Fumes Force Evacuation Near Site of Plant Blaze

Acid and poisonous chemicals that spilled and cooked together in a fire Saturday at a Sun Valley company began generating “puffs of a white-colored gas” in the ruined building Monday, prompting Los Angeles city and county officials to evacuate dozens of people from a largely industrial two-block area. The federal Environmental Protection Agency assumed control of the cleanup.

A security guard who discovered the escaping vapors was treated by paramedics when he complained of dizziness. He was hospitalized in stable condition.

Fumes from the fire at Research Organic and Inorganic Chemicals Co. on De Garmo Avenue injured 56 people, including 52 firefighters who were treated and released from hospitals.

A police officer and a news photographer, who inhaled smoke from the burning substances Saturday, were still hospitalized Monday for treatment of chemical pneumonia.

County health inspectors asked that the area be evacuated when they showed up for an inspection Monday and the security guard pointed out gases escaping from a mass of charred material in the gutted building, said Anastasio Medina, chief of the Los Angeles County Health Department Hazardous Materials Unit.

A ‘Visible Cloud’

“There was a visible cloud, puffs of a white-colored gas” coming from “a pile of burned chemicals” of unknown composition, Medina said.

Officials were particularly worried about the presence of several “extremely toxic” chemicals in the building, Medina said. Concerned that “very unstable chemical reactions might be taking place,” Medina asked the Fire Department to order all buildings within 100 yards evacuated. The evacuation order was expected to be lifted today.

Chris Weden, an EPA site coordinator, arrived from the agency’s San Francisco regional headquarters late Monday afternoon, armed with authorization to spend up to $100,000 from the federal Superfund for environmental cleanups.

County Hazardous Materials Unit workers and specialists from the IT Corp., a hazardous-waste management firm, discovered that the vapors that set off the evacuation were caused by a combination of hydrofluoric acid with other chemicals, Weden said.

The specialists--equipped with breathing masks and oxygen tanks and protected by sealed, rubberized suits against chemicals that can enter the body through the skin--neutralized the acid with soda ash, he said, and the chemicals in the building were “all in a stable condition, for the most part.”