Synagro ordered to stop taking sewage in Hinkley as 3-month waste fire fuels 2nd lawsuit
San Bernardino County’s composting regulator may force Synagro Technologies Inc. to stop accepting all forms of waste at its open-air pit of sewage sludge in Hinkley after a more than three-month fire that’s now central to two “mass action” lawsuits by rural High Desert residents.
The county’s Environmental Health Services Division issued a cease-and-desist order with the potential for new fines against Synagro, a Maryland firm owned by a private-equity arm of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in a Sept. 29 letter signed by EHS inspector Sarah Cunningham.
The letter to site manager Venny Vasquez says Synagro’s officially-dubbed Nursery Products Hawes Composting Facility has been breaking multiple sections of California code; “threatens to cause odor and nuisance,”; and “poses a potential threat of fires or significant smoldering to the public health, safety, and the environment.”
The cease-and-desist order cites numerous details exclusively reported by the Daily Press since the May 28 eruption of a fire in the guts of Synagro’s 80-acre composting pit less than ten miles west of Hinkley. The fire burned consistently for more than three months — fueling a surge of complaints by hundreds of residents about rancid air and sudden ailments for dozens of miles — and some nearby residents say waste-pit flames have continued flaring up in sporadic waves more recently.
Synagro’s vice president of technical services and government affairs, Layne Baroldi, told The Daily Press in an email that his firm has appealed the order and that “the majority of the issues had already been addressed and voluntarily complied with before the order was issued."
“We are in communication with staff at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health [EHS] as we are normally in the course of our regular business operations,” Baroldi wrote.
“We are working with them to address their concerns,” he continued. “We expect to resume our critical work at the Nursery Products facility soon. In the meantime, we are continuing to provide uninterrupted composting services to communities we serve across Southern California through our other facilities.”
The order says Synagro must “immediately cease and desist the acceptance of all materials including but not limited to compost feedstock (biosolids and green material) and amendments” unless it meets multiple requirements of state law and its permit by Dec. 31, 2022.
It specifically states that by the end of the year, the Hinkley site must get into compliance with all statutes and regulations “including but not limited to current standing violations” of five specific laws summarized in CalRecycle disclosures:
“Vectors/Litter/Hazard/Nuisance/Noise/Dust”
“Significant Change,” which in this case relates to the Hinkley site having to accept unapproved forms of waste before the fire and allowing the piles in its pit to accumulate in a way that has “resulted in emergency situations[,] potential health hazards[,] and the creation of a public nuisance.”
“Fire Prevention, Protection, and Control”
“Odor Control”
“Odor Impact Minimization Plan,” which in this case means a legally-required plan for composters that’s been deemed inadequate at Synagro’s High Desert site.
With that, by the end of the year, Synagro’s High Desert site must regain compliance with its own Odor Impact Minimization Plan and “Report of Composing Site Information” as last approved in October 2017 “and otherwise as reviewed and approved by the [local enforcement agency],” including any changes the county deems “necessary to ensure protection to the public health, safety, or the environment.”
The Sept. 29 letter to which the cease-and-desist order was attached adds that “any actions that are not completed or complied with this order will result in civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each violation for each day the violation continues.” Baroldi said no fines had been issued in relation to the order as of Monday.
Synagro and Goldman Sachs are also now the defendants in two lawsuit filings on behalf of High Desert residents affected by the fire.
The lawsuits harken back to legal actions Hinkley residents filed against Pacific Gas and Electric over water contamination years ago, producing the plot of the Oscar-winning 2000 film “Erin Brockovich.”
The newest filing came in early October by Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, led in this case by lawyer Gary Praglin. He also helped run a series of Hinkley cases against PG&E decades ago. Praglin told the Daily Press his firm’s complaint hadn’t been processed by San Bernardino County Superior Court, meaning it’s not yet a public record.
The first filing against Synagro and Goldman Sachs came in August from two San Diego firms with dozens of their own Hinkley and Barstow clients, the Law Offices of Gregory J. Hout and the Schack Law Group.
The county-ordered halt of waste deliveries to the High Desert site is the latest in a series of reprimands, penalties, and public denouncements since Synagro’s waste-pit fire began on Memorial Day weekend.
Much of the 32-page cease-and-desist order is spent running over a total of 39 violations inspectors cited at the Synagro site from November 2020 to April this year, which the Daily Press first reported in a June 19 analysis of dozens of inspection reports, as well as a slew of new violations in the months since the fire began.
The Hinkley site’s violation count dwarfs the total violations at 11 peer compost facilities in California, but regulators had taken no enforcement action against Synagro before the inferno began in May.
The pre-fire violations included a March 23 surprise check finding above five times the legal limit of film plastic in a ready-to-go compost load and raw sewage being dumped and logged as “green material” in the waste pit for more than a year until an inspector noticed in early 2021.
The longest-standing problem up to the recent cease-and-desist order is that Synagro has been in “continued violation” for failing “to prevent offsite migration of litter” since November 2020.
Film plastic is the most prevalent form of litter blowing into natural habitats outside Synagro’s facility, according to inspection reports. The area in which Synagro has persistently failed to clean up litter is the desert northeast of its property. The heavy winds of the High Desert usually blow in this direction, which also happens to be a direct trajectory toward the homes of Hinkley residents.
Another issue cited in the county’s order is the fact that a mismatch between Synagro’s “wet ton” intake of waste compared to its output of finished compost caused the amount of waste in its Hinkley pit to more than triple over the past five years from roughly 170,900 cubic yards of waste in January 2017, to 560,600 cubic yards in October 2021, the Daily Press previously reported.
Vasquez disclosed those airborne survey estimates in a July 22 email to regulators, responding to their requests for various data after a surprise inspection the month prior that came as the first unified response to the fire by state and county agencies.
That inspection marked the de facto launch of a state-county “Nursery Products Task Force,” District Attorney Jason Anderson’s office previously told the Daily Press it will use “to determine if there were any criminal violations” tied to the waste-pit fire.
The Hinkley site can accept and compost only two forms of waste from across California: “biosolids,” or semi-cleaned organic sewage such as human feces, and “green materials” such as wood.
The former material makes up the key ingredient in Synagro’s business model. Only four other facilities have a permit to compost biosolids in California, and inspection data shows biosolids make up the vast majority of waste in the Hinkley pit, according to a Daily Press analysis of CalRecycle disclosures.
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 worldwide. 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: Synagro ordered to stop taking sewage in Hinkley, faces second lawsuit
