By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter

Until 1986, the IT Corporation Panoche Facility northeast of Benicia off Lake Herman Road was an active 248-acre Class One landfill, taking in between 80,000 and 220,000 tons of waste annually.

Now Panoche is in post-closure, undergoing monitoring and remediation to reduce the remaining contamination. Each year, Benicia City Council is given an update on the site, and Tuesday night a pair of outgoing consultants submitted their final report to the panel.

Kitty Hammer, a planning consultant, and Bruce Clark, of Leighton and Associates, who interpret technical reports and represent the city in discussions with the landfill’s liquidating trust and regulatory agencies, will end their service to the city June 30. “I’m ready to retire,” Hammer said.

Funds to continue remediation should last until 2024 or 2026, they said. About $17 million is left in the account.

After that, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control will seek long-term funding for continued cleanup at the site.

Built at 2251 Lake Herman Road, the site opened in 1968 after receiving a use permit from Solano County for the disposal of liquid and solid hazardous wastes.

As a condition of approval, the county required all treatment and storage of hazardous waste to be contained at least 200 feet from the outer perimeter of the property, according to 1991 court documents. The landfill, built uphill from Benicia, stored its collected waste both on the surface in impoundment ponds and below, buried in drums.

It became home to a variety of caustic substances: petroleum refining waste, paint pigments, contaminated soils, materials used in hydrogen sulfide abatement, oily slurries and other organic and inorganic compounds.

“Twenty-five years ago, I heard about this,” Mary Frances Kelly-Poh said Tuesday, adding later that she wondered for years about green goo she knew was oozing from the site.

At times, her inquiries were brushed off, she said, but finally she learned the substance was identified as arsenic.

Though the landfill is called IT Panoche, problems with leakage predate its purchase by IT Corp. in 1975, court records show. City reports indicate the leaks began when organic solvents began seeping out of the buried drums, polluting both the soil and groundwater.

In 1971, Solano County Planning Commission said several of the surface impoundment ponds had encroached not only within 200 feet of the property line, the boundary described in the use permit, but on neighbors’ land, too.

The landfill operator bought additional land to comply with the restriction, and the county issued another use permit, keeping the 200-foot condition in place.

When IT bought the landfill, it continued to deposit waste in several ponds, in a surface waste pile, and in two landfill sites that encroached beyond the setback line.

IT built the north drum burial site that also intruded into the setback zone, court records show. But the company bought more land to the west, north and east the eliminated the encroachment problem except for one pond. That one was nearest to Benicia and was fewer than 200 feet from the property line.

The landfill received Department of Health Services authorization to operate in 1981. Four years later, the county director of public works halted grading at the landfill, saying the company hadn’t obtained a permit. IT appealed, but agreed to formal hearings to determine its compliance with permits as part of the settlement of the case.

During those hearings, even IT representatives conceded that evidence was “overwhelming” that the company was in noncompliance. Among the documents were citations by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Testimony and other papers reported leakage and migration of hazardous wastes from the areas that encroached on the 200-foot buffer and beyond the landfill’s property line.

In 1986, the California San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board issued a cleanup and abatement order, saying the landfill’s waste storage ponds either threatened to pollute state waters or was actually contaminating them, which IT denied. In a decision issued July 15, 1987, Roger B. James, then the control board’s executive officer, decided all the landfill’s surface impoundments threatened state waters. He ordered the immediate closure of the ponds and said all liquid should be removed by June 30, 1988.

The county’s planning commission determined June 25, 1987, that IT was out of compliance with several permit conditions, ordering the company to close all encroachments. It ordered the company to begin closure immediately and gave it three months to supply a plan for clean closure and removal of all wastes and contaminated soils, except those buried in drums, from the setback zone.

IT appealed the clean closure order to the county Board of Supervisors, saying clean closure of the encroachment meant removing 174,000 cubic yards of hazardous materials and could cost as much as $40.5 million, court records show. The company suggested that only the encroachment next to Benicia should be closed and cleaned, and that a new 200-foot setback be dedicated to conform to the current boundaries of the property.

County supervisors told the commission to find alternative remedies and accepted the commission’s remedial order. IT appealed again to Superior Court, which ruled that state law preempted the supervisors’ authority over the site’s storage, treatment and disposal of the hazardous waste.

That decision was overturned by the First District Court of Appeal, which decided Solano County could enforce its valid land use regulations and noted that to do otherwise “would permit the company to reap the benefits of the illegal encroachments.”

In the early 1990s, a plume of contaminants from one of the drum burial sites entered Benicia’s Paddy Creek property. In 2002, a plan to address the leaks called for drilling wells along the city’s property line so the polluted groundwater could be pumped out and treated. Uphill from there, a deep trench was dug to intercept the contaminated groundwater and help prevent the flow of pollution toward the city’s property, which includes Benicia’s own water treatment plant.

IT filed for bankruptcy in 2002, and its assets were sold. It emerged from bankruptcy in 2004 as IT Environmental Liquidating Trust, which manages and maintains the company’s four Northern California hazardous waste disposal plants using money that had been posted prior to the bankruptcy.

It is that fund the city’s consultants said would run out in about a dozen years.

The site requires management systems on and beneath the land to operate to protect both the site and its neighboring land and water from pollution, said Charlie Knox, Public Works and Community Development Department director.

But he said Tuesday the systems have withstood the heavy rains of last winter, particularly the slurry wall extraction and containment system in a section of the landfill close to Benicia.

That containment system prevents groundwater contaminated by heavy metals from leaving the landfill site and entering a stream that flows east to Goodyear Slough, part of Suisun Bay, he said.

When it was built originally, that containment system didn’t work well, Knox said, but the plant’s operators told him the system worked well through the rains.

In about six months, the Council will hear staff suggestions on ways to address the consultants’ departure, City Manager Brad Kilger said. Meanwhile, the two have assembled a handbook to guide the city in monitoring the landfill remediation activities.

Marilyn Bardet, along with Kelly-Poh, was among those who became alarmed early on by leakage at the landfill. She told the Council on Tuesday it must keep reminding DTSC “we haven’t forgotten IT.”

“Tons of waste will remain with us forever,” she said.