West Covina is a delightful place to live. Few would deny that. The city is also a record breaker. At one point in its history it was one of the fastest growing cities in the Unites States – a 1000% population increase between 1950 and 1960. The city is home to the biggest collection of shoehorns in the world – nearly 3,000 of them housed in the Shoehorn Museum. The city is also home to largest hazardous waste landfill in the State of California. That landfill, covering nearly 200 acres and up to 595 feet deep, is called BKK. Buried there are over 5 million tons of toxic hazardous waste. Most of that was liquids, poured directly on to trash at the landfill or injected into the trash. Worse yet, that landfill is unlined – there is no physical barrier between it and the adjacent land. Accordingly, the landfill is leaking. Over 26,000 people live within one mile of the landfill. 200,000 people live within 3 miles. Today a small army of regulatory personnel, hydrologists, geologists, drill hands, pipe fitters, heavy equipment operators, lawyers, and others try to keep the community safe through a choreographed dance of science and engineering. While the landfill has been closed since 1987 it’s a beehive of daily activity pumping and treating leachate and groundwater, monitoring readings from methane probes, and taking corrective actions. Meanwhile plans are being developed to remediate (clean-up) the landfill. Those plans have not been finalized, but the preliminary price tag for the clean-up is already $869 million. Many believe the final clean-up cost will exceed $1 billion. They’re probably right. This book is the story about how a plan for 200-acre development of thousands of homes, housing 20,000 or more people, complete with an 18-hole golf course, and a large public park…instead turned into the largest toxic hazardous waste landfill in the state of California. It’s the story of the rancorous, prolonged fight to close the landfill, the evacuations that occurred when the landfill leaked…and the efforts today to limit the seepage of contents of the landfill, as well as move past its toxic legacy. Bad decisions make good stories. This book is a really good story...