Tainted dirt from SF Bay on way to Utah landfill

Tuesday, Dec. 17, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Tons of pesticide-laced dirt being dredged from a San Francisco harbor was headed for a Utah landfill instead of Arizona, where the burial of 50,000 tons of the mud has angered residents.

A train carrying up to 5,000 tons of the DDT-laced dirt was bound Monday for a landfill in East Carbon City, Utah, said John Lyons, a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency office in San Francisco. He said he expects an agreement to be reached that would send another 25,000 tons there.

East Carbon City is about 140 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

The EPA wants to bury the rest of the dredged mud in Utah because the landfill operator, ECDC Environmental, will provide extra rail cars to speed the project, Lyons said.

The project was supposed to be finished Dec. 1. It was not largely because the Arizona contractor, Waste Management Inc., was unable to ship the dirt quickly enough to its landfill in Mobile, Ariz., Lyons said.

"The rail transport to Arizona can't go as fast as the project can go," Lyons said. "The Utah facility was able to get 90-plus additional rail cars that will speed up the project substantially."

Officials want to complete the dredging before winter because they fear activity during the wet months may harm the spawning of herring in San Francisco Bay, Lyons said.

Waste Management said it was not told until the last minute that the EPA wanted to complete the project by Dec. 1, said company spokesman Don Cassano.

"There's no date set in the contract," he said. "We don't understand why they had made any commitments to anyone on when (the project) would be done."

Cassano said debris in the canal where the dirt is being dredged was responsible for slowing down the project. He insisted Waste Management could finish the job at the Butterfield Station landfill south of Phoenix.

"We can handle it right here," he said. "We're set up to handle it, but things go beyond our control."

Lyons said he did not know when the project might be completed. Of the 80,000 tons originally slated to be dredged, more than 50,000 tons has already been buried in Arizona, he said.

The EPA and other involved parties agreed last week to send one trainload of dirt to Utah. Lyons said he expects an agreement to be reached soon that would send the rest of the dredged mud to Utah.

The Utah landfill sits in a remote area about five miles from East Carbon City, a community of about 1,600 that once thrived on coal mining, but now depends on garbage.