Coin Vacuum Spews Oily Suspected Toxin

When Kathy Quarles pulled into Marv’s Car Wash in Canoga Park Tuesday evening, she expected to drive away with a clean, vacuumed car.

Instead, county health officials said, as Quarles’ 10-year-old daughter began to vacuum the car, the hose of the coin-operated machine spewed an oily liquid that apparently contained an as-yet-unidentified pesticide onto the car floor.

According to Richard Gillaspy, senior environmental health officer who was dispatched to the scene by the county health department, Quarles may have been a victim of the “most peculiar example” he has seen of illegal disposal of toxic waste.

Gillaspy said someone apparently had used the vacuum cleaner to dispose of leftover chemicals, perhaps from a commercial pesticide-spraying truck.

Neither Quarles nor her daughter, Christina, was injured.

Gillaspy said that, when he opened the vacuum cleaner, it disgorged seven or eight gallons of a mixture of petroleum distillates and pesticide. The suspected pesticide is being sent to a laboratory for analysis, he said, but because of a backlog, results may not be known for two or three weeks.

1st Case of Its Kind

“I’ve been at this for a long time, but this is the first time we’ve seen this,” he said.

The incident, which happened about 6:30 p.m., “scared me to death,” Quarles said. “My daughter put the hose into the car, then she screamed out, ‘There’s something falling out of the hose!’ ”

About a half gallon of the liquid soaked into the carpet, she said. “It was slimy, sudsy. . . . It smelled like kerosene or gasoline.”

Quarles reported the incident to the Fire Department when she got home later that evening, and fire officials called the hazardous-materials unit of the county Department of Health Services, which is on call 24 hours a day.

Gillaspy said the petroleum mixture “looks like something from a professional pesticide company.”

Volume Significant

If it had been from a small container, “it would have been a lot easier and less conspicuous for the individual to just leave the container somewhere,” he said. “For him to drive up, put money in the machine and then suck out the contents doesn’t make sense.”

He said the department is seeking witnesses to the waste disposal, which probably occurred about 6 p.m.

Eric Mathis, who is managing the car wash while the owner, Marv Kessler, is on vacation, said the vacuum cleaner is in the back of the complex and that no one reported seeing anything suspicious on Tuesday.