Sludge Watch ==> Thermal CA Native lands - Sludge Mountain - Mount San Diego

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

In Canada and the USA Native communities are often not subject to state or 
provincial requirements and can contract for waste activities on 'sovereign' 
Native reservations.  In both jurisdictions this has resulted in some 
unscrupulous waste activity.

The First Nations (Tribal Governments) and regulators should cooperate to 
remediate these waste sites right away.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dump2jun02,0,7610180.story?coll=la-home-local

>From the Los Angeles Times
Toxic waste litters desert Indian reservation
Rampant dumping in Thermal has gone on for years, and pupils breathe tainted 
air.
Government can't yet stamp it out.
By David Kelly
Times Staff Writer

June 2, 2007

THERMAL California: A grim-faced George AuClair Jr. wandered his 25-acre 
patch of desert looking every inch the broken man.

"I'm ashamed of what happened here, but you can't lie about it," said the 
Torres Martinez tribal member. "You have to own up when you do wrong."

Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair's illegal 
dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the 
Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines.

AuClair's site isn't unusual. Illegal dumps are spread across the Torres 
Martinez reservation like ugly wounds, making it the most polluted tribal 
land in California, Nevada and Arizona. Vast swaths of desert have been 
transformed into toxic trash heaps threatening the tribe and nearby 
communities. There are at least 26 illegal dumps here, including the largest 
one in the state. Federal officials struggle to shut them down, but new ones 
pop up all the time.

"I would say this is in its own league," said Clancy Tenley, EPA's tribal 
program manager. "I don't know of any place that has this level of 
pollution."

Unlike the nearby Agua Caliente, Morongo and Cabazon tribes, the Torres 
Martinez are poor. They don't have luxury hotels, spas or, until recently, 
even a casino.

But they do have land: 24,000 acres of it stretching from Riverside to 
Imperial counties, and even under the Salton Sea. And as development in the 
Coachella Valley has exploded, some tribal members have cashed in by 
offering land to those looking to cut corners on waste disposal costs.

Golf course trimmings from clubs throughout the Coachella Valley have 
arrived in unmarked trucks, and drums of oil, car batteries and sewage also 
wind up there. Even waste from nearby cities found its way onto the 
reservation via unscrupulous contractors. And when the pile gets high 
enough, it's often just burned.

The result, federal officials say, has been widespread contamination along 
with toxic smoke drifting over cities, schools and farms across the 
Coachella Valley.

"We find new dumps on a regular basis," said Ray Paiz, battalion chief for 
the Riverside County Fire Department in Coachella. "What has occurred out 
there is not only wrong, but it's a shameful criminal act."

So far AuClair, 50, is the only owner expressing any shame.

His site had it all. Fires routinely sent poisons into the air; more than 
34,000 square feet of arsenic and chromium ash littered the place. 
Transients also lived there; drug abuse was rife, and there was at least one 
killing, say police and the EPA.

AuClair's biggest mistake was burning thousands of toxic wooden grape 
stakes.

"How could we have known grape stakes were treated with arsenic and 
chromium?" he asked. "There was no sign saying, 'This is hazardous to your 
health.' "

And he insists his own health wasn't damaged.

"I lost my hair, but I think that was a thyroid problem," he said, "and I 
get headaches, but that could be anything."

Still, the site is small compared with other illegal dumps on the 
reservation.

A few miles away, looming up from the desert floor is a plateau 40 feet 
high, 300 feet wide and nearly 1,000 feet long, composed almost entirely of 
human excrement. It's been dubbed Mt. San Diego because of where the sewage 
originated.

A mile or so from that is the towering Lawson dump, the biggest in 
California. The 40-acre site has mountains of debris 50 feet high and a 
million tons of buried waste. Subterranean fires smolder endlessly, 
occasionally flaring up through cracks. Since a federal judge shut it down 
last year, there have been more than 20 fires injuring nine firefighters.

"It's the largest dump I have seen in my career, and I have been doing this 
since 1986," said Scott Walker of the California Integrated Waste Management 
Board. "Nothing else compares."

School nurses in the Coachella Valley have reported high levels of asthma, 
bronchitis and skin rashes among local students that they attribute to smoke 
from dump fires, especially the Lawson facility.

In response, Loma Linda University recently sent a team of researchers to 
survey the pupils and will issue a report before the school year is out.

"We think the community health has been impacted, and we want the schools to 
know, we want the families to know and we want the tribe to know," said Rick 
Alvarez, assistant superintendent of the Coachella Valley Unified School 
District.

Despite flagrant violations of federal law, it's only in the last year that 
the dumps faced serious enforcement action.

"Over the years the tribe, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the EPA tried 
different things to combat this problem, but it wasn't until we all began to 
work together that things got done," said Tenley, the EPA manager. "There 
has been a radical transformation, especially in the last 12 months. Ten 
dumps have been closed."

Before that, layers of bureaucracy, tribal politics and intimidation allowed 
operators almost free rein on the reservation.

Federal officials trace the first big dump to 1989, when tribal member 
Geraldine Ibanez, who has since died, made a deal with now-defunct Chino 
Corona Farms to compost sewage on her land. But the company composted only a 
fraction of the sewage, which originated in San Diego, and left the rest in 
a giant, growing pile.

In 1994, a federal court in Los Angeles barred further shipments to the 
site, though illegal dumping has persisted on a smaller scale. Two years 
later, the two owners of Chino Corona Farms were convicted for illegal 
dumping in Imperial County and were sent to prison, according to state 
officials.

Mt. San Diego stands just a half-mile from three schools and directly beside 
an empty lot advertised as a future Pardee Home site. According to state 
environmental documents, it still "poses a significant threat not only to 
the reservation but also to the neighboring communities." Cleanup efforts 
began last year and will continue at least through 2008.

Three years after Ibanez opened her dump, fellow Torres Martinez member Kim 
Lawson started a "recycling center" on tribal land.

Little if any recycling went on, investigators say. Semi-trucks dropped off 
loads of palm trees, treated wood, plastics, paint and oil, among other 
things.

"Kim Lawson used to burn twice a month, and it would last for hours or 
days," said EPA attorney Letitia Moore. "You could see the smoke for 50 
miles."

Citing a total lack of permits, the BIA issued Lawson a cease-and-desist 
order in 1994. Yet he continued to operate. It took more than a decade to 
shut it down. Lawson could not be reached for comment.

Unlike in some other states, the BIA in California has no police officers to 
enforce its will.

"It would be a lot easier to have a law enforcement officer standing with 
you when handing out cease-and-desist letters," said Lisa Northrop, natural 
resources officer for the BIA's Southern California Agency. "If they ignore 
the letters, we hand them out again. We need to create a record before 
taking someone to court."

Torres Martinez tribal leaders insist they have no power over members such 
as Lawson because they run businesses on private land allotted to their 
families by the government.

The BIA and legal experts dispute that.

"The tribe does have jurisdiction over these allotments, but it's 
complicated for tribes to exercise coercive authority over them because of 
intertribal relationships," said UCLA law professor Carole Goldberg, an 
expert on Indian law who has written extensively about dumping on tribal 
lands. "It is very delicate."

James Fletcher, BIA superintendent for Southern California, said the Torres 
Martinez tribe, which has 400 members on the reservation, has largely 
cooperated in efforts to stop dumping but hasn't done all it can.

"The tribe has ordinances, but they choose not to use them," he said.

One tool the tribe could use, Fletcher said, is cutting off gaming money to 
lawbreakers.

Tribal Chairman Ray Torres refused to comment, citing instructions from his 
tribal council. Tribal Manager Maxine Resvaloso did not return repeated 
calls seeking comment. The tribe's environmental director, Alberto Ramirez, 
also declined to comment.

Aside from internal politics, violence and intimidation also remain serious 
problems.

"People who have objected to the running of an illegal dump have had their 
families threatened," said Lt. Mark Barfknecht of the Riverside County 
Sheriff's Department, whose deputies patrol the reservation. "As recently as 
18 months ago there was a school project where kids living in and around the 
reservation filmed the burning in the illegal dumps and were chased off by 
armed men."

Cesar Rafael, 17, of Thermal was one of those kids.

"They shot a gun into the air," he said. "I was trying to film when it 
happened."

A virtual Wild West atmosphere prevailed at the AuClair dump. 
Methamphetamine use was common, deputies said. At least 13 people lived in 
makeshift shelters. On a recent visit, a man pulled up and warned that two 
other men were shooting at each other around the corner.

Back in the brush, Tonetta Torro, 50, tended the four wolves she keeps tied 
up for protection. She has spent four years here in a tent but plans to 
leave soon.

"I hear gunshots all the time," she said. "Still, I feel sad to go."

The arrival of trailer parks on the reservation in the 1990s heightened a 
sense of urgency about the dumps.

More than 12,000 people, mostly farmworkers, live in five ramshackle parks. 
The biggest sits beside the Lawson dump site.

In 2003, the EPA issued an internal memo reporting dioxin levels 20 times 
the national average at the dump.

Last year, a federal judge in Riverside shut it down and fined Kim Lawson 
$47 million. He has declared bankruptcy.

As for AuClair, his dump may be closed, but his shame lingers.

"We are destroying our environment," he said, picking up a piece of Indian 
grinding stone lying in the sand. "I don't have the money to pay for it, but 
I'll be damned if I won't clean this up. Look at this place. My ancestors 
would roll over in their graves if they saw it."