New cleanup proposed for old San Jose Superfund site near San Jose State

Most people don’t pay much attention to the ordinary-looking parking lot at the corner of South 10th Street and East Alma Avenue just south of downtown San Jose.

There are plenty of bigger draws nearby: San Jose State University’s football stadium, the San Jose Giants’ ballpark, Happy Hollow Zoo, and Sharks Ice at San Jose, a popular ice rink where the San Jose Sharks practice.

But the 5-acre, asphalt-covered lot is home to one of Silicon Valley’s longest-running environmental cleanups — a former business where workers scrubbed and recycled more than 2 million industrial steel drums between 1947 and 1987, often dumping pesticides, solvents, acids and other chemicals into the ground and storm drains.

By 1987, after decades of contamination, the owner, Ernie Lorentz, was jailed and the Lorentz Barrel and Drum Co. property became a federal Superfund site, included on the list with some of the most toxic sites in the nation. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has overseen cleanups for decades, is proposing a $24 million high-tech project to remove most of the last remnants of his pollution.

“We’ve done about 90% of the cleanup,” said Mike Montgomery, director of the U.S. EPA’s Superfund and Emergency Management Division at the agency’s regional office in San Francisco. “What’s left is low concentrations. We want to get at that last bit of contamination that has eluded our cleanup efforts.”

EPA officials plan to place metal probes in the ground to heat the dirt 20 to 30 feet below the surface, the way a toaster warms bread. That technique, already used at a few other environmental cleanup sites in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California, is expected to cause stubborn tiny particles of solvents, volatile organic compounds and other chemicals still in the soil to vaporize, so those vapors can be captured in new wells, treated and removed. While earlier portions of the cleanup were funded in part by companies that contributed to the mess, this round will be funded with Superfund money that comes from a federal tax on chemical companies.

The job is expected to begin next year and take about 18 months to complete.

It also will hasten the day when the infamous site can finally be removed from the Superfund list and more easily put to better use, such as an industrial site or commercial businesses.

Currently, the property is being used as a parking lot for car dealers’ inventory. It is owned by 10th Street Land Management — a limited liability corporation registered to Jerry Daniels of Ponte Verde, Florida, a former South Bay car salesman who is Lorentz’s grandson.

The man who had been responsible for the cleanup, Lorentz, died of a heart attack in 1987 after Santa Clara County prosecutors secured convictions against him for violating state hazardous waste laws.

Shortly before he died, Lorentz, then 70, and in declining health, had his feet amputated due to complications from diabetes. in 1987 was sent to jail briefly by a Santa Clara County judge for repeatedly failing to remove hundreds of 55-gallon barrels the court had ordered cleaned up.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll move something now,” Lorentz said as he was taken from the courtroom by Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies. “Let the state do it.”

Prosecutors said they had tried for years to get him to clean up the site.

“It’s a sad case,” deputy district attorney Jerry Nadler said in 1987.  “This man has no money, he’s in terrible physical shape… but he’s done unbelievable damage to the environment of San Jose. Who knows what kind of damage he’s done to the future health of the people who live here?”

The EPA collected millions of dollars between 1994 and 2004 from dozens of large companies, including technology, heavy industry and agricultural companies, that had shipped barrels to the site to help pay for the cleanup after Lorentz filed for bankruptcy and died.

Today, the property poses no health risk to people who work and live nearby, the EPA’s Montgomery said. Most of the pollution is long gone, and the low concentrations measuring in the parts per billion of contamination remaining are capped by the parking lot.

Starting in the 1990s, EPA crews hauled away much of the contaminated soil. They installed wells near the property, including on land owned next door by San Jose State, to pump shallow groundwater, filter out chemicals using charcoal filters, and discharge the clean water into storm drains. Those continue to operate.

EPA studies have shown that because of underground clay layers in the area, the chemicals, mostly low concentrations of volatile organic compounds found in everything from gasoline to nail polish remover, have not seeped deeper into the ground.

This latest cleanup effort should reduce the risk of any remaining pollution seeping into groundwater aquifers more than 200 feet below, EPA officials say.

San Jose State officials sent a letter to the EPA last fall asking whether the heated probes might kill the grass on the university’s soccer field, or if vapors from the operation could leak and pose a health risk. Montgomery said no, because the probes are well below the surface and because EPA has used the technology successfully in other places and monitors the air during the work.

“San Jose State’s top priority is campus safety, and through our questions, we want to ensure that the next steps of this project do not negatively impact our campus community,” said Michelle Smith McDonald, a San Jose State spokesperson.

Ted Smith, a longtime environmental advocate who pushed for the site to be cleaned up in the 1980s, along with other toxic contamination that came from high-tech firms, said he remembers the saga well.

“Mr. Lorentz made a good foil,” Smith said. “He was elderly and kind of cranky. He didn’t have the polish that a lot of the guys for the PR firms working for the tech companies had. He became an easy target for people wanting to point out the dangers of toxic hazards.”

Before a San Jose inspector put a halt to it in 1968, Lorentz and his employees were dumping a toxic soup of paint thinner, oil and other chemicals directly into storm drains, which fed into Coyote Creek, EPA records show.

“There were people who would say you could see the waste running in the gutters right along Alma Street,” Smith recalled.

There are 35 Superfund sites in the 9-county Bay Area. Of those, 23 are in Santa Clara County. Most are old technology sites, where solvents used in chipmaking and other activities at companies like Intel, AMD, and Hewlett-Packard leaked from underground tanks in the 1970s and 1980s. They have been cleaned up to such low levels that the sites are now office parks, stores and other uses.

Other prominent Superfund sites in the Bay Area include former military bases, like Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, Alameda Naval Air Station in Alameda County, and Concord Naval Weapons Station in Contra Costa County. Around the state, former mines also are Superfund sites, like the Sulphur Bank Mine in Lake County.

Because of tougher environmental laws, no property in the Bay Area has been added to the Superfund list in more than 20 years. The most recent was in 2003, AMCO Chemical, a former chemical distribution company site in Oakland.

Properties take a long time to be removed from the Superfund list, Montgomery said, because federal law requires that contaminated groundwater — even water near the surface that is not used for drinking— be cleaned up to drinking water standards.

“Messes get created fairly quickly,” he said. “But they take a long time to clean up. It’s important we have strong enforcement and inspection programs to ensure they don’t happen again.”