VIA hosts talk on cleanup
Business community listens as property owner for Whittaker Bermite discusses development timeline
By the fall of this year, the undeveloped Whittaker-Bermite site will finally have completed its longawaited cleanup project, managers of the cleanup said on Tuesday.
At a luncheon with the business nonprofit Valley Industry Association, or VIA, Realtors, land developers and other stakeholders met at Valencia Country Club to hear the latest update on the 996 acres of land at the center of Santa Clarita. Those who have consistently been in charge of the cleanup said it should be completed by October or November.
The site’s complexity all factored into the careful work done into implementing the excavation and treatment of the soil, said Jose Diaz, project manager of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The issue grew with the levels of perchlorate, among other chemicals and compounds, contaminating the soil and the groundwater nearby. The Whittaker-Bermite site was once a munitions testing site, and the perchlorate use contaminated the soil, remaining there for decades. Perchlorate was and continues to be used as solid rocket fuel, said Hassan Amini, vice president with GSI Environmental Inc., a cleanup firm.
As the technology to deal with perchlorate detection improved over the last two decades, regulations caught up with its standards, Diaz said.
“We have very conservative, very strict cleanup levels that we’re targeting on the site,” he added.
Pumping the groundwater at the site will last over the next 30 years, Diaz said.
Along with excavating the soil and pumping, there will still be locations unsuitable for construction.
“We estimated that about 150 acres has surface contamination,” Diaz said. “We estimate that probably 10 to 15 acres will be restricted, will have restrictions in the way that you cannot use it for sensitive uses.”
Eric Lardiere, president for MeggittUSA Inc, which owns the Whittaker Corporation, said there is nothing “weird about it, nothing scary about” keeping parts of the site restricted, that it is how such sites are dealt with.
Whittaker-Bermite is expected to begin development within the next two years, Lardiere said.
Kim Thomson, membership chair of Via, said she is looking forward to roads finally connecting the center of Santa Clarita. A realtor, she said she anticipated the roads more so than any housing developments that might possibly go there, she said.
B.J. Atkins, president of the board of the Newhall County Water District, said he found the presentation and its results to be forthright and transparent. He has followed the cleanup’s process for 20 years, he said. At the start of the process, the small portion of contaminated land centrally located in the middle of the SCV led many to refer to the plot as the SCV’s “toxic donuthole.”
“It’ll be not very long before we have, I think, a Whittaker-Bermite (site) to be able to be developed,” Atkins said, “and we can fill in the hole in the doughnut.”
“It’ll be not very long before we have, I think, a Whittaker-Bermite (site) to be able to be developed, and we can fill in the hole in the doughnut.”