Serving Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and surrounding communities

Orginally published September, 2006

By Sara Ellis
Contributing writer

<< The 38-acre site, a lifeless alien landscape hidden by thick greenery and high dirt banks, reveals as much about the history of America's industrial corporate foibles as an ice core sample does climate change. As Mary Urashima, a public information representative for Cannery Hamilton describes it, Ascon —named for some of the site's lesser pollutants, asphalt and concrete—is a laundry list of industrial chemical wastes. The waste, which was produced from as disparate sources as oil drilling, World War II industrialization, and the construction booms that followed that war, has contributed to a nasty hodgepodge that reads like a who's who list of toxicity. Arsenic, lead, and benzene permeate the site, while less siblings—what the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as group 2b carcinogens—such as styrene, swirl in the depths of the oft written about Pit F. >>