The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to enter into settlements with 275 parties for a Superfund site in Monterey Park, the federal agency announced Monday.
The former Operating Industries Inc. site is a 190-acre facility that operated as a landfill that accepted commercial, residential and industrial waste from 1948 to 1984.
Each of the settling parties sent between 4,200 and 110,000 gallons of liquid hazardous waste to the OII site during its decades of operation, according to the EPA. Collectively, those parties will pay more than $17 million toward cleanup costs.
"Today, landfills that accept hazardous waste must meet very strict design requirements," said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator for the EPA's Pacific Southwest Region.
"This was not the case with OII, where hazardous materials were released into the environment," he said." Including this settlement, 1,100 companies responsible for the contamination have contributed more than $600 million to the cleanup of the OII Superfund site."
The landfill once accepted industrial solid, liquid and hazardous wastes, as well as municipal solid waste. The EPA identified the site as an environmental problem in the early 1980s and placed it on a priority list in 1986.
