Point Reyes Light - December 13, 2001

Old dump, secret mine overlooked by regulators

By Gregory Foley

In an era when state and county regulatory agencies closely monitor the environmental impacts of every business operating along Tomales Bay, two sites on bayside public property have gone unnoticed by authorities.

Investigating over several months, The Light has learned that the sites – one in downtown Point Reyes Station and another near Inverness – do not appear to pose an immediate threat to the water quality of local creeks or groundwater, but both sites could contain contaminants and were closed decades ago with minimal or no cleanup.

The development of the two sites is a curious tale of trash and tungsten – a silver-gray metal used extensively in the manufacturing of spacecraft parts, electrical conductors, and hard-steel alloys.

A large public dump at the south end of B Street in Point Reyes Station was apparently paved over with no cleanup, and a clandestine mine off North Dream Farm Road in Inverness was simply dynamited shut and left to grow over with weeds.

Gone and almost forgotten

The location and histories of the two creekside plots are virtually unknown to residents around Tomales Bay or to county and state regulatory agencies responsible for monitoring ground water and environmental cleanup. According to local officials, neither site was ever assessed for possible toxins.

The relative obscurity of the two sites – both of which sit on county or state property – has left some longtime West Marin residents concerned about what may lie beneath the ground.

The dump that served downtown Point Reyes Station residents in the 1920s and early 30s was one of several in the area where people left everything from old cars to common household garbage, said 76-year resident Fred Rodoni, Sr., a retired insurance agent.

Rodoni characterized the dump as "pretty big," taking up the entire area that is now the lower end of B Street, immediately adjacent to Highway 1 and Lagunitas/Papermill Creek. Rodoni added that he recalled the site being in full use by residents when he moved to the area in 1925.

Trail to school

Years later the site was simply paved over to form B Street, he said. "They just filled it and made a road on top of it. If you go down there and start digging you might find something."

Longtime Point Reyes Station rancher Harold Genazzi also remembered the dump in the center of town – on property that is now owned and maintained by the county. Genazzi said that in the 1930s he used to walk to school on a trail that passed through the site. "There was a lot of junk in there," he recalled. "It was still being used when I got out of school in 1935."

The county, however, said it has no documentation of the use of the site as a dump. Local dumps were not monitored and recorded by county government until the 1950s.

Cynthia Barnard, a county environmental health specialist, said the county does operate a program to assess abandoned dump sites, but she hasn’t seen any record of a former dump in downtown Point Reyes Station.

Records not kept

"The county tried to do some kind of control in the 50s, but there was considerably less oversight back then," she said. "The records are sparse for that time."

In the 1970s, the county started to take notice of old Marin dump sites and phase in more sophisticated regulations, Barnard said. County control over landfills and dumps was expanded again in 1998. (The now defunct West Marin Sanitary Landfill in Point Reyes Station was shut down in 1998 by the state over concerns about toxins leaking into nearby waterways.)

The mining operation was run by late Inverness Park resident Dell Bender on a piece of property along North Dream Farm Road that is now part of Tomales Bay State Park, according to Genazzi.

Dick McManus of Inverness, a longtime acquaintance of Bender’s, said the property that Bender mined next to Redwood Creek yielded large amounts of scheelite, a mineral that typically contains high concentrations of tungsten. Bender at first shipped tons of soil to Nevada to have it processed into a usable form, but eventually decided to process it himself at his Dream Farm Road residence next to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, McManus told The Light.

Tungsten dreams

The tungsten mine was developed after World War II at a time when many landowners were looking for valuable uranium on their property, McManus explained. In addition to a residence in Inverness Park, Bender owned some 500 acres at Dream Farm, which over time was sold or bequeathed to different owners.

Few people around Tomales Bay know about the mine, and no one in county and state governments had any record of it.

Catherine Caufield, executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, said that she was unaware of the site. Ken Fox, president of the Tomales Bay Association, said he didn’t know about it either, but said he thought the nearby marsh was in relatively good health.

Ron Angier, supervisor for the North Sector of Marin’s state parks including Tomales Bay State Park, said he too was unaware of an old tungsten mine along Tomales Bay.

Officials from the state-run San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board – which tries to identify and monitor toxic sites in the area – told The Light that many mines and landfills in West Marin and other parts of the Bay Area get overlooked, in part because of the sheer number of mines developed before systems to monitor them were installed.

Threat drops over time

The state agency has no record of either the Point Reyes Station dump or Dell Bender’s mine near Inverness.

Curtis Scott, Regional Board division chief for groundwater protection, said that the agency often relies on county environmental regulators to tell them about potentially hazardous sites such as dumps or mines. He explained that the state typically gets involved in assessing or cleaning up sites only after it has been established that water supplies could be affected – as occurred in the agency’s $3 million cleanup of the former Gambonini mercury mine in Marshall.

The agency does not have a funded program to consistently go into the field to try to identify new sites that could pose a threat to public health but they do respond to reports, he said.

Scott said old dumps and landfills usually aren’t a hazard to groundwater, but noted that sites that were buried deep can affect water quality. Dumpsites that took mostly household waste tend to pose less of a threat over time, he noted.

"Where we’ve seen there have been issues is when there has been industrial waste dumped," he said, adding that the agency needs to see "good potential" that a site is toxic before it will act. Drilling holes to test groundwater at old sites is very costly, he added.

State can’t keep up

Priya Ganguli, a Regional Water Board geologist, said the Regional Board does conduct surveys to discover new sites and assess water quality, but they haven’t been able to keep up with the scores of old mines – mostly mercury mines – around the San Francisco Bay Area. A 1998 mine report, which details many other mines in the Bay Area, has no mention of a mine in Inverness. About 50 mines were identified in the study, according to Will Bruhns, Sr. Engineer for the Water Board.

"We found that most are not a threat to water," he said, but a few, including the Gambonini mine on the other side of Tomales Bay, needed to be cleaned up. Two others – one in San Jose and one in Oakland – are also scheduled to be cleaned up.

"We often get requests to excavate material," Ganguli said, adding "citizens can call if they are concerned." She said she would come out to Inverness and take a look at the Bender Mine now that it’s been brought to her attention.

Who pays?

The Water Board focuses on areas that pose the highest threat to water quality and clean up can be expensive and complicated, Ganguli said. In general, when contamination is discovered on private or public land the board tries to go after the individual or group responsible.

In the case of the Gambonini mine, for example, the Water Board went after the mining company, not the family who own the property now, but they were only able to get about $100,000 from the now bankrupt company. The clean-up costs topped $3 million on that project. Most of that was covered with state and federal money.

"We try to put the burden on those who are responsible," Ganguli said.

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