Carson’s contaminated Carousel tract wins $120 million settlement
Posted on July 25, 2016 by Sheryl Barr
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com, July 23, 2016
By: Sandy Mazza
Workers have only just begun removing millions of tons of oil-caked soil left buried for decades in the yards of Carson’s Carousel tract, but a long-awaited financial settlement for the pain and suffering of residents likely will be disbursed before Christmas.
The final payout from two companies deemed responsible for the mess will be $120 million for emotional and physical turmoil, according to an agreement between attorneys reached Friday.
The deal comes after more than a year of legal wrangling between Shell Oil Co., which operated the former oil-tank storage farm on the site, and Dole Food Co., which bought the tract’s developer, Barclay Hollander Corp., and was named responsible for cleaning the property by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board in 2015.
The board found fault in a contract Barclay Hollander signed in the 1960s with Shell to clean up the oil before building homes. Instead, the company just knocked down old tanks and covered the concrete and waste oil with a few feet of clean dirt, according to court documents.
Shell and Dole are still battling in court over who will ultimately pay for the $146 million cleanup being done in groups of eight homes at a time and expected to last six years.
Shell, which was ordered to clean the property in 2011 — three years after the underground dump was discovered during routine testing — 7 Comments in late 2014. Hundreds of current and former residents have claimed damages for anxiety, cancerous tumors, asthma, blood disorders and other ailments related to longtime exposure to benzene and other chemicals in petroleum products.
On Friday, Dole agreed to pay $30 million to settle resident claims for emotional and physical damages. At least 95 percent of plaintiffs must sign off on that amount before it can be disbursed, but the agreement clears the way for attorneys to release Shell’s $90 million payout.
“The developer-defendants have agreed to settlement of their claims for additional payment of $30 million above and beyond” the Shell settlement, said Bob Finnerty, an attorney with the Girardi & Keese law firm, which represents 1,491 current and former residents in the mass tort claim. “I forwarded to the city what I hope to be the final draft of that agreement (Friday). I’m optimistic that they will get money in 90 days.”
City Attorney Sunny Soltani was not available for comment on Friday, but she promised residents at a City Council meeting this week to fast-track the process and ensure that they are well-represented. The city joined the lawsuit in 2012, hoping to help speed up the process.
Barbara Post, president of the Carousel Homeowners Association, told Carson council members Tuesday that she’s skeptical attorneys will maximize the compensation for residents who have suffered the most.
“There is a distinct distrust of our (Girardi & Keese) attorneys by the Carousel residents,” Post said. “We’re sharing this (settlement) with people across the street who have no contamination from Shell Oil, yet we’re told we have to give them something.
“So we’re sharing this with people who have not gone through what we’ve gone through, will not be going through what we’ve gone through. They do not have the same type of illnesses and deaths. They didn’t have it oozing up in their yards like we have.”
Finnerty said attorneys will take 40 percent of the settlement, which is more than the 33 percent Post said she was originally told.
Once the city signs off on the deal, attorneys can authorize a court-appointed “special master,” a retired appellate justice with expertise in mediation and arbitration, to determine how much each plaintiff receives in damages, Finnerty said.
Residents all have to sign off on the additional $30 million settlement before it can be paid out, but the special master will determine settlement amounts for each person using the full $120 million figure, Finnerty said.
“We are very happy with our ability to actually get them these settlements in these amounts,” Finnerty said.
Individual awards will be decided based on the extent of emotional and physical damage suffered.
However, the ongoing cleanup is still taking its toll, Post said.
In May, work began excavating soil and replacing it with uncontaminated dirt at the first cluster of homes in the tract. Affected residents were relocated to a hotel while a tall green temporary fence walled off the construction work from the rest of the neighborhood. Inside the fence, backhoes removed 5 to 10 feet of dirt, and new soil was trucked in to replace it. Shell is providing landscaping and a new paint job for residents.
But the work, originally expected to take three months per cluster, is running more than a month behind schedule, said Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board spokesman Samuel Unger.
“The water board’s major concern is the productivity at this point. The pace of the excavation is taking longer than expected,” Unger said. “I think the challenges of working in such a confined space have proven to be more difficult than we anticipated.
“I think an analysis will have to be done after this first cluster is finished. The water board will meet with the responsible parties and the contractors to see what improvement can be made.”
Odors and other negative effects have been minimal, though work had to be temporarily stopped at least once when the smell of oil became overpowering.
“I happened to take a peek in there, and I was horrified to see 10 homes dug 5 to 10 feet down right up to their foundation,” Post said. “You have no idea the cancer that’s in that tract. I started mapping it out and I stopped. I just cried. I thought, I cannot believe this has happened to the Carousel. “Our latest case of cancer is a 14-year-old girl who spent her birthday in Children’s Hospital. They have no insurance. We have other people in the tract who can’t make their mortgages or buy medication. They need the money and we need the delays to stop.
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Work begins on massive cleanup of contaminated Carousel tract yards in Carson
By Sandy Mazza, Daily Breeze
Posted: 05/13/16, 6:51 PM PDT | Updated: on 05/13/2016
The Ancheta family of Carson watches from behind a sound barrier as crews begin removing landscaping and soil from around their home at right in the Carousel neighborhood where tainted soil from an old Shell Oil plant needs to be removed. Hundreds of homes are affected and cleanup will take years. May 12, 2016. (Brad Graverson / Staff Photographer) They had been waiting for this day for eight years. But it was still wrenching for the Ancheta family when it finally came this week.
Their house in Carson’s infamous Carousel tract was the first of hundreds slated for cleanup of tons of soil contaminated with hazardous waste from old oil storage tanks. Beginning a five-year clean-up process across the 50-acre community, workers ripped out carefully manicured plants and lawns and dug up trees.
Teresa Ancheta winced at the sight of her trees being uprooted in front of the home where she’s lived for 26 years.
“I’m very, very sad today seeing the trees come down,” Ancheta said. “They throw away the whole tree and then they will remove everything down to 7 feet. We’ll see what happens. I have three sons and grandchildren. We want to be healthy.”
Like all families in the neighborhood of 285 homes, the Anchetas were told nearly a decade ago that the soil beneath and around their homes was full of toxic petroleum waste. They were warned not to plant vegetables or let their children and pets dig in the yards off Lomita Boulevard and Neptune Avenue, and then — counter-intuitively — assured their health wasn’t in danger from the petroleum hydrocarbons. Many residents suspect the pollution has triggered their medical problems and those of their pets, including asthma, irregular heartbeats, blood disorders and cancerous tumors.
The Ancheta home is in the first cluster of eight houses on one side of 249th Street to be blocked off by a sound wall designed to muffle the construction noise and deflect petroleum odors while remediation takes place.
Work at each cluster will take about three months as contaminated soil is replaced with new dirt and a soil-vapor extraction system is installed to safely remove toxic gases because only a fraction of the roughly 14 million pounds of underground waste oil will be removed across the neighborhood.
Contaminated groundwater plumes that carry future drinking water supplies also will be remediated during the cleanup, which should take five to six years.
Across the street from the Anchetas, neighbors watched the construction with patient skepticism.
“It’s a mess,” said a neighbor who didn’t want to give her name because of an ongoing lawsuit against Shell Oil. “It’s an inconvenience. I have family in from out of town but there’s nowhere to park. In the evening, you get a scent. When my grandmother left, she said: ‘What’s that smell?’ ”
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The pollution was left behind when Shell abandoned its tank farm on the property before the Carousel development was built in the 1960s. Since it was discovered eight years ago, teams of investigators have scoured the community doing tests of soil, soil vapors and air inside and under homes to determine whether toxicity levels threatened health.
About 1,400 current and former residents sued Shell for damages, and the Carson City Council joined the suit in 2013 in an effort to fast-track the cleanup and lawsuit settlement.
The yearslong process spurred residents to become environmental advocates in the city, calling for greater regulations on industrial operations. In 2013, activist Erin Brockovich met with city officials and residents to discuss environmental injustices. A 2000 film dramatized Brockovich’s successful suit against PG&E in the community of Hinkley over groundwater contamination.
Residents have since successfully lobbied the city for more restrictive laws on oil companies and greater oversight of environmental issues in general. The city was a dumping ground for Los Angeles County hazardous waste before it installed its own government in 1968. Today, it could soon be home to the West Coast’s largest oil refinery, if Tesoro’s planned merger of its Carson and Wilmington plants is completed.
City officials and Carousel tract residents have pleaded with Shell to buy them out of their houses so they wouldn’t have to suffer through years of construction and health threats, but the company didn’t agree.
In late 2014, Shell offered to settle disputes over health and emotional damages with residents for $90 million. Residents accepted the offer but haven’t yet received any money because the tract’s developer blocked the disbursement. Dole Food Co., which now owns the company that developed Carousel tract, Barclay Hollander Corp., contests determinations by Shell and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board that they are responsible for the mess because they agreed to remove the hydrocarbons before building homes, but instead simply covered the pollution with a few feet of clean soil.
Girardi & Keese, the Los Angeles law firm representing residents, is working on a settlement with Dole that would allow Shell to release the $90 million payment to residents, said attorney Robert Finnerty.
“Once the money is dispersed through the Shell settlement, we still have our issue with Dole,” Finnerty said. “We and the water board and the residents are completely frustrated by the delay caused by (Dole). We certainly hope to be able to resolve the case in its entirety. (It’s being held up by) a legal issue that only the court can control. Shell is interested in getting this behind them and finishing the remediation.”
Despite the ongoing court battles, the Regional Water Quality Control Board gave the go-ahead to begin cleaning the 50-acre community in August 2015. Shell anticipates spending about $200 million on the remediation.
A Carousel tract resident who lives nearby in Cluster 17, which will be cleaned in three or four years, echoed what many residents have said this week throughout the process.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said the woman, who didn’t give her name because of the lawsuit. “Why would they spend all that money to clean up the soil? The toxins are going to end up airborne anyway. I don’t get why they don’t just buy us out completely.
“I have three sisters that also live in the tract. I just think it’s ridiculous that this is going to take years, and I just can’t get over that they never settled to buy us all out. Are they waiting for us to pass?”