The state says Mayor Todd Gloria’s team needs to dig deeper into the property he wants to make into a mega-shelter, citing concerns there could be unknown contamination from a shuttered chemical plant next door.
California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control says it will work with the city to do “additional investigation” into the ground below the former print shop Gloria wants to turn into a shelter along Kettner Boulevard, according to an email Tuesday from spokesperson Elizabeth Leslie-Gassaway.
Two properties neighboring the shelter site leaked a multitude of chemicals into the soil and groundwater in the past. That history is well-documented and closely monitored by the company that owns them.
What’s not known, and what the state wants the city to find out, is whether those spills affect the potential homeless shelter site. Certain chemicals can escape groundwater and turn into gases that seep through soil and even building foundations, forming toxic air pollutants to those inside.
“Additional site investigation would be needed to address this question,” Leslie- Gassaway wrote.
Gloria spokesperson Rachel Laing declined to comment on the state agency’s statements late Tuesday. She pointed to an environmental study ordered by the site’s owner, Douglas Hamm, that the city has cited as due diligence on the property that discovered air quality contamination. But the study concluded the human health risks were minimal, especially with building upgrades.
Gloria announced his plan to pursue the 1,000-bed shelter and 35-year lease at Kettner Boulevard and Vine Street earlier this month. In the weeks since, the lease proposal spurred an avalanche of questions that led Gloria’s office to postpone an initial City Council committee hearing on the pitch and a closed-door City Council discussion on the deal earlier this week.
The city has a track record of real estate deals blowing up in its face, notably, the asbestos-contaminated former Sempra Energy headquarters at 101 Ash St. where the city planned to house staff. The botched deal cost taxpayers more than $200 million and now, seven years later, the building sits vacant.
Gloria’s office told the Union-Tribune’s Jeff McDonald they suspected no such surprises at the homeless shelter site on Kettner Boulevard.
Now the state Department of Toxic Substances Control wants more vetting.
Air quality tests from Hamm’s report showed high levels of benzene, a cancer-causing substance linked to leukemia, as well as Napthalene – made from crude oil or coal tar – and Dichlorobenzene – used in some insecticides and to remove contamination from metals, among other things. But the consultants concluded the amounts did not “pose a material risk for future residents” and recommended a ventilation system to get rid of those toxins, which the site owner already plans to install.
Laing highlighted these findings again Tuesday following additional questions from Voice and noted that there are scores of clean-up sites throughout the city.
Debbie Bennett, a professor of environmental health at the University of California-Davis, said she wasn’t alarmed by those air quality results after Voice shared them. The risk of living on the street, she said, outweighs temporarily living in a building contaminated by these levels of chemical vapors – especially with a new ventilation system.
“Quite honestly, if these people are no longer living in the street and living indoors instead, that’s much better in terms of reducing health risk,” she said.
Rick Adcock, a former environmental specialist for the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, is worried about the toxic waste flowing through the groundwater plume below the sites. Gases from many of these chemicals would rather be in air than in groundwater, so they escape through air pockets in soil and can make their way through building materials, exposing any people or animals inside.
Adcock helped put a car rental parking lot over that groundwater plume when he worked for the airport authority. He lives about a mile from the site and fears a shelter could spur increased crime in his neighborhood. But he’s also worried the city hasn’t looked deep enough into whether that pollution could penetrate the shelter – if and when it opens.
“We don’t know what’s underneath that property,” Adcock said. “And if it will affect homeless families that are housed there, that means kids, who are more susceptible to exposure, and old people.”
Inquiries from Adcock this month prompted a response from a Department of Toxic Substances Control official who said the agency was looking into the site’s conditions.
The proposed shelter site sits between Kettner Boulevard and California Street along an industrial strip of land north of the airport. Its neighbors are an electrical substation and a vacant parking lot that used to house a chemical production and industrial waste facility, from which spilled chemicals leaked into the groundwater creating cancer-causing gases that ascend from the soil.
A little about those contaminated properties: Bateman Chemical Sales Corporation operated a virgin chemical sales business on the proposed shelter site-adjacent properties in 1969. The business changed hands after a few decades doing business as an industrial waste management facility that stored, treated and recycled hazardous waste and acids stored onsite. It closed in 1993, after which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to clean up contaminated soil leaking toxic chemical gas that pose a human health risk, especially when those vapors become trapped inside a building. Around 2005, Trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing carcinogen used to degrease metals, spilled from tanks on the site and leaked into the groundwater, state records show.
Honeywell International, which merged with the sites former company ownership, installed groundwater wells to keep track of the pollution’s spread. The company monitors and files reports on that groundwater contamination to the federal government every year or so.
Honeywell’s groundwater monitoring reports show the plume flows downhill from the former industrial waste facility at 3625 California St. beneath Pacific Highway toward the airport parking ramp, just skimming the property line of the proposed mega-shelter site. That parcel used to house a virgin chemical tank farm which, sometime around 2005, sprang a leak. The other part of the property, 3596 California St., housed the former business office and warehouse – which was once considered for private airport parking that never materialized.
In an email, Honeywell spokesperson Caitlin Leopold said the company “continues to work under the oversight of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control with a focus on protecting human health and the environment.”
