The Search for Hidden Peril : Cities, Businesses Face Task of Hazardous-Chemical Survey

“Everybody keeps asking, ‘Can Bhopal happen here?’ Until you know what you have and where it is, who knows?”

Richard Anderson, commander of the hazardous materials section of the Los Angeles Fire Department, posed that question. He and other officials who watch over hazardous materials in the South Bay are going to get some answers.

Once the multiple deadlines of a new state law click into place in the coming months, thousands of businesses throughout the South Bay and the rest of the state will be forced to disgorge a wealth of previously secret information about the hazardous materials they use.

“After this, we will have at least a reasonable assumption as to whether it can happen here,” said Anderson in a reference to the release of methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India, on Dec. 4, 1984, that killed more than 2,000 people and injured an additional 200,000.

Even before the deadlines for compliance, the new law--passed in reaction to the Bhopal disaster and other toxic releases--is yielding significant information.

Carson Survey

A preliminary survey conducted by Carson officials to find out what would be involved in administering the law indicates that 37% of the city’s businesses handle significant quantities of hazardous materials, including petrochemicals, chlorine, methyl chloroform, aromatic isocyanates and polyisocyanates, caustic alkalis, mineral acids and methyl ethyl ketone, to name a few.

Besides death, dangers from the uncontrolled release of these chemicals include fire, damage to the lungs, liver and kidneys, spasms, asphyxiation, delirium and blindness.

The law, authored by Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), was passed Sept. 28, 1985, and amended with minor revisions in July, 1986. It requires businesses to provide local officials with detailed inventory information about hazardous materials and a plan for dealing with emergencies. Local officials must prepare an areawide plan for emergencies and set up a computerized data base to provide instantaneous access to information during an emergency.

The state Office of Emergency Services will monitor local programs. Municipalities may administer the law or let counties do it.

When the inventory information comes in, municipalities may find some unexpected results, judging by the findings of the Carson survey.

Storage Sites

Community Development Director Patricia Nemeth said the surprise was not that a high percentage of Carson companies handle hazardous materials; because half of the city is zoned for industrial and commercial uses, she expected that. The news was where the hazardous materials are located.

“I was surprised every time I saw someone reporting handling (hazardous) materials in a residential area,” Nemeth said. She said she was particularly concerned about a high concentration of hazardous materials in the city’s northwest corner, the site of many warehouses and several residential neighborhoods.

Torrance notified 2,500 companies last week that inventory information on hazardous materials is due in a month. In El Segundo and Manhattan Beach, city officials intend to seek inventories from about 250 firms, including the Chevron refinery, Hughes Aircraft, TRW and other aerospace firms. All three cities decided to administer the law themselves.

Inglewood, Hawthorne and Gardena also decided recently to run their own program and soon will be seeking information from firms in their cities. In the next few weeks, Redondo Beach and Hermosa will be voting on whether to run their own programs.

The city of Los Angeles will face the huge task of digesting inventory forms from 44,000 businesses--many of them in San Pedro and Wilmington and the city strip along the Harbor Freeway. County officials, who will be monitoring the South Bay’s unincorporated areas, Lawndale, Lomita and the municipalities of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, estimate that they will keep tabs on up to 25,000 companies.

The law, the first attempt in California to bring some system to a cross-hatch of government agencies, has long been needed, authorities say.

It comes in the wake of the tragedy in Bhopal, which spurred a nationwide movement toward more planning for industrial disasters.

The federal government has issued guidelines for the disclosure of inventory data for hazardous materials that are similar to California’s inventory disclosure requirements. In addition, the chemical industry has begun its own program, Chemical Awareness/Emergency Response, which encourages companies to beef up training programs for employees, planning for emergencies and coordination with local safety officials.

In Southern California, there is a special need for the new law because chemical plants often lie close to residential areas, and earthquake faults pierce the region, according to a report produced by the Southern California Air Quality Management District in September, 1985.

Inadequate Planning

The report quoted seismological experts who predict a great earthquake here during the next 20 years and then concluded:

“A worst-case, though not unlikely scenario, postulates severe, simultaneous toxic chemical emissions across a broad spectrum of plants. Given such a situation, today’s planning is almost totally inadequate.”

Under the current system, said Capt. Kennith M. Hall, assistant fire marshal for Torrance, with “little or no information, you just go in and fight the fire and then later you find that your personnel was exposed to hazardous material and it may be carcinogenic. . . . Some of the effects may not show up for years.”

But carrying out the new system, Carson officials discovered, is no easy task.

Earlier this year, they scheduled a series of meetings with representatives of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Health Services, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the county Health Department and the county Fire Department.

Each time they sat down with their counterparts, Carson officials posed the same questions: “How many businesses do you regulate in Carson? Can you provide us with a list?”

The answers were dispiriting.

“Not one agency could provide the city with the list of businesses they regulate in Carson,” Nemeth wrote in a report to the City Council. “In all cases, the file data is still kept manually.” (She noted, however, that five of the six agencies have promised to prepare lists for the city.)

Ever since the law was passed, coordination has also been a pre-occupation of the regional organization of fire chiefs. They have been wrestling with different computer systems in use, trying to make sure all that the computer software will be compatible. The fear is that an emergency might develop in which assisting fire and rescue agencies would be unable to gain immediate access to information in each other’s computers.

Several cities, persuaded by arguments that a city administration would be more responsive than a distant and larger county bureaucracy, have decided to administer the law locally.

“In this way, the city will retain the option of administering this program or remanding it to the county at a later date,” Gardena Fire Chief Andy Bero wrote in his Aug. 4 report to the City Council.

In El Segundo, a spokesman for the giant Chevron refinery told the council that his firm preferred to have the city, rather than the county, in charge.

But Carson’s preliminary work indicates that it will not be easy for cities to run their own operations.

In Nemeth’s report, she concluded that the city would have to hire a new staff and probably buy new computer equipment to manage an enormous data base.

Data Management

“The legislative mandate is overwhelming in terms of data management alone,” she said.

To meet what she termed “unrealistic” deadlines, Nemeth said it would be necessary for a city department head to work almost full time on carrying out the law.

In addition, she said, “the city would be hard-pressed to create new positions, write job specifications, recruit and hire a specialized team of inspectors for this program within the next six to nine months.”

Her recommendation, which was approved by the council, was for Carson to let the Los Angeles County Fire Department run the program in its first years under a contract that will enable the city to regain control once the data system is running smoothly. The contract now is being drafted.

To handle the new program, the department is hiring 22 people at a cost of nearly $1 million, according to Assistant Fire Chief Paul Blackburn. “It is going to be a major undertaking for anybody,” Blackburn said.

The law gave cities and counties the right to raise business license fees to pay for the program. The city of Los Angeles will impose a $75 surcharge on businesses handling hazardous materials during the first year of the law’s operation. In succeeding years, the flat fee will be replaced by graduated system of fees established after analysis of the inventory.

Deadlines in the legislation call for for businesses to submit their inventory data and plans for handling hazardous materials by Dec. 28. Also at that time, cities and the county must submit their draft plans for emergencies involving hazardous substances. Final plans are due June 30, 1987. The computerized data base must be functioning by Jan. 1, 1988.

Local officials have criticized the deadlines.

“We don’t think it is possible to do all these things within the deadline,” said El Segundo City Manager Arthur Jones. Blackburn said the county wants the deadlines extended a year or more.

Last week, the state Senate removed language from a bill that would have extended the deadlines by several months.

Many cities and counties will find it relatively easy to meet the deadlines for producing draft versions of the hazardous material safety plans, a senior official with the state Office of Emergency Services said.

“I believe they could put a new cover on their existing emergency plans,” said the official, who did not want to be identified. Later, after companies produce their plans, they could be updated, he said. He said many chemical companies would find the process facilitated by the planning initiated under industry’s own program.

“In many instances, they will be able to submit these plans as the business plans (required by the state law). There is a tremendous amount of planning out there that has taken place already,” the official said.

Carson’s Nemeth and Torrance’s Hall said they are not worried about the larger firms, which have sophisticated experience with contingency planning. However, they said they that believe some of the medium- and smaller-sized firms will have trouble coming up with inventory data and emergency plans.

Nemeth recalled a conversation with a licensed hazardous materials hauler, whose cargoes were paint byproducts.

“The president of the company called me and said, ‘I am not hauling anything hazardous.’ I said, ‘What do you haul?’ He said, ‘Paint and paint thinner.’ Those are all flammable. They are hazardous. There is an education process required here before compliance is going to be good.”

Hall added that he would like to schedule workshops to explain to businesses what the law requires and what exemptions might apply.

A number of consulting firms have contacted city, county and state officials to see if the new law will generate a market among businesses who find it difficult to produce a plan for handling hazardous materials.

The county’s Blackburn said he discourages the consultants.

“I want the business plan developed in-house,” he said. “I don’t want an environmental impact report that no one reads. I hate to see someone with a small business call in a consultant (to do a report) that is never read by his employees. . . . The intent of the law is to develop procedures that are to be used, not just something that is written down and forgotten.”

Aiding compliance is the possibility of fines of up to $2,000 a day against businesses for violations of reporting requirements.

Nemeth said she was pleased that 45% of the companies responded to the city’s preliminary survey. Those who did not respond will get reminders.

One company that sent in the information is Industrial Polychemical Service, which stores flammable polyvinyl chloride glue in underground tanks in the 17100 block of South Main Street in northwest Carson.

Edwin Gutierrez, plant manager, referred to the law’s provisions and said, “Some of this is very necessary, especially for the chemical industry.” He said the company safety director has already begun working on the plans that the law requires and now has five pages of suggestions for a draft plan, including “a plan for evacuation to take care of our people as well as the surroundings.”

“It is tough to deal with all those laws but that is what you have to do to stay in business and be responsible. Some people really don’t care much about (safety) and that’s how we get in trouble. That is how we get our bad name.”