For most of his adult life Jun Apostol has lived, willingly, in the shadow of a mountain of waste. An accountant who’s now retired, he planted his family in 1978 in a modest new house in Montebello, an industrial cum bedroom community just east of Los Angeles. Behind the house, in neighboring Monterey Park, sat an active landfill—but don’t worry, the developer said. Soon it would close and become a park or maybe even a golf course.
The greens never came. It turned out that the landfill, a former gravel pit that had welcomed so much ordinary trash it had filled to ground level and then kept on rising, had also accepted some 300 million gallons of liquid industrial waste—and it hadn’t been selective. Was your waste laced with arsenic, 1,4-dioxane, or mercury? No problem. The nodding pump jacks nearby, left from the oil boom, wouldn’t care. Some of the waste might have come from drilling those oil wells.
Los Angeles had buried the hazardous waste, but it was far from gone. A few years after Apostol’s development was built, his neighbors began complaining of nausea. Gas had intruded into six homes. Property values plummeted. In 1986 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency marched in and listed the landfill as a Superfund site, part of its new program to contain the nation’s hazardous waste crisis.
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