Central Valley Business Times

AUDIO: Landowners turn to courts, Internet to press for cleanup

SACRAMENTO
November 19, 2007 6:35am

• Claim junk was buried on their property by renter

• ‘They buried hundreds of tons of material’

The owners of a nine-acre property near Sacramento in the Central Valley are turning to the courts and public opinion to press the nation’s largest maker of concrete pipe to cleanup after itself.

Patrick McGilvray, whose family owns the land, says Hanson Pipe and Precast Inc., a unit of Heidelberg Cement AG, Germany’s largest cement maker, has refused to remove tons of waste concrete pipe and rebar found buried on the land. Hanson had leased the property from the McGilvray family.

The 20-year lease expired in 1999. In 2003, the McGilvray’s started to clear the land for development and discovered the burial site, Mr. McGilvray says.

“Instead of removing all of the materials as they had promised, they buried hundreds of tons of material,” says Mr. McGilvray. “They spread it across our property and covered it over with a thin layer of topsoil.”

He says it will cost more than $700,000 to clean up the site to permit future development.

The company doesn’t feel it has done anything wrong.

“Hanson leased the property in question from the mid-1970’s until 1999. The lease contained language that addressed the condition of the property at lease termination,” says Sue Tanenbaum, Hanson Pipe & Precast’s Western Region president, in a written statement e-mailed to CVBT.

“Hanson is unaware of any environmental agency expressing concern with the condition of the property,” the statement concludes.

(Mr. McGilvray and his attorney, David Frank, of Auburn, discuss the problem from their perspective in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please click on the link below to listen or to download to your iPod of PC.)

The family has taken the company to court but Mr. McGilvray has also taken to the Internet, posting a video in which he walks the viewer through a tour of the property and shows some of the buried material that has been unearthed.

“I wanted people around the world to be able to quickly see the type of debris that was left on our property by a company which claims to be a leader in environmental responsibility and social responsibility,” Mr. McGilvray says.

“In the face of the company’s intransigence and unwillingness to work with us to come up with a solution that doesn’t impoverish us, I wanted to world to know,” he says.

Comments on this story