Toxic Living: California Neighbors Sue After Finding Homes Were Built on Oil-Saturated Soil

CARSON, Calif. May 19, 2010— -- The tidy rows of hacienda-style homes in a pretty, well-manicured southern California neighborhood give little indication of the festering chemicals under the soil.

Built on top of a long-forgotten crude oil storage site, the 285 homes in Carson's Carousel neighborhood are now ground zero for an environmental and medical crisis that has pitted current and former homeowners, some of them cancer-stricken, in a massive lawsuit against Shell.

"I'm very angry. I'm angry that this could happen to our family or anyone else's family," longtime Carousel homeowner Royalene Fernandez said. "It has definitely ruined our lives and I don't want it to ruin my kids' lives or my grandchildren's."

Fernandez, 64, is terminally ill after having battled both leukemia and melanoma over the last 18 years. She said doctors in January gave her just six months to live, but she is pushing hard for a few final milestones -- her 46th wedding anniversary in August chief among them.

Click HERE to see images from the Carousel neighborhood in Carson, Calif.

Benzene exposure has been linked to an increased risk for the type of leukemia Fernandez was diagnosed with-- chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In the Carousel neighborhood, repeated testing has found benzene levels just a few feet under the soil at more than 1,000 times the acceptable limit, according to environmental experts hired by the plaintiffs and the county water board.

"It was never disclosed that it was ever over any type of oil ground or that anything had been there," said Fernandez, who bought her home on Panama Avenue in 1968 and lived there until 1999. "So of course you would not have bought if it had been disclosed."

In addition to the extraordinarily high benzene levels, the soil has also tested positive for dangerously high levels of methane, leading some environmental experts to fear a massive fireball at Carousel should the gasses ever make it to the surface.

The mayor of Carson said the contamination may be so bad that the entire neighborhood may have to be razed.

Houses were first developed on the site in the late 1960s after Shell sold the site it had operated since 1923. It wasn't until 2008 that random testing discovered disturbing, and some would say alarming, levels of contamination in the ground beneath the homes.

Though Shell has not owned the land in decades, residents, their lawyers and city officials believe it is still the company's responsibility to clean up what was left behind.

"The thing that was really compelling here was that Shell absolutely, positively without a doubt, knew they had this mess of tens of thousands of gallons, or millions of gallons, of very toxic material right under these houses," attorney Tom Girardi said.