Test Burn at McColl Waste Site Canceled : Environment: Firm backs out in dispute with EPA over funding. The action may delay a final decision on cleanup of the Fullerton dump.

An experimental test burn of hazardous waste at the abandoned McColl dump in Fullerton scheduled for February has been scrubbed after a San Diego County company applying new technology backed out of the project, federal officials said Wednesday.

The decision by Ogden Environmental Services is expected to delay cleanup efforts at Orange County’s worst hazardous waste dump by six months, federal officials said.

Odgen had planned to erect a temporary incinerator at the 8-acre dump site and conduct a month-long test burn of the toxic refinery wastes and oil-drilling mud buried there.

But citing financial and scheduling difficulties, the La Jolla-based company has informed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it is withdrawing from the project.

Ogden officials wanted the EPA to pay most of the estimated $1.8 million it would cost to prepare and carry out the test burn at the Superfund dump site. But when the EPA said it would spend no more than $500,000, Ogden officials chose to pull out, an EPA spokesman said.

“We are willing to cooperate and help pay for costs directly associated with the test burn,” said EPA spokesman Terry Wilson in a telephone interview from Sacramento. “But they were attempting to factor in a profit, depreciation costs for equipment and labor costs that we felt were too high.”

Ogden official Bob Wilbourn, however, downplayed the financial dispute between the company and EPA. He said the company withdrew from the test burn because none of its four portable incinerators would be available during February.

The test burn of the World War II-era noxious sludge was considered critical because it is uncertain whether burning McColl waste locally would violate federal air quality standards in Southern California, a heavily polluted area that already is under strict federal mandate to meet those standards.

Wilson denied that canceling the on-site test burn will greatly delay the ultimate selection of a cleanup method for the dump, which is located a stone’s throw from neighborhoods of expensive single-family homes and the private Los Coyotes Country Club.

In February, EPA officials recommended that burning the hazardous waste--deposited by five oil companies at the site in the 1940s and early 1950s--was the best way to rid the dump of its toxic load, the equivalent of 6,000 truckloads. That recommendation was to be confirmed in April, 1990, after the test burn. But Wilson says it may be October before any final decision is announced, prolonging the 10-year battle to clean up the site, which is contaminated with solvents such as benzene, toluene, xylene and acetone.

Ogden had been considered a likely choice to eventually handle the on-site incineration, which engineers estimate would take seven years of continuous burning to complete.

Earlier this year, Ogden conducted a three-day test burn of McColl waste at its La Jolla offices and the EPA said the results were encouraging because they showed that air emissions from contaminants in the tainted soil could be controlled and kept below health safety standards. But a field test at the dump site was necessary to confirm those results. Ogden’s Wilbourn said the company is still interested in competing for the cleanup contract if EPA decides to go ahead with on-site incineration, which federal officials estimate could cost $117 million.

A spokesman for a coalition of oil companies, which have been blamed by EPA for creation of the dump and will be pressed to pay for the cleanup, said cancellation of the test burn provides the “perfect opportunity” for EPA to abandon incineration and consider other cleanup methods.

The five oil companies--Shell Oil Co., Phillips Petroleum, Texaco, Arco and Unocal--prefer capping or “entombing” the hazardous waste in the ground by surrounding the toxic soil with subsurface walls that extend below but not under the contaminants. That option would cost about $22 million.

BACKGROUND

The McColl dump was opened in the 1940s as a repository for refinery wastes and oil drilling muds. It lies beneath a vacant field and part of a golf course at the Los Coyotes Country Club in northwest Fullerton and is bordered on three sides by homes. Despite 10 years of hearings, reports, court orders and citizen protests, the site has yet to be permanently cleaned up.