300 Demand City Do More to Speed Halaco Cleanup
By Zeke Barlow, Ventura County Star, Calif.
Jul. 18–More than 300 people attended a meeting in Oxnard on Thursday night demanding that local leaders do more to speed the cleanup of the Halaco facility, a former metals recycling plant that is now a Superfund site because of a toxic stew of chemicals and heavy metals.
At times, moderators and the audience were confrontational with elected officials as they demanded answers on how long it would take to clean up the Oxnard facility, which shut down in 2004.
When Oxnard Mayor Tom Holden tried to make an opening statement regarding the city’s role in the cleanup, one of the organizers, Gloria Roman, interrupted, saying, “We just want an answer, we don’t want a speech.”
Holden, as well as other Oxnard, county and federal elected officials who attended the meeting, vowed to do everything they could to speed the process along.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency is in charge of cleaning up the site, since it took over the area and established it as a Superfund site last year.
The cleanup is likely to take many years.
EPA project manager Wayne Praskins said testing the area to see exactly what needs to be cleaned up could take until 2010, a statement that was met with groans from the crowd.
Once testing is complete, a plan on how to clean up the site is drawn up and the process can begin.
Though federal money for cleanup is in short supply these days, Praskins said companies responsible for the damage can be forced to pay for the reclamation.
In the meantime, locals want more education about the site and better fencing around it to keep children from wandering into the area, where trace levels of radioactive materials have been found.
“Our community has dealt with this for 40 years,” said Maricela Morales, a Port Hueneme city councilwoman and associate director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, which helped put on the meeting. “It could be another 40 years before it is dealt with.”
Some at the meeting, held at Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Oxnard, framed the issue as one of environmental justice, where polluters dump on poor, ethnic areas.
Signs tacked up around the church read “Halaco = environmental racism.”
“We get the toxic waste dumps, why us?” said Catherine Ingram, an African American woman who has lived in Port Hueneme for 15 years.
Beatriz Garcia, who also helped put on the event, said more public education is needed to let Latino communities know what happened at the site and what dangers exist by going onto it.
At the end of the meeting, which was in Spanish and English, the handful of elected officials was asked to pledge its support and attend a series of meetings aimed at doing more to clean up Halaco.
Throughout the meeting, chants of “Si se puede” punctuated speakers’ comments as they tried to rally the crowd to action.
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Copyright (c) 2008, Ventura County Star, Calif.
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