Illegal dumps leave toxic consequences

THERMAL, Calif. — 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 AuClair, a member of the Torres Martinez American Indian tribe. “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 faces millions of dollars in fines.

AuClair’s site isn’t unusual. Illegal dumps spread across the Torres Martinez reservation like 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, including the largest one in the state. Federal officials struggle to close them, but new ones pop up all the time.

“I would say this is in its own league,” said Clancy Tenley, the 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 or spas.

But they do have land: 24,000 acres stretching from Riverside to Imperial counties, and under the Salton Sea.

As development in the Coachella Valley has exploded, some tribal members have cashed in by offering land to businesses looking to cut corners on waste-disposal costs.

Golf-course trimmings from clubs throughout the Coachella Valley arrive in unmarked trucks. Drums of oil, car batteries and sewage also wind up here. Waste from nearby cities ends up on the reservation via unscrupulous contractors. When the pile gets high enough, it’s often just burned.

The result, federal officials said, 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 Riverside County Fire Department in Coachella.

Excrement plateau

So far, AuClair, 50, is the only owner expressing 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, police and the EPA said.

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.’ “

He insists his health wasn’t damaged.

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

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

A few miles away is a plateau 40 feet high, 300 feet wide and nearly 1,000 feet long, composed almost entirely of human excrement. It’s called “Mount San Diego” because of where the sewage originated.

A mile or so away is the towering Lawson Dump, the biggest in California. The 40-acre site has mountains of debris 50 feet high and 1 million tons of buried waste.

Subterranean fires smolder endlessly, occasionally flaring up through cracks. Since a federal judge closed it 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, which they attribute to smoke from dump fires, especially those from the Lawson facility.

In response, Loma Linda University recently sent a team of researchers to survey the pupils and will issue a report soon.

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

“Over the years, the tribe, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 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 tribal-program 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.

Tough to police

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 pile.

In 1994, a federal court in Los Angeles barred further shipments to the site, though illegal dumping 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, state officials said.

Mount San Diego stands 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.”

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.” Little if any recycling went on, investigators said. 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,” EPA attorney Letitia Moore said.

Citing a total lack of permits, the BIA issued Lawson a cease-and-desist order in 1994. Yet Lawson continued to operate.

It wasn’t until 2006 that a federal judge in Riverside shut Lawson down and fined her $47 million. Lawson, who has declared bankruptcy, could not be reached for comment.

Unlike in some other states, the BIA in California has no police officers for enforcement.

“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.

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 Carole Goldberg, an expert on Indian law at the University of California, Los Angeles, 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, largely has cooperated in efforts to stop dumping but hasn’t done all it can.

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

“We are destroying our environment,” he said. “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.”