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- Freedom, NH
WARBIRD INSTRUMENT SELLER HIT WITH $6 MILLION EPA BILL
An Anaheim, California, pilot and owner of a business selling surplus instruments made from the 1940s through the 1980s has gotten a $6 million bill from the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup of instruments using radium (once used to make them readable in the dark). Jeffrey Pearson, owner of Heritage Aero and Preservation Aviation, bought the inventory of an instrument sales business several years ago stocked with government surplus instruments, a small percentage of them containing radium, which was based in Hollywood, California. That site was closed and one of the rented buildings leveled starting in 2004 in an EPA cleanup project. On February 15, EPA's Region 9 office in San Francisco asked Pearson for $6 million for the Hollywood site and $107,600 for supervising still uncompleted county cleanup efforts at the company's storage site at the Chino airport. (The instruments are in containers that have not been shipped.) Although the letter demands Pearson send a copy of the check to enforcement officials, EPA has also evaluated his personal belongings, including a 1950 Cessna 190, and will determine how much of the $6 million he could fairly pay, an EPA official said.
An Anaheim, California, pilot and owner of a business selling surplus instruments made from the 1940s through the 1980s has gotten a $6 million bill from the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup of instruments using radium (once used to make them readable in the dark). Jeffrey Pearson, owner of Heritage Aero and Preservation Aviation, bought the inventory of an instrument sales business several years ago stocked with government surplus instruments, a small percentage of them containing radium, which was based in Hollywood, California. That site was closed and one of the rented buildings leveled starting in 2004 in an EPA cleanup project. On February 15, EPA's Region 9 office in San Francisco asked Pearson for $6 million for the Hollywood site and $107,600 for supervising still uncompleted county cleanup efforts at the company's storage site at the Chino airport. (The instruments are in containers that have not been shipped.) Although the letter demands Pearson send a copy of the check to enforcement officials, EPA has also evaluated his personal belongings, including a 1950 Cessna 190, and will determine how much of the $6 million he could fairly pay, an EPA official said.
