WHO’S GONNA CLEAN THIS UP?

Every tenant leaves a mess. Sometimes it’s a dirty oven. Sometimes it’s a stain on the carpet. Sometimes it’s forty tons of hazardous waste and tanks filled with 20,000 gallons of cyanide-laced water.

Every day, Don DeSanti parks his 1982 Toyota in the shadow of four imposing black tanks. He walks past the yawning gap in the wall of the Tempe industrial property he owns and into the office where, for fourteen months, he has presided over what used to be the building that housed Circuit Technology Incorporated.

And while DeSanti’s property sits fire-gutted and vacant with a still unknown level of toxic contamination, his former tenant, Circuit Technology president Richard Weinraub, is parking his Cadillac Biarritz at a newer, better-equipped and much larger building in Phoenix.

Circuit Tech took its $1.5 million insurance settlement and moved out of Tempe within six weeks of the March 20, 1990, fire, but it has yet to finish cleaning up the mess it left behind.

The Tempe Fire Department still has not declared an official cause for the fire. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has done little more than write letters, but a DEQ official now admits an actual cleanup order might have been a good idea.

Weinraub and a Circuit Tech supervisor have pleaded no contest to endangerment charges for not telling firefighters about cyanide stored in the building. But the City of Tempe, where police proudly pointed to the charges as part of a new crackdown on environmental crime, failed to write a cleanup deadline into the plea agreement. The company is still operating at its new Phoenix location, but it has filed for Chapter 11 protection in Bankruptcy Court, tying the hands of the state and anyone else seeking funds for cleanup.

A full battery of tests on the site near Hayden Road and Salt riverbottom hasn’t been conducted, so no one knows whether or how much cyanide or other chemicals have seeped into the soil of Tempe.

RICHARD WEINRAUB does not like being called a “corporate dumper.” In a telephone interview (with his lawyer listening in), Weinraub talks of Circuit Tech as a company concerned about the environment, a company battling government red tape in a courageous effort to fix the mess. He sees Tempe officials as the aggressors.

“Rich is really an innocent victim of events, and he’s battling the bureaucracy,” says his lawyer, Jeffrey Ross.

Among the assets listed in Circuit Tech’s bankruptcy case is the possibility of filing a claim against Tempe for “libel, malicious prosecution and abuse of process.” City records show that no claim has been filed.

“I think they’re picking on the wrong guy–we didn’t ask for this fire,” Weinraub said last August.

But the city warned Circuit Tech of possible fire hazards a month before the blaze.

Fire Inspector Russ Wollam advised installing sprinklers, saying a fire was likely in a dipping tank (used for plating circuit boards). But Weinraub acknowledges that he balked at the costs, which ranged from $30,000 to $50,000. That was too much to spend on a building the company did not own and was thinking of leaving anyway, he says.

The fire began about 4:45 a.m. on March 20, 1990. One of the three workers on duty, Trun Min Pham, switched on the heater in a dipping tank. Nobody told Min Pham that the tank had been drained the day before. The overheated tank is thought to have caused the fire.

The workers got out safely, but by the time the first firefighters arrived, the flames were already through the roof, setting adrift a foul-smelling cloud of smoke.

Tempe firefighters poured water on the fire–despite placards warning of water-reactant chemicals. Wollam explains that there was not enough foam available to effectively fight the fire. The green-tinted water ran down the street, pooling in a nearby intersection.

A half hour after the firefighters began dousing the flames, Circuit Tech engineering supervisor Curtis Daily arrived on the scene. Soon after, Weinraub pulled up. Both men were asked if cyanide was in use, according to the police reports. Both men said no. According to a list Daily had provided to the fire department three months before, no cyanide was present. Investigators later found two tanks containing a total of 65 gallons of cyanide.

The pools of greenish water left by the firefighters were pumped into four large tanks and stored in the parking lot. A mass of twisted metal and other debris littered the gutted southern half of the building.

Weinraub first talked about rebuilding, but within a week, he was pursuing a deal to buy an ailing circuit board factory in Phoenix.

Six weeks after the fire, Weinraub had closed the deal. The company would absorb the Phoenix firm, Custom Circuits, and move into its building at 5815 South 25th Street. As with the Tempe site, Weinraub would lease.

Weinraub says he used the insurance settlement from the fire to buy equipment for his new factory.

The cleanup at the Tempe site has been anything but speedy. Some of the waste was officially declared hazardous, but it would be seven months after the fire before it was even stored in containers. Until then, the piles of chemical-laden ash and metal sat, blown by the wind, washed away in the rain and looted by scavengers searching for scrap metal.

Circuit Tech did show good intentions, hiring a Phoenix consulting firm Geraghty & Miller, to devise a cleanup plan. The proposal was mailed to DEQ on April 13, 1990.

Six weeks later, DEQ replied, listing 42 “deficiencies” in the Geraghty & Miller plan. Thus began a series of letters and meetings between the company and DEQ that lasted into the fall.

Unlike DEQ, Tempe seemed ready to break out of the toxic quagmire. The summer of 1990 was the season when Tempe declared itself an “environmental city.” There was an elaborate Earth Day festival. A curbside recycling program was under way and the public works department had placed large bins for aluminum and newspapers at schools and parks across the city.

The summer of 1990 was also the summer that self-styled “environmental cop” Jay Golden formed a team he called TEQA (Tempe Environmental Quality Assurance.)

Golden, a Tempe city cop, was attempting to coordinate investigators from the water and fire departments to search out businesses committing environmental crimes. Often perceived as a “clean” city, Tempe has a large number of small high-tech manufacturers. Golden, with his informal and officially unauthorized team, was pecking away at the toxic violators.

In late August, Golden and fire inspector Russ Wollam cited Weinraub on three violations of the city’s fire code. Golden also cited Weinraub and Daily on the endangerment charge.

The charges were held up as trophies days later when Golden’s environmental crusade came to a head in a late August press conference announcing an official Tempe police program they labeled “Operation Corporate Dumper.” Tempe police, with Golden at the lead, seemed to be getting tough on environmental crime. The police even brought television cameras along to film the arrest of another circuit board manufacturer.

The same morning Golden was putting the cuffs on someone, Tempe City Manager Terry Zerkle was putting out the red carpet for yet another circuit board manufacturer, who was considering a move into Tempe. Zerkle was busy portraying his city as a user-friendly locale.

Zerkle had not been informed of Golden’s press conference and was reportedly distressed by the timing. Three weeks later, Golden was reassigned from “Operation Corporate Dumper” to traffic duty. Tempe needed ticket writers more than it needed an environmental cop, Police Chief Dave Brown said at the time. (Golden has since left the department.)

A few weeks after the press conference, still under pressure from Tempe on the endangerment charge and cleanup problem, Circuit Tech’s Weinraub wrote to Zerkle. In the October 11 letter, Weinraub played up his business’s contributions to the local economy and added: “I have been an upright, law-abiding citizen of Tempe and do not deserve this kind of treatment. Television crews have been presenting damaging photographs of our old site and have repeatedly referred to us as `corporate dumpers.’ I am not a corporate dumper! . . . I feel that we have been treated unfairly by the Tempe police and fire departments.”

Weinraub also tried to persuade Zerkle he had not abandoned the Tempe site. “I still have equipment in what is left of the building,” he wrote. (DeSanti, however, says he has seized that equipment for nonpayment of rent.)

Weinraub’s pleadings had little effect. The charges stood.
In August, five months after the fire, DEQ decided the waste at the site constituted an “imminent” threat. Still far short of an official order, DEQ officials were asking Circuit Tech to at least get the waste into containers and prepare it for transport.

In early September, Circuit Tech came up with a plan which DEQ quickly approved. A month and half later, the waste still sat.

So DEQ officials jumped into action. They wrote another letter.
This time, Circuit Tech responded with an actual cleanup. In October, the burned wreckage was separated into hazardous and nonhazardous waste and hauled away. The waste was eventually hauled to processing centers and a Nevada landfill. Weinraub says Circuit Tech has spent roughly $130,000 on the cleanup.

“It only took them a day and a half once they got going,” says Ed Csira, a DEQ compliance manager. But then the work stalled.

On October 16, Circuit Tech filed for protection under the Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws. The filing lists $4,963,236 in assets up against $6,297,686 in liabilities. Among the creditors is Don DeSanti’s KEDD Investments, with $13,056 in back rent left unpaid. Weinraub says he has submitted a reorganization plan and is awaiting its approval.

DeSanti also is waiting. Until Circuit Tech gets rid of the wastewater tanks and tests for ground contamination, he cannot rent, sell or rebuild on his property. If DeSanti begins the cleanup himself, he says, he could be stuck with the bill. Assistant attorney general Kim McEachern says the situation is clouded by the bankruptcy filing, which makes the state hesitant to do the cleanup and then try to force Circuit Tech to pay.

DeSanti, the attorney general and DEQ are all looking to see what Tempe will do next. In January 1991, when Weinraub and his engineering supervisor, Curtis Daily, pleaded no contest to the endangerment charge (Weinraub also pleaded no contest to three fire-code violations concerning hazardous waste), they were placed on two years’ probation. One of the conditions of their probation was that the company would not violate environmental law.

The plea agreement does not set a deadline for the cleanup, but Tempe prosecutor Geraldine Mattern says she considers the inaction at DeSanti’s property a violation of environmental law and thus a violation of the terms of probation. Weinraub says his company has made “substantial progress” and is doing the best it can to settle the situation. Technically, Weinraub could face up to six months in jail, Mattern says. But the prosecutor hopes it will not come to that.

Mattern has never thought it would come to that. She says she foresaw a quick cleanup after the plea agreement was reached in January.

Circuit Tech, now operating in Phoenix, is waiting for permission from that city’s water department to move the four wastewater tanks to its new building and process the contents through a purification system there. Such permission was already refused once, and water department spokesman Bing Brown says Weinraub should consider that refusal as final.

A plan for ground-contamination testing is ready for review by the DEQ, Weinraub says. “We have not delayed in any shape or manner,” Weinraub says. “It’s been a priority of our company to put this behind us.”

The DEQ’s Ed Csira says he’s tired of waiting for the cleanup to be completed, but he is vague on his plans to “accelerate” it.

Fourteen months after the fire, the DEQ has yet to officially order a cleanup. But Csira says no such order is likely now because the department has decided to see what comes of the Tempe’s probation revocation.

“Looking back, we probably should have done an order the first day,” Csira says.

A DEQ official now admits an actual cleanup order might have been a good idea.

Investigators later found two tanks containing a total of 65 gallons of cyanide.

“I am not a corporate dumper!