A company that paid a bankruptcy trustee for the right to cut up the old Halaco Engineering plant and its furnaces to sell for scrap may not get anything.

American Tubing, the Carson-based business, learned this week that a survey by the Environmental Protection Agency found contaminated metals embedded in the paint on the buildings.

"We're still trying to determine what it means," said Ron Miller of American Tubing, which paid $52,000 at a U.S. Bankruptcy Court auction in February.

The EPA is considering including the Halaco facility on its list of Superfund cleanup sites. The company opened the magnesium and aluminium recycling plant at Ormond Beach in 1965. Over four decades the company amassed a 28-acre pile of slag that rises 40 feet above the adjacent wetlands. The pile of waste is laden with hazardous levels of metals and radionuclides.

Halaco declared bankruptcy in 2004 and last year began liquidating its assets. A bankruptcy trustee sold the 28 acres last year for about $2.5 million. The auctioning off of the plant was part of the liquidation process.

Miller paid for sundry metal boxes, furnaces, tools, forklifts and loaders that remained at the plant and agreed to remove much of the rest of the metal structures. But the EPA's survey put those plans on hold.

Although the EPA survey found low levels of radioactive material in the building, the real problems are the layers of dust laden with such metals as beryllium and copper, said Rob Wise, the EPA's on-scene emergency response coordinator.

The Oxnard Fire Department and the state of California have classified the material as hazardous waste. The scrap metals can't be removed from the site unless the waste, embedded in paint and coating much of the plant, is somehow removed, Wise said.

Meanwhile, the city of Oxnard has plans to condemn the structure, which is considered not just an eyesore, but also an attractive nuisance to trespassers. Although the EPA has installed fences, it's very hard to secure the almost 40-acre site.

The EPA will be done with its $4 million emergency stabilization work this month to ensure that metals and radioactive isotopes do not migrate off the site while a cleanup plan is developed.