatives the city prefers. The Health Care Agency will have the final say in the matter.
In a public notice dated Feb. 23, the Health Care Agency announced that the public has until March 31 to comment on the Corrective Action Plan that was prepared by Atlantic Richfield Company’s consultant, Stantec. There will be a public meeting to hear public comments on the plan at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 18, at the Marina Community Center.
Explaining the environmental board’s reasoning for supporting Alternative 3, Persico said the board members believed the third option would carry a much lower risk of causing additional pollution to the area than Alternative 1, which is commonly known as “dig and haul.”
Persico said board members were concerned that the vehicles needed to haul soil from the Bridgeport neighborhood would cause more pollution.
The soil under Bridgeport has been contaminated since the ARCO station on PCH leaked at least twice since the 1980s. The contamination has become a concern since mid-2009, when it became known that gasoline vapors had been detected in the soil.
Environmental board member Barbara Barton told the Sun Newspapers that she originally thought Alternative 1 was best. However, she changed her mind when other board members expressed the opinion that Alternative 3 would be the least disruptive to the neighborhood.
The other alternatives were injecting air pressure into the contaminated groundwater (Alternative 2) and extracting hydrocarbon vapor and groundwater from the ground (Alternative 4).
Board member Mario Voce said the trucks that would have carried contaminated soil away from the neighborhood were not clean-burning trucks.
Voce believed treatment of the soil in place was the best approach.
Voce said the “dig and haul” option would have required the removal of the entire gas station. He said that in itself could cause pollution.
Persico said he wanted to make it clear that the alternative the board recommends isn’t necessarily the clean up plan that the city of Seal Beach will officially support.
Who pays?
In a recent e-mail, City Manager David Carmany told the Sun Newspapers that Atlantic Richfield Company has begun “to decline payment of some of the consultant and soil sampling expenditures.”
In a Jan. 11 letter to the city, Atlantic Richfield Company said it would reimburse Seal Beach for the “review of soil, groundwater and vapor assessment activities, residential sub slab and indoor air sampling and remediation/mitigation activities within the Bridgeport neighborhood and on the ARCO station property.”
In a Feb. 23 e-mail to City Engineer Michael Ho, Henry C. Winsor of Atlantic Richfield said, “Please note this letter does not include reimbursement for soil, groundwater or vapor assessment, remedial feasibility testing or remediation.”
Winsor said the company would perform any and all of those tasks as required by the county Health Care Agency.
When Atlantic Richfield submitted its Corrective Action Plan to the county, it provided the city of Seal Beach with one copy.
“We had twenty copies made (for City Council, EQCB, to place in (the) library, for staff members, for sale to the public, etc.),” Carmany said in an e-mail to the Sun. “This cost was $2,467.85. We plan to request ARCO reimbursement.”
However, Carmany was not sure if they would pay the bill. “We’ll see.”
Hard copies of the clean up plan are available at the City Clerk’s office for $125. A free electronic copy may be downloaded in PDF format from the city’s Web site.
“If need be, I will ask the City Council for a budget amendment to cover necessary expenditures for the ARCO Bridgeport matter,” Carmany said.
In the Thursday, Feb. 25 issue, the Sun reported that ARCO had refused to release testing data to the city of Seal Beach on the grounds that Bridgeport residents had asked the company to protect their privacy.
City Engineer Ho told the Sun that the city sent a letter asking all Bridgeport residents to submit their data to the city.
“There is a constant stream of residents submitting data,” Ho said.
