Last month, inewsource reported on a decadeslong toxic chemical contamination at Market Creek Plaza in the Chollas Creek community of San Diego.
Soon after, we reached out to elected officials with questions. Though most left our questions unanswered, some wrote back with statements expressing concern.
U.S. Rep. Juan Vargas wrote a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, calling on the agency to help mitigation efforts.
At the time, state Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson’s office did not respond to our inquiry.
But on Thursday, the senator paid a visit to the community and hosted a town hall at Lincoln High School with state officials and a Market Creek Plaza representative.
When the senator asked the crowd how many had heard about the contamination before the last week or two, most kept their hands down.
Her staff gathered questions from several dozen community members, and Sen. Pierson herself asked a few of them.
Walking out of the venue, I spoke with some residents who were thankful for the town hall, but they said that the session left them hungry for more answers. We have questions ourselves, about the trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene (commonly called TCE and PCE) found on site, the action taken to date and the next steps to protect the community.
PCE can cause cancer of the liver, bladder and kidney as well as multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. TCE causes reproductive toxicity, including congenital birth defects, miscarriages, small birth weights and a low sperm count in men.
Here are a few questions and answers that stood out in Thursday’s discussion. Ben Stanphill, a Southern California division chief with the Department of Toxic Substances Control, answered the questions below, with the exception of the final answer as you’ll see.
Q: “If TCE was dumped in the ’50s, why was it allowed to build a grocery store and apartments on top of that land?”
A: “The honest answer is, during the environmental investigations in the late 1990s, early 2000s, we just didn’t look at soil vapor, and we didn’t look at these sorts of concentrations as TCE. We’ve learned more about TCE specifically over the last 25 years, and the screening levels for that chemical in particular have gone down quite a bit. So as we learn more about it, we’ve realized how it’s more of a problem. And as Market Creek Plaza discovered it in the Food 4 Less and reached out to DTSC, we’ve been working to bring those concentrations down.”
Q: “Once we understood we had a different method or a better method for testing, was there ever any consideration of coming back to test this site since it was known that it was an exposure?”
A: “The real concern here is the TCE and soil vapor that’s coming up into buildings. That just wasn’t even considered typically in the late ’90s, and so we did not have a flag in our system that said, ‘Hey, you need to come back and retest these projects from the ’90s.'”
Q: “Has there been any testing of groundwater for TCE levels?”
A: “So groundwater, TCE, absolutely, it can migrate through soil down into groundwater, and that is one of our goals. That’s going to need to be tested before this site can be closed out. However, the more urgent risk, as we see it, is coming up through soil vapor into the apartments, into the Food 4 Less. And while testing the groundwater is going to be really important and needs to be done, our focus has really been on reducing the amount of TCE people come in contact in their everyday lives.”
Q: “How long has the contamination been leaking? And additionally, I would think that if you have some kind of contamination in the soil, over time, the levels would go down. So that makes me wonder if in the 1990s and the early 2000s, when we were building and having people go and shop, if the levels were actually higher at that time potentially than what you found when you tested in 2024 and 2025.”
A: “It’s possible. In soil and soil vapor, TCE is very stable. In the presence of oxygen, it tends not to biodegrade and while Langley was using these chemicals from the ’50s to the ’90s, you know, concentrations may have been higher but they were also using these chemcials in the factory potentially for degreasers during the construction. There was some amount of testing and soil removal to get rid of the highest concentration areas, but then a lot of times what we see in our environmental cleanups, especially for chlorinated solvents like PCE, TCE and cis-1,2-DCE, they persist in the environment for a long time, and don’t don’t seem to go down very much. And for the chemical signature that we see at Fleet Aerospace, that’s primarily TCE and not very much of the cis-1,2-DCE that it typically breaks down to, we do think that these concentrations have been fairly stable for the last 30 plus years.”
Q: “Why not close Food 4 less grocery stores since it has such a high level of contamination, not only for people who are coming there to purchase food, but also for the workers who are there for hours at a time, weeks at a time, months at a time? So why was the decision made to keep that grocery store open?”
A: “So we looked at this and did consider this. We’ve also had a lot of conversations with the county health department, and in discussing with our toxicologists, we do feel like the store is safe for shoppers. So coming in for an hour or two a week to buy groceries, we don’t have large concerns. We also feel like the food in the store is safe, things like produce, fruits, and vegetables. It’s probably good to wash those when you get home for for lots of other reasons. But TCE, it’s not a dust. It doesn’t settle down. As we’ve talked with our toxicology groups, we don’t have concerns about the food. We’ve been working with Kroger to make sure that employees are informed. And as we’ve said a number of times … they’ve been steadily and constantly making mitigations, doing what they can to protect their workers, shoppers, and just the whole community.”
Market Creek Plaza consultant Tracy Craig also answered that last question.
She said: “When we test, we never quite know where we might find that high level, which is actually reassuring, probably for somebody working in there. Also, a lot of the employees are moving around. The areas where employees hang out, the break room, the office, we have put those air treatment units in, and they are working as planned there, so that’s good news. And also, I did talk with Kroger today, and they are working with DTSC, their environmental compliance department. I think more data needs to be gathered. It’s not an ideal answer, I get that, but we’re working hard to address it as quickly as possible, and also talking with the employees as well.”
