New California task force eyes Synagro waste fire; DA to review for ‘criminal violations’
A cadre of California regulators is quietly putting heat on Synagro Technologies Inc. for a two-month fire in its open-air pit of sewage, wood, and industrial waste in Hinkley, government reports and emails reviewed by the Daily Press show.
More than half a dozen state, county, and local agencies have been looped into a recently-launched Nursery Products Task Force that met for the first time on July 21, according to the records disclosed by the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board.
The focus: to hone in on “challenges for compliance” at the Nursery Products Hawes Composting Facility run by Synagro, a Maryland firm owned since late 2020 by an investing arm of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Previous coverage: Synagro waste fire fuels 144% air-complaint spike in Mojave Desert; $1M fines on table
The task force isn’t limited to standard taxpayer-funded watchdogs of Synagro operations. It also includes the office of San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson.
“This is a multi-agency investigation,” DA spokesperson Jacquelyn Rodriguez told the Daily Press in an email, “and once that investigation is completed, our (Consumer Environmental Protection) Unit will review it to determine if there were any criminal violations.”
The regulator team-up appears to mark a ramp-up of what rural High Desert residents have criticized as a confused response to their complaints of rancid air and resulting ailments. A surge in Mojave Desert air-quality complaints began on the first day of the waste-pit fire, May 28, but no public acknowledgment of the fire came from any agency or private entity until after a May 31 report by the Daily Press.
The most severe reports have come from people roughly eight miles downwind of Synagro’s composting site in Hinkley, the unincorporated town best known for decades of water contamination that cost Pacific Gas and Electric a $333 million settlement and won Julia Roberts an Oscar for “Erin Brockovich.”
Attendees at the task force’s July 21 meeting included:
Paul Levers (a deputy district attorney for San Bernardino County)
Kimberly Tra (supervising environmental health specialist for the county Department of Public Health’s Environment Health Services division, or EHS)
Adela Evans and David Alaniz (environmental health program managers for the EHS)
Jan Zimmerman (senior engineering geologist for the Lahontan water board)
Kelly Anderson and Tom Strong (County Fire battalion chief and assistant fire marshal, respectively)
Manny Sedano and Javier Gaona (County Fire prevention officers)
Monica Ronchetti, Kristen Ward, and Dwane Pianalto (deputy fire marshal, assistant fire marshal, and hazardous materials specialist for County Fire’s Hazmat Division)
Ronchetti, the Hazmat deputy fire marshal, shared the minutes of the task force meeting with personnel from even more agencies in a July 25 email reviewed by the Daily Press. That included multiple inspectors from the Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District and Justin Vlach, a solid-waste enforcement and inspection officer for CalRecycle.
CalRecycle, a division of the California Environmental Protection Agency, is the state’s oversight authority for waste composters like Synagro.
The state agency has previously told the Daily Press that its standard is to leave the responsibility for inspections and enforcement actions to the local agencies tasked with those powers — in this case, the county EHS — but “when the department notes that appropriate action is not being taken, CalRecycle can take action to ensure they do so.”
CalRecycle spokesperson Maria West says her agency “is actively supporting the (county EHS) to resolve issues at the Nursery Products facility…as it works with other agencies on the task force.”
“In the last few weeks,” West told the Daily Press in an email, “CalRecycle staff accompanied (county EHS) inspectors and provided information and suggestions to help control the issues at the site. CalRecycle has also received daily updates from the (county EHS), assisted with a follow-up inspection by the (county EHS) of the facility on July 21, and provided observations to the (county EHS) to assist their efforts to address the issues at the site.”
The minutes of the inaugural Nursery Products Task Force meeting on July 21 indicate long-term plans for multi-agency coordination on a range of violations cited against Synagro up to and in the time since its two-month fire began.
“The purpose of the Task Force is to bring all of the different regulatory agencies together to discuss the challenges for compliance and provide status updates on the current activities happening at and with Nursery Products,” the minutes state.
Inspectors from the county EHS and CalRecycle were at the Synagro site during the task force’s July 21 morning meeting and “have been out at the site for two additional inspections, including with the Cal Recycle fire expert,” according to the minutes.
Synagro “had anticipated the fire would be out by 7/29/2022 but will probably ask for an extension,” the minutes read. “Cal Recycle is restricting the amount of materials coming on site.”
The minutes also state that Synagro is “leaving the burnt materials mixed with the product materials” and that the Lahontan water board “may ask Nursery Products to test if the burnt materials are considered hazardous in the near future.”
County lawyers and Fire Prevention officers met with Synagro lawyers on July 20 to discuss compliance issues, the minutes state. On-site visits by regulators appear slated to continue in the coming weeks.
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During a Daily Press visit to the Synagro site on July 25, black smoke clouds could be seen coming from roughly a quarter into the waste pit’s 80-acre length. The fumes were less intense on this low-wind morning than on past visits, though experts from CalRecycle and other agencies have noted in emails that a spurt of heavy winds can revamp such smoldering to a larger-scale fire.
With that, local questions are bolstered by years of earlier fires — which went unnoticed by almost everyone aside from government regulators, Hinkley residents, and workers whose jobs bring them within miles of the facility — and unresolved violations.
San Bernardino County has never taken enforcement action against the Hinkley site, but inspectors cited it for 39 violations from November 2020 to April this year, dwarfing its 11 peer facilities in California, the Daily Press reported in a June 19 analysis.
That included more than five times the legal limit of film plastic being found in a ready-to-go Synagro compost load on a surprise check March 23, and the site taking “unacceptable feedstock” of mixed waste — sewage solids including “non-organics, processed industrial materials, mixed demolition or mixed construction debris, or plastics” — and brewery muck from an Anheuser-Busch factory near Los Angeles. Three more violations came from a routine inspection two days before the fire began.
The task force’s next meeting is scheduled at 9 a.m. Aug. 18, according to the minutes.
Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.
This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: New task force, DA to review Synagro fire for ‘criminal violations’
