Safety Concerns Lingering After Ammonia Leak : Industry: In the wake of Monday’s accident, which drove 1,000 La Habra residents from their homes, some wonder whether more stringent guidelines are needed.

Just days ago, most of Orange County thought of ammonia simply as the smelly but useful household cleaner stashed in a bottle under the kitchen sink.

But then a noxious ammonia cloud wafted from a food-storage warehouse into a La Habra neighborhood, leaving in its wake a new wariness of the chemical’s potential dangers.

Now, with officials still probing the accident and with tons of fruits and vegetables discarded because of possible contamination, some wonder whether more stringent standards are needed to prevent leaks of anhydrous ammonia like the one that drove 1,000 people from their homes.

“Having a big ammonia tank in the middle of downtown USA is nuts,” said Washington-based environmentalist Fred Millar.

But industry officials counter that such accidents are rare, and that ammonia is far safer than the alternative coolant, the ozone-eroding Freon.

This back and forth over ammonia dramatizes the Catch-22 that so often plagues environmental debates: If one chemical burns eyes and lungs and the other thins the ozone layer, how does one choose between them?

Ammonia is “a terrific refrigerant. It’s been used for over 100 years. It’s very efficient,” said Kent Anderson at the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration in Washington, D.C.

But after inhaling anhydrous ammonia, a form far more concentrated than its watered-down household cousin, some are newly uneasy.

“I don’t like living around anything that deals with chemicals,” said Russ Wolven, 37, whose home is three doors downwind of the huge building he always thought was a trucking firm. Not until the stench filled the air last week did he discover his neighbor is a refrigerated warehouse.

“If I smell it again, I won’t need the police to tell me to evacuate. I just will get out of here,” Wolven said.

The 102,000-square-foot warehouse on Cypress Street is owned by Scotland-based Christian Salvesen Inc. Most of it holds frozen foods, while a smaller cooler section contains fruits, vegetables and other food.

The plant, like the vast majority of the estimated 1,500 refrigerated warehouses nationwide, relies on anhydrous ammonia, a chemical widely used in industry and agriculture. The Orange County Fire Authority’s records list 16 businesses, many of them refrigeration plants, that keep 100 or more gallons of anhydrous ammonia on site.

Anhydrous ammonia can irritate the eyes, skin and breathing passages, and concentrated doses in some circumstances can be life-threatening.

But although more than 1,000 gallons of ammonia is kept at the Christian Salvesen warehouse, where the cooler section has operated since 1967, company and fire officials reported no significant problems there until last Monday evening, when an estimated 140 gallons of the chemical leaked from a cooler pipe and formed a cloud.

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Christian Salvesen officials said Friday that the leak apparently occurred when a piece in the mounting that held a gauge to a pipe broke, leaving a one-eighth-inch hole in the mounting through which the ammonia spewed. Contrary to earlier reports from fire officials, the piping was no more than five years old, they said.

The fumes sent eight people to hospitals, some vomiting or suffering breathing problems. Hundreds more spent the night in an emergency shelter and a nearby park.

After the air cleared, workers loaded an estimated 230,000 pounds of food and packaging into six trucks and took it to a county landfill. Oranges and grapefruit were discarded, along with wilted lettuce, tomatoes, margarine and shortening.

Vendors who store goods at the warehouse disposed of the food voluntarily, said Jim Huston at the Orange County Health Agency, which helped oversee the project.

La Habra Mayor Juan M. Garcia said he wants city fire officials to meet with Christian Salvesen representatives to explore how to avoid future accidents. But Garcia said he is not overly concerned about the leak because the plant has a good safety record.

Cyriel Godderie, president of Christian Salvesen’s U.S. subsidiary, said the firm is switching from Freon to ammonia at other warehouses precisely for environmental reasons.

“We are spending big bucks to convert some of these facilities to ammonia, because ammonia is environmentally friendly,” Godderie said. Another advantage is ammonia’s unpleasant signature odor, which quickly signals a leak, industry experts said.

In the early 1990s, the staff at the South Coast Air Quality Management District began planning rules to reduce the risk of both ammonia and chlorine. But the AQMD later backed away from those plans, and officials said this week that public support for more stringent guidelines appeared to be lacking.

Anhydrous ammonia remains one of the 651 toxic substances on the federal government’s so-called “toxics inventory list,” for which industries are required to disclose data about emissions. The U.S. House recently passed legislation to restrict the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s power to enforce such reporting requirements, prompting an angry rebuttal last week from President Clinton.

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Some environmentalists say the La Habra accident illustrates exactly the dangers they have been warning about for years.

“As long as we keep using massive amounts of acutely toxic chemicals, like ammonia, like chlorine . . . these events will happen,” said Greg Karras of Citizens for a Better Environment, a California environmental group based in San Francisco. “They’re the very human atmospheric equivalent of oil spills.” He believes companies should find safer substitutes.

But others say the chemical is safe when it is treated with caution.

“Handling ammonia is like working with elephants. If you turn your back on them, they’ll step on you,” said Mike Chambers, executive director of the Ammonia Safety and Training Institute. He urges users to “face the elephant,” to understand ammonia’s properties, to treat it with care and to follow safety practices.

“As long as you’re looking at it,” Chambers said, “You’re cool. You’re OK.”