Prometheus 6   

How about: enough not to kill you?

Cleanups Fuel Debate: How Much Is Enough?
By Miguel Bustillo
Times Staff Writer

December 16, 2003

For ten years, Juanita Tate has worked to bring something so basic to a neighborhood that most take it for granted: a supermarket.

As director of the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, Tate's goal is to revive an area that was the center of unrest during the city's 1992 riots by filling in a checkerboard of vacant lots and old factories with housing and soccer fields.

But Tate's revitalization plans are repeatedly being held up by a problem common in urban areas throughout California: toxic chemicals lingering in the land, left behind by decades of industrial use. California has more brownfields, as the tainted sites are known, than any other state, and has been slower than most in cleaning them up. At the heart of the delays is a question that divides regulators, environmentalists and developers: How clean is clean enough?

The question often comes down to the equivalent of a few grains of sand –– toxic residue measured in parts per billion. Many of the chemicals California considers dangerous have only been scientifically proven to cause health problems in laboratory animals. But the state, ever careful to reduce the risk of harm, often requires contaminant levels to be reduced far below the threshold. For a builder trying to redevelop a large contaminated lot, parts per million can add up to millions of dollars in cleanup costs.