Workers at South Gate Site Echo Health Fears

By JIM NEWTON and TIM RUTTEN

Oct. 23, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

All things being equal, it’s not where you’d want to send a child to school.

The Los Angeles Unified School District plans to build two schools--one for elementary students, the other for high schoolers--on a roughly square, 40-acre tract in South Gate bordered on one side by the Los Angeles River and zoned for the region’s heaviest, most polluting industries. Around the neighborhood, many students, desperate over the crowding in their schools, are pushing for the project to be completed.

But those who know the South Gate site best--the men who have long worked here--have plenty of doubts about that idea.

“This area is fine for us, for the foundries and the warehouses,” said one business owner who, like several interviewed for this story, asked that his name not be used.

“But who ever thought of using this for a school? It’s been industrial for at least 40 years. You want to send your kid to a factory site to go to school?”

Mike Wood remembers that a heavy-equipment operator near his tow-truck business used to service bulldozers, backhoes and the like. To change the oil, Wood says, the owner would simply dig a hole, drain the 15 gallons or so of dirty oil out of the vehicle and then cover up the mess with dirt.

A map of the area indicates that the property where that once occurred would be roughly at the edge of the kindergarten playground.

Even in early morning’s forgiving light, the South Gate site inescapably brings to mind the adjectives “gritty” and “industrial.” It’s dusty and sour, the air tinged with the smell of solvents.

There’s an aluminum foundry near an abandoned truck yard, just a block or so away from a chemical plant that for years made DDT. There’s lead on more than one parcel, as well as DDT and petroleum residues. One old factory, a chrome plating operation, tainted the earth around it and, when analysts drilled a test well on the site, they pulled up a dark orange liquid laced with arsenic and chromium, among other things.

School officials have argued that they can make the area safe. But members of the school board were so unnerved when they were briefed on South Gate’s problems this month that the revelations led to their decision to interpose a new chief executive, Howard Miller, between Supt. Ruben Zacarias and the school district’s bureaucracy.

The board, according to a knowledgeable source, became concerned last week that Zacarias’ lack of rigorous oversight was allowing the school district to slide toward a repetition of the fiasco at the environmentally tainted Belmont Learning Complex site.

The district has eyed the South Gate property for more than a decade, tipped to its potential availability by the South Gate City Council after the city briefly weighed trying to redevelop the area itself.

After years of considering the idea, the district finally plunged ahead about two years ago when it began acquiring the land.

But according to the district’s own studies, the school system is picking up some deeply troubled property. District officials say some of the parcels would cost little to make safe--a few thousand dollars here and there--but others appear to be far more expensive and risky.

One parcel alone, the former chrome plating operation on Chakemco Street, would require an estimated $3 million to investigate and cleanse. Another, the site of a former pesticide and chemical company, is riven with lead, hydrocarbons and DDT.

“Remediation of the petroleum, pesticide and lead-impacted soil . . . is likely to be necessary,” an environmental consultant retained by the district concluded.

The environmental analysis estimates that it would cost $280,000 to $340,000 to cart off 410 cubic yards of tainted dirt from that property.

That’s hardly a surprise to those who work in the area. After all, several said, Chakemco Street got its name from the chemical plant that was there for decades, back when people didn’t pay much attention to what they did with waste.

Wood, the tow-truck company owner, was in business at the South Gate site for 10 years, and remembers a number of instances in which the land there took a beating. Furniture makers used solvents and paints haphazardly, and paint companies were always awash in fumes, Wood said.

“Send my kids to school there?” he asked incredulously. “Over my dying ass.”

Some of those who work in the area say it is so unfit for a school that it seems better suited to serve as an example, the kind of place a parent might take a child and warn him: “This is where you’ll find yourself if you don’t do your homework.”

That was the sentiment of the foreman of a nearby plating company who sipped his coffee at a catering truck Wednesday.

“Maybe they should just go ahead and build that school here, so those kids will see where they can end up if they don’t get serious,” said Victor, who declined to give his last name.

According to Victor, who said he has worked in the area for nearly a decade, “this is a pretty bad place. When it’s hot you can hardly breathe from the [stuff] in the air. A lot of guys are sick all the time, coughing and stuff. I don’t know if it’s because of the air or the crap they work with in these plants, or maybe it’s because all the guys down here smoke. Anyway, I don’t know for sure about that stuff, but I know one thing: I wouldn’t want my grandkid anywhere around this place.”

The school district’s handling of the South Gate site not only has jeopardized the prospects for yet another school--in this case, two schools--but also has enraged the owners and renters of the industries those schools would replace. Many were told almost 15 years ago that they should get ready to move. Ever since, they say, they have been delayed and avoided, promised payments that have never come, offered relocation assistance that has failed to materialize.

One owner’s property was condemned last summer and he was given three months to move. He found another building and bought it, but has yet to get his relocation money from the school district. The result: He’s stuck paying a mortgage on a new building that he cannot afford to move into. And so he, like so many people, is hopping mad at L.A. Unified.

“These people either are incompetent or up to no good,” he fumed in an interview this week.

Another businessman in the area, whose company leases a number of buildings, said the district has destabilized his firm for years, suggesting that it was about to acquire the property, then dropping out of sight for months at a time.

“It’s no way to do business,” that businessman sighed. “At least, it’s no way to do good business.”

After so many years of back-and-forth between the district and the businesses at the site, it’s hardly a surprise that feelings today are raw. Several of the business owners have hired an attorney and are battling the district for relocation money and other expenses.

At the same time, a source close to the school board’s majority faction said the “behavior of some of the [South Gate] property owners who are still holding out suggests a very high degree of knowledge about the district’s strategy and internal processes.”

“Maybe there’s a leak,” the source suggested, “or maybe it’s just that their lawyers are a lot smarter than the people doing this deal for the district. That isn’t hard to imagine.”

In any event, a knowledgeable source said, the elements of “negligence, bad judgment and stuff that is just plain mysterious down at South Gate” are so intricately intertwined “that the truth is, even with subpoenas and rubber hoses, we probably wouldn’t be able to sort out exactly what happened down there.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Cleanup Cost Examples

The South Gate site proposed for a high school and elementary school consists of 38 parcels. Some are relatively clean, bur others have histories of environmental problems.

* 5223 Chakemoc St.

Previous tenant: Chrome plating operation.

Found in soil and water: Arsenic, chromium, petroleum, hydrocarbons

Estimated cleanup cost: $2.2 million to $3.1 million

* 5230 Chakemoc St.

Previous tenant: Car repair shop, gas station

Found in soil: Petroleum, hydrocarbon

Estimated cleanup cost: #4,800 to $5,300

* 5245 Chakemoc St.

Previous tenant: Pesticide company, paint formulator

Found in soil: Chlordane, DOE, DDT, lead--all in concentrations that exceed probable applicable state and federal standards

Estimated cleanup cost: $280,000 to $340,000