Opinion: Standard Hotel, substandard precautions?
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The kind of illegal midnight dumping of noisome toxic chemicals that would, a dozen years ago, have been the sole purview of the city and county’s environmental crimes investigators now has the full attention of the feds.
The FBI, always on the outlook for terrorist acts, took a sudden and serious interest in what turned out to be pool chemicals after a noxious gas started making subway commuters sick early on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in the big Metro station at 7th and Figueroa.
Turns out it wasn’t the terrorist attack that the feds immediately suspected, not in the conventional sense, anyway. But any time chemicals like chlorine get dumped, it is indeed an attack -– on us, on our water quality, on the entire environment. Chlorine gas was used to kill people as long ago as World War I.
Where were these icky chemicals coming from? According to the federal complaint, the source was ...
... the Standard Hotel downtown, just a few blocks from the afflicted Metro station. Hotel workers had allegedly dumped about 100 gallons of pool-cleaning chemicals into the rooftop drain, and gravity being what it is, it all flowed down below the street and into the city drains.
The Standard is one of those see-and-be-seen places, with rooftop pools at both its Hollywood and downtown hotels, and a young, glam, ‘tini-drinking crowd that collects at the water’s edge -– and sometimes in it. So chic. So fab. So … chlorinated.
The assistant U.S. attorney told my colleague Scott Glover that the law ‘does not discriminate between hazardous wastes generated by chic hotels or foul junkyards,’ and court records show that the hotel’s chief engineer allegedly told the feds that he knew the best way to get rid of the chemicals would have been to hire a disposal company -– duh -– but decided ‘we could deal with it this way.’
The company that owns the hotel was charged with knowingly disposing of hazardous waste, which can carry a half-million-dollar wallop in fines. For once, it looks like the case won’t stop at the working stiffs who were carrying out orders, but will go all the way to the top. Just like the pool.
My vote for creative sentencing is to make the hotel owners personally clean up the nest they fouled, and I mean with masks and cleaning brushes, the whole deal. And then make the hotels convert their swanky pools to clean, eco-pools. Or turn them into rooftop gardens, and give every hotel guest a bus ticket to the beach.