The neighborhood that never was

Oil is a sticky mess, especially when it seeps up through the floors in local homes

BY DANIEL BLACKBURN

At first glance, the neighborhood appears perfectly normal, just another collection of large, upscale, single-story, ranch-style houses perched on oversized lots. The sprawling yards are beautifully landscaped, with manicured shrubs and colorful flowers bracketing the street.

Nothing seems out of place in or around the 15 neatly-maintained homes that line Palomino Drive in Orcutt.

On closer inspection, however, the neatness itself gradually becomes disconcerting.

Every lawn on the street is cut the same length, and the landscaping of all the residences bears an eerie similarity. No cars are parked on the streets, and only a few in driveways. There are no children playing. In fact, none of the usual signs of youngsters are visible–no swing sets, no bicycles, no toys of any kind. Nothing is out of order; the usual clutter that collects in the wake of human life is absent.

There is an air of unnatural calm about Palomino Drive, which transmits the kind of feeling one might feel in an Old West ghost town.

These houses are hardly homes. Some are completely vacant. Some are used for storage. Structures that are not occupied by people are equipped with automatic light timers, so that at least after dark the neighborhood looks inhabited.

Welcome to the dead neighborhood, brought to you by the folks at Unocal.

What you see is not what you get in this neighborhood. The ground under the $400,000-plus houses was found several years ago to be severely polluted from long-concluded oil drilling operations and the careless (some say criminal) disposal of sump pond contents.

Sump ponds are deep, wide holes in the ground used to capture overflow crude from wells and a host of toxic substances that are used in the extraction of oil from underground. Each oil well uses a sump pond. Over the years, more than 3,000 of the dirty holes have dotted the terrain in the Santa Maria Valley, and many have never been properly contained.

And the old ponds are everywhere, their remnants scattered all over California, often just bulldozed over with topsoil to become a hidden part of the landscape. They have left their lasting legacy in Kern, Monterey, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties.

Sump ponds are particularly nasty things: Aside from crude oil remnants, they also can be expected to contain contaminated drilling muds, diesel, motor oil, gasoline and other petroleum fuels, heavy metals, and other hazardous wastes generated in oil-producing operations such as diluent and PCBs.

As a result, much of the city of Santa Maria and surrounding areas, including Orcutt, is built over land that is, at best, questionably clean. Contaminated sites are everywhere–under homes, schools, churches, businesses.

Health problems posed by the contaminants include a full list of cancers and birth defects, according to medical experts.

That the Orcutt neighborhood had any problem at all was discovered only after its homes had been occupied, back a few years during a time when children did play in the streets, and signs of life were everywhere.

That, however, was before one resident, Henning J. Roug, discovered a pool of California crude oozing into his home, right through the thick carpeting of his living room. That was just the first such incident; the thick, gooey crude oil was beginning to pop to the surface–"daylighting"–all over the neighborhood.

It didn’t take long to figure out the problem: The land, formerly the site of extensive oil exploration, hadn’t been properly reclaimed before being sold and developed for housing.

When the contaminated soil’s cleanup was deemed impractical and too expensive, Unocal officials decided to purchase every home on the block, and paid to move its former residents into homes elsewhere.

"It’s a site that turned out to be [an oil] tank farm, way back in the early days of oil exploration and drilling," said Russ Hanscom, Unocal’s Santa Maria area manager. "It’s very old. Then, houses were built in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and there was found to be some contamination. Unocal purchased the properties back just to resolve the problems."

The company first purchased several empty lots that would never be developed for housing. The first land the company bought was in 1984, a lot at the southeast corner of Blosser and Solomon streets.

But then, inexplicably, other adjoining properties were sold to private developers who built houses. Unocal ended up buying back six of the Palomino Drive and South Blosser Street private residences in 1990; eleven more were acquired by the company the following year, and the remaining three in 1993. The street was known locally by this time as the "Unocal neighborhood."

By the time the buying spree ended, Unocal owned 38 houses, vacant lots, and miscellaneous properties in and around Santa Maria.

Palomino Drive used to be part of Quarter Horse Trail. Now, a steel fence divides the streets and permanently separates the dead neighborhood from surrounding residential areas. An old sump pond sits empty in a vacant lot at the end of the street. And a horse trail that once passed through the neighborhood has been rerouted around the blighted area.

The few people who occupy the Palomino Drive houses today are mostly oil company employees who have been informed of the potential health risks posed by the soil contamination. Women of child-bearing age must sign a company contract agreeing to move within two months of discovering a pregnancy.

"Unocal is starting an investigation," said Hanscom, "to bring our studies [on the site] up-to-date, and we will do a plan in the near future and make some decisions regarding remediation of the site, if it is even required."

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A similar, if smaller, situation faced Unocal in San Luis Obispo, when company officials discovered a leak in a deteriorated, old, natural gas line running under a residential lot at the corner of Pismo and Beach streets near Nipomo Avenue, just down the street from Emerson Elementary School.

The line, jointly owned by Tosco Corp. (now Phillips 66) and Unocal, was repaired years ago, and remediation of the lot has been continuing. The empty lot would sell for at least $200,000 and as much as $250,000 in the contemporary market, but it probably won’t be sold or developed in the near future.

Dangerous oil byproducts and messy sump ponds are facts of life in the oil exploration business. These become problematic only when they have not been properly remedied after their useful life is ended; contamination that has not been removed is likely to be a major problem in other ways for many years to come.

Crude oil itself poses no hazards. In fact, old-time oil workers used to chew it right off the ground after discovering its tooth-whitening properties.

But oil field contaminants pose problems which plague many areas in California. Since oil was first discovered under the state, more than 170,000 oil, gas, and geothermal wells have been drilled. About 88,000 are still in use.

That means that more than 90,000 abandoned oil sump ponds are buried under some of the most desirable real estate in the land. About 1,750 new wells were drilled in California in 1999 by about 700 different companies.

It’s big business. According to state regulators, daily oil production tops 1 million barrels, placing California fourth among the nation’s oil-producing states.

Cleaning an oil sump pond begins with large vacuum trucks equipped with large-diameter flexible hoses that suck up the more-or-less liquid contents.

In past years, the trucks would swoop down on sump ponds under cover of darkness, pull the gunk from the hole, and depart, ostensibly headed for authorized toxic dump stations in Kern County.

But such transport costs money, and often the mess was simply dumped elsewhere, in a much closer location, on property where an owner might cooperate and keep quiet for cash.

Ironically, these transgressions were usually not the fault of the oil companies, which hired people to dispose of sump pond contents and probably always expected the contractors to perform their tasks within the law.

The illegal dumping was viewed a little differently in those days, and as a result many properties rest over contaminated landfills, occupants none the wiser. And it wasn’t just the big boys, Unocal and Texaco, said one source familiar with the area’s history.

"It was everyone who worked the oil fields in the valley those days," said private investigator Alan Bond of San Luis Obispo. Bond investigated oil pollution for several clients in relation to the massive Avila Beach cleanup by Unocal, and discovered oil company land holdings in numerous areas, which will probably always be unfit for healthy human habitation.

"It was the vacuum truck companies and the support people that work with the oil companies," said Bond. "They did a lot of really bad things, and it all came down to one thing: money."

But when problems were eventually uncovered, it was the oil companies which were held liable, both by regulators and in the court of public opinion.

Santa Maria’s Burnell H. (Bud) Richards knows first-hand how sumps can create back-breaking environmental problems. Richards is a lifetime oil man with extensive Santa Maria and Orcutt property holdings. Richards is 83, wealthy, and owner of Trojan Petroleum Company, Santa Maria Enterprises, and a variety of other oil-related endeavors.

He has a 17-acre parcel at 610 West Betteravia Road that he intends to develop for commercial use, as well as a smaller site down the road, in the 1600 block.

Six years ago, Richards contracted with RMR Inc., Texaco Exploration and Environmental Inc., and Buena Resources Inc. to receive clean fill dirt which was to be used as landfill for the Betteravia property. He hoped to raise the level of the property by about 20 feet to make it better-suited for the commercial development he planned.

According to Richards, he was approached by two men, Don Ringstmeyer and Tom Gibbons, who asked Richards if he could use some clean dirt they needed to get rid of. He agreed, he later said, after several weeks, partly because he had known one of the men for 30 years, and partly because he saw samples of the dirt allegedly intended for transport to his property. The sample appeared clean, free of refuse, and had no distinct oil smell.

What he bargained for, Richards later told a Santa Maria jury, was not what he got.

Richards later would say that he mistakenly thought the men were representing only Unocal in the proposal, but he would learn they also were working for Texaco.

Russ Hanscom, project manager for the Central Coast Group of Unocal, would testify in court that Texaco had provided some funding for joint cleanup of an old well site with Unocal.

According to Richards’ lawyer, Jack A. Draper of Bakersfield, the soil that eventually made it to Richards’ property was anything but clean.

"They said it was clean, recycled, and they delivered it in large quantities in huge hauling trucks. That soil contained large amounts of old oil, debris, all kinds of junk, asbestos, high levels of heavy metals. There would be bulldozers waiting to run over it, smooth it out right away and pack it down. No one ever really saw what was in it."

What was in the soil was the usual contents of oil sump ponds–specifically, anything in the world. The pits often were used by local residents to dump garbage and junk.

"There was everything but the kitchen sink, and if we’d looked longer, we’d have found one of those, too," said Draper.

The junk and contamination were found only when Richards started excavation to set concrete footings for building construction.

Before the dispute ended up in court in January, Richards had collected a laundry list of foreign materials that were found in the supposedly clean fill dirt after it had been deposited on his property.

Richards sued, alleging the defendants conspired to defraud him and conducted unlawful business practices.. He was asking the court to order the defendants to remove and replace the contaminated soil, and to award him $5 million in compensatory damages, an unspecified amount of punitive damages, and a $20 million performance bond to offset expenses during the next 20 years.

"Some really bad stuff was in there," said Draper of the "free" fill dirt.

"What Texaco did was to clean the materials from their sump ponds in various locations, stack it up, and wait for a suitable taker," he said.

There was metal of all descriptions, he said, and wood, plastic debris, waste-filled oil drums, pools of viscous or solidified oil, oil well drilling parts, and mud. Noxious fumes emanated from the soil.

The mess was eventually noted by the San Luis Obispo-based Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) after Richards applied for construction permits. The agency ordered a cleanup and abatement operation to remove the fill dirt and scrub the ground that had been under it. That in turn sparked Richards’ lawsuit.

Before the ensuing 12-week trial, Unocal settled with Richards and agreed to remove some of the contaminated dirt for which it admitted responsibility.

That was fortunate for Richards, because a Santa Maria Superior Court jury decided in favor of the defendants after hearing evidence that the property on which the polluted soil was dumped was itself contaminated.

Attorney Draper said the lawsuit was the impetus for Texaco’s agreement to clean up the properties. Draper promises an appeal.

"We at least forced them to ‘fess up that they planned to clean it all up, as a ploy to get the jury to limit damages," said Draper. He said the oil corporation was also motivated by the threat of a state-levied fine of $5,000 daily until the remediation was completed.

"We will get justice done," added Draper.

The seemingly unlikely end to the trial was certainly impacted by decades of dumping practices that have created massive environmental problems all over the region. So many tons of pollutants have been unlawfully dumped on so many acres of property that it’s difficult to lay individual blame.

"Unocal is working off an inventory of less-than-sterling performances on the Central Coast," said Unocal’s Hanscom. "So there probably is a little more focus on Unocal than other people. We have been trying during the past two or three years to get these problems resolved in a manner that is satisfactory for everyone. I’m not sure we’re the only [oil companies] doing this, but we do have more visibility."

Hanscom said most of his company’s current remediation projects are "voluntary and proactive–we are going out and looking for places where there are historic indications of problems and making arrangements to fix them."

But regardless of who is liable for the irresponsibility and subsequent damage, the problem has been left for all to share.

"Avila Beach was supposed to be the end of the problem. Instead, it’s turning out to be just the beginning," said private investigator Bond, wistfully. Æ

‘New Times’ news editor Daniel Blackburn can be reached for comment or story ideas at [email protected].