Discovered 5 years ago, Carson’s Carousel neighborhood is sitting on top a toxic landfill. Frustrated by years of delay and protracted cleanup efforts, the mayor of Carson has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency over polluted soil that is affecting a neighborhood of about 300 homes. Shell Oil was ordered more than two years ago to implement a clean up plan for the South Bay neighborhood but yet nothing has actually been done. Shell Oil once owned and used to store barrels of oil on and under the land. Past testing has found cancer-causing and toxic chemicals under homes in soil, soil vapor, and in groundwater. Carson’s Mayor, Mayor Jim Dear, called on the city council to declare a local emergency, a move he said might be used to prod regulators into action and ultimately force Shell to buy up all the homes, relocate residents and replace the contaminated ground with clean soil.
“It’s been 5 years since the situation was discovered, and we’ve gone through a long, long process of discovery and analysis and a legal order to clean the land, but it just seems to me that a delay game is being played with the lives of the residents of the Carousel tract, and that’s why we’re taking this kind of more dramatic action,” Dear said in an interview by phone.
Carousel Neighborhood in Carson
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