Pollution Patrol : ‘Toxic Cops’: Sewers Are Their Beat

It is 2 a.m. on a dark, misty Wilmington street as a lumbering yellow van pulls to the side of the road. Three shadowy figures, wearing gloves and toting a floodlight, emerge and quickly move across the damp pavement to a sewer manhole--one of nearly 100,000 in the city of Los Angeles.

Removing the iron cover, they haul up electronic equipment on wire cables. One device is a small black box with glowing digital letters; it is a meter to measure acid. Another is a barrel-shaped water sampler; every few minutes for the last 24 hours, it has drawn up a small dose of sewage.

Working quickly, the men collect the water samples, record meter readings and reset the equipment before moving on.

The three men are Los Angeles industrial-waste inspectors, or “toxic cops,” as they are sometimes called by city officials.

Illegal Dumpers

And this was another routine stop--one of about 10 they would make this night--in an escalating effort to catch industries that illegally dump toxic chemicals into the city’s great maze of sewer lines. The aim is to reduce toxic chemicals that flow through the city’s two major treatment plants, Hyperion and Terminal Island, on their way into the Pacific Ocean.

Under cover of darkness, often at the behest of anonymous tipsters, the men operate like spies in the city’s heavy industrial zones--Wilmington, East Los Angeles, downtown, portions of the San Fernando Valley.

“We do sweeps,” said Norm Cotter, the city’s chief industrial-waste inspector. “We’ll set up (sampling equipment) downstream. . . and we’ll set up upstream,” Cotter said. The difference in levels of pollutants recorded at the two points is enough to help pin down the source of illegal dumping.

Little-Known but Vital

Cotter and his crew are a little-known but vital part of the city’s attempts to crack down on industrial-waste pollution.

A 1977 federal law requires all large ocean dischargers of sewage to develop programs to combat illegal industrial dumping. So far, about 1,000 of the nation’s 1,450 major sewage treatment agencies, including those in the Los Angeles area, have met that requirement.

But few conduct regular nighttime surveillance to gather potential evidence for use in criminal cases against toxic-waste violators.

The three-man night crew is a part of a Los Angeles program that is made up of about 50 daytime inspectors and engineers who make unannounced visits to inspect the sewage-treatment systems of major industrial plants.

At any given moment, the crew’s surveillance equipment may be hidden at five to 15 strategic points in the city’s 6,000-mile sewer system, according to Larry Muto, a 30-year-old environmental biologist who heads the night crew.

Those points are checked nightly, sometimes for several weeks if Muto and his crew, Ben Silva, 30, and Mike Mercado, 24, suspect illegal dumping.

On a typical night, they may collect 250 to 300 water samples to be delivered to a city-operated chemical laboratory near Dodger Stadium, where tests are run for common industrial compounds such as cyanide, chrome, lead, acid, paint, zinc or a variety of other toxic agents and heavy metals.

In some cases, the results have led city officials to hold investigative hearings and to disconnect the sewer lines of repeated dumpers. Such evidence also has been used to support criminal charges filed by the Los Angeles Toxic Waste Strike Force, a group of regulatory agencies coordinated by the district attorney’s office.

Widespread publicity over the strike-force crackdowns has helped deter other would-be violators from dumping toxic chemicals, inspectors believe.

Pushing for Compliance

“We’re not here to shut everybody down,” Muto said. “We just want them in compliance with the law. And with a lot of public outcry . . . attitudes are beginning to change a little bit.”

Los Angeles officials say the efforts of inspectors like Muto have led to measurable declines in pollution from Hyperion--even as sewage volumes have grown. In 1980, Hyperion was discharging heavy metals at the rate of 3,900 pounds per day, city records show; by 1984, the total had dropped to 2,800 pounds per day.

And yet, concern over toxic-waste control escalated anew in April, when health officials began warning consumers that some sport fish caught in Santa Monica Bay contained potentially dangerous levels of DDT and PCBs, two highly toxic chemicals known to be present in ocean-bound sewage.

Adequacy Questioned

Critics such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth say the $1.5-million-a-year program falls short of the manpower and money necessary to oversee Los Angeles’ 7,500 businesses and industries.

“They don’t have enough investigators, they don’t have enough capital . . . or enough equipment in place to do an adequate job,” said Larry Lacombe, the Sierra Club’s water resources chairman for Southern California.

“There’s a limit to how many cases we can (handle),” conceded Mal Toy, a senior city sanitation engineer who oversees the industrial-waste enforcement program. “We try to have four or five (criminal) cases active . . . at any one time.”

The sanitation department has asked for 10 additional inspectors to be funded under the 1986-87 budget.

Daytime Inspections

Currently, the city’s daytime inspectors visit about 300 electroplaters, metal finishers, jewelry makers and circuit-board manufacturers each month to ensure that such firms are properly disposing of cyanide, zinc, cadmium, chromium and other compounds, Toy said.

Other kinds of licensed sewage dischargers--from coin laundries and car washes to restaurants and aerospace companies--are inspected without warning anywhere from once to five times a year, Toy said.

Unlike the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, however, the city no longer tries to work with industries to help them meet sewage-discharging laws, said Maureen Kindel, president of the city’s Board of Public Works. Kindel said the adoption of a new city dumping ordinance 2 1/2 years ago came at about the same time Barry Groveman, then an assistant city attorney, was establishing the Toxic Waste Strike Force.

New Philosophy Tried

Together, the ordinance and the strike force helped usher in a new enforcement philosophy, Kindel said.

“We changed the way the industrial-waste inspectors did their jobs,” she said. “We told them, ‘You are, in effect, a toxic cop.’ ”

“The city . . . (is) combating the problem as traditional crime, rather than treating it as a business problem,” said Groveman, who still heads the strike force, part of the district attorney’s office.

Since 1983, about 50 criminal cases have been filed by the strike force, all ending in convictions or still pending before the courts, Groveman said. The nighttime inspectors have played a part in many of those, including one last year against the Arrowhead Drinking Water Co. that resulted in the largest penalty in state history for a violation of hazardous waste laws.

Fined $600,000

Arrowhead pleaded no contest to illegal dumping charges and was fined $600,000 after city inspectors found paint in one sewer manhole and recorded a discharge of nearly pure acid in another sewer line near the plant.

Secret monitoring by the inspectors also led in 1983 to a $100,000 fine paid by Culligan Deionized Water Service Inc. for pouring tons of untreated toxic wastes into city sewers. Its president also was sentenced to three months in jail.

Inspectors had spent several months monitoring the plant near downtown Los Angeles, staking out four different manholes with six water samplers and pH meters.

And in at least nine other cases, the city moved quickly to revoke the sewage-discharge permits and order sewer lines sealed with cement, forcing several firms out of business.

Now ‘We Have Teeth’

“A few years ago, we’d issue a citation and the guy would laugh and throw it in the nearest trash can,” Cotter remembered. Now, under the new program, he said, “We have teeth.”

Toy said inspectors serve about 30 citations a month to firms that fail to install or maintain sewage-treatment equipment. Industries that fail to correct problems outlined in those citations can face misdemeanor charges carrying $1,000 fines, he said.

Inspectors acknowledge that some of the worst offenders may be the most difficult to find.

“Some companies may hold all their wastes for a month and dump it at one time,” Muto said. “If it’s a one-time dump, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

On Trail of Cyanide

On a recent night, Muto and his crew were looking for cyanide known to be flowing into the Terminal Island plant, where the deadly chemical was killing some of the microorganisms necessary for sewage treatment. Several weeks of monitoring so far had brought no clues to the source of the pollution.

“The ones that are out there deliberately trying to deceive us are going to have a game plan,” Muto said. “The guy who’s blatantly going to do it is going to find a way.”

Additional problems complicate the effort. Under the city ordinance, for example, certain chemicals--such as gasoline, mercury, paint, pesticides and solvents--are not allowed to be dumped into sewer lines at all; but other chemicals--such as arsenic, cyanide, acid, lead, oil, cadmium and chromium--are allowed, as long as their concentrations in waste water do not exceed established limits.

Water Added Illegally

Although it is illegal to add water to the sewage to meet concentration limits, environmentalists charge that the law is easily broken. “You can leave the hose running” and beat the regulations, said Greg Karras of the Citizens for a Better Environment.

Inspectors conceded that “solution by dilution” is nearly impossible to detect.

Another shortcoming of the program is that it tests for fewer than two dozen chemicals--a tiny percentage of the more than 60,000 compounds now in common use.

“They have no way of knowing whether a substantial amount of an unknown or previously unrecognized hazardous substance is being discharged through their system,” said Dr. Rimmon C. Fay, a private marine biologist and a longtime critic of the city’s sewage discharge practices. “They are completely vulnerable.”

Many Chemicals Ignored

Toy conceded that much of the city’s attention has been focused on cyanide, acid and several of the heavy metals used by the electroplating, metal-finishing and jewelry-making industries. And he acknowledged that many other kinds of chemicals, originating from other industries, have yet to become targets of city enforcement.

Standing in a light rain outside a pumping plant near Terminal Island as a torrent of sewage poured past an open manhole, Muto loaded a case of sample bottles into the rear of the city van and prepared to make the long drive to the San Fernando Valley, where other monitors were waiting.

A few hours before dawn, the search for illegal dumpers was still not done.

“Everybody knows there are people out there trying to beat the system,” said Muto, a 3 1/2-year veteran of the night crew.

“We don’t know how many are doing it, we don’t know where they are,” he said. “But we’re doing the best we can.”