Regional Water Board Votes to Expand KHF

January 17, 2014

Last night the Regional Water Board voted to approve the staff recommendation to the permit expansion for Section B-18 of the Kettleman Hills Facility. The public hearing held at the Kettleman Hills Elementary School, began at 5:00pm with an overview provided by staff on their evaluation of the permit expansion in regards to water quality. Greenaction and El Pueblo for Clean Air & Water of Kettleman City were stakeholders to the hearing and were able to raise some important questions to the Water Board staff and Chemical Waste Management staff. A crucial moment happened when Bradley Angel, Director of Greenaction, through questions made Chem Waste staff admit that the facility was only accepting “a few percentage points” of it’s total capacity while the state was conducting the Environmental Impact Report. Bradley continued to contrast that to the full capacity numbers that were never studied by EPA. In…