OC Great Park

Hey moms! I don't want to start a debate, I just want this to be something that you all look into & make a decision for yourself. I can only tell you the side of the story that is mine & it may be different for others.

I read up on the OC Great Park and thought it would be a really awesome place to take my daughter, like many of you. Who wouldn't want to take their kid to a park that has free balloon rides and carousel rides? Well my boyfriend. Why? He's a Civil Engineer and he knows what used to be on that land. The land that they built the Great Park on is toxic. It emits chemicals that are known to cause cancer. If you google this, it will come up. Several articles and discussions. If you even go to the foundation page for the OC Great Park, they talk about it. They claim to be "cleaning" it but according to my boyfriend, that just isn't possible with the type of chemicals that were dumped on that land. Keep in mind that this park was created because the land was too toxic to build houses on so they moved the housing project to the outer edges where the toxicity is less and meets the minimum requirements.

Anyway, i just wanted to write this to encourage all of you to do some research. Read some articles, talk to land surveyors, environmental/civil engineers, geologists or any other expert on the topic. Make an educated decision for you and your family.

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Permalink Reply by Giselle Baturay on September 4, 2011 at 11:22pm

Jenn, thanks for posting! I had heard of this but didn't know the details. I have a quick question though, when you say that many of the areas in the property didn't need remediation, does that mean that some still do? Remediation from what? The link about the remediation update from 2010 says access denied so I wasn't able to open it though I really wanted to read that one in particular.

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Permalink Reply by Jeannine Torres on September 12, 2011 at 10:39am

Thanks so much for sharing this! Why isn't there more publicity about this??!

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Permalink Reply by Michelle Lebron on September 12, 2011 at 1:30pm

Wow! I know of a similar issue in LA but, they built homes on property and equipped alarms in houses should chemicals leak and create a extreme hazard or light explosion:-(. The alarms would go off so residents could evacuate quickly.

And if it's true that it's the same exposure as at gas pump, I don't pump more than once a week if that for 10 minutes. So on an average I'm at pump for 9 hrs a year. If your going to park on a regular basis spend 1-2 hrs you'll greatly increase your exposure.