More than three dozen residents, upset by Chiquita Canyon Landfill’s repeated claims of progress amid their ongoing claims of health problems in lawsuits seeking compensation for the problems caused by the landfill, gathered Friday at Del Valle Training Center to hold their own media event two days after one hosted by the landfill.
Chiquita Canyon Landfill held an invite-only press tour Wednesday to demonstrate its progress and talk about its ongoing efforts to stop the leachate and landfill gases from impacting the community.
Friday’s gathering, which toured several locations over three hours, focused on the experiences of nearby Castaic and Val Verde residents, shared once again with a group of legislators invited by Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, D-Chatsworth.
Diana James said she was caring for one of her several neighbors who has cancer, but the air was so bad on a daily basis due to the landfill, the person had to move in with someone else. She doesn’t have any such option, she told her neighbors Friday.
“I’ve been suffering from headaches and nausea and constant pain. I can’t get out of bed, I can’t do my job, I can’t work, I can’t pay my bills,” she said. “It basically boils down to that I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t take it anymore, and I don’t have a way to relocate. I cannot financially afford it, and I’m in trouble.”
Waste Connections representatives said they’ve made significant progress by spending millions on extraction wells, flares and tanks to capture and treat the gases and chemicals that continued to overpower the nostrils during a tour of Chiquita Canyon Landfill’s reaction site.
Landfill officials said all their progress — which they say is demonstrated in hundreds of pages of reports on the landfill’s website, with takeaways that county and state officials have continually disputed — is the reason why they shouldn’t have to compensate the residents for their health problems, in a decision to end its compensation program.
L.A. County disputed that in a court filing this week seeking an injunction against the landfill and ordering it to resume the financial-assistance program it ended in February.
“I mean, you can’t come away from all your stories without just wanting to frickin’ storm the ramparts — and that’s what I know that all of us here are going to do,” Rep. George Whitesides, D-Agua Dulce, said to the group at the beginning of the tour. “This is unacceptable in the United States of America, to be affected the way you are. And we are going to do everything we can to get you help, whether that’s relocation, medical and to fix the problem. We’ve got to do all of it, right?”
Also present for the tour were Assemblyman Juan Carrillo, D-Palmdale; Assemblywoman Anamarie Avila Farias, D-Concord; Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxins; and Assemblyman Stan Ellis, a Bakersfield Republican with an extensive background in chemical engineering and one of the few to express optimism over a potential solution.
“I became excited, because, as a scientist, you always look for solutions,” he said, referring to his initial reaction to the crisis. “You all have individual issues, and, of course, I have a lot more questions. But my concern, frankly, is where are regulatory agencies in this? There are regulatory agencies that are supposed to jump on things like this and fix these problems and make the land abide by regulations. I’m concerned that that’s not happening.”
