Kaiser Bulk Loader Blamed : Sooty Pall Over Marina Angers Boaters

For the past 25 years, Craig Tolby has spent weekends on the 24-foot sloop he keeps at the Holiday Harbor marina, one of several privately operated wharves in the Port of Los Angeles.

Tolby usually sleeps overnight on the boat, the Tolby II, takes it for a sail the next day, and then drives 40 miles back home to Arcadia in the San Gabriel Valley.

“The people in this anchorage have changed many times, but when good ones have left, good ones have come,” said Tolby, the brim of his floppy white hat resting on the top of his oversized sunglasses as he stood by his boat one day last week. “This marina has been very good to me.”

Yet sailing from one of the busiest harbors in the country has its hazards. There are tankers to contend with, cruise liners, touring boats, barges, tugs, Coast Guard vessels, thousands of other small craft--and worst of all, Tolby says, black gunk.

“It is just a mess,” he said, spraying his boat with a hose. “It is like soot. It goes along the decks, and if you tramp on it, you track it all over and you never get it off.”

Tolby said pollution--both in the water and the air--has been a fact of life ever since he began renting a slip in the bustling industrial port. But the black oily residue is relatively new, he said. It seems to settle on boats after moisture mixes with sooty dust in the air, Tolby said, and he and scores of other boat owners in the area are convinced--although they are still trying to gather proof--that it comes from the nearby bulk-loading facility operated by Kaiser International Corp.

“I would like it closed down and moved out,” Tolby said, his voice partly drowned out by the whistle of a train hauling a load of coal into the facility. “Here they are coming to dump dust on my boat again.”

As president of Kaiser International, Richard E. Holdaway has made the export business a way of life. The company, formerly a subsidiary of Kaiser Steel and now owned by three different companies, exports more than $150 million worth of materials from the Harbor Department-owned bulk loader, which is sandwiched on 26 acres between the harbor’s east and west channels.

Kaiser International exports about 1 million tons of coal, 600,000 tons of petroleum coke, 300,000 tons of steel scrap and 200,000 tons of copper concentrate each year from the bulk loader, which the Harbor Department built in 1965 to export iron ore and coal, primarily from Kaiser Steel mines in California. Kaiser International has operated the bulk loader for the past two years.

Holdaway estimates that the operation pumps about $75 million a year into the Southern California economy, and under a lease agreement with the Harbor Department, the company will pay close to $2 million this year to the port in tariff charges, a port spokesman said.

“The mandate to the city of Los Angeles to operate Los Angeles Harbor is to promote commerce,” Holdaway said. “There is no reason why recreation and industry can’t live harmoniously, but recreation has to be a secondary use. Exporting generates a tremendous amount of income into this area, and people at some time have to support exports from this country. It is critical that we have them.”

Since taking over the bulk loader in 1984, Kaiser International has undertaken a “good-neighbor policy” designed to improve relations between the company and nearby boaters and residents--even though Holdaway is convinced that Kaiser International is not responsible for the black gunk.

The company has installed a 700-foot-long chain-link fence with redwood slats along Miner Street, which separates the facility from the neighboring Watchorn Basin marinas, including Holiday Harbor. It has planted shrubs and trees to screen the operation from the marinas, which together have more than 800 slips. It has installed sprinkler systems to keep piles of material wet to cut down on dust, and it has begun sweeping Miner Street, where trucks hauling petroleum coke and steel scrap stir up dust that some boaters complain ends up on their decks.

“We have done everything we could within reason to be good neighbors,” Holdaway said. “But boats in Los Angeles Harbor are going to get dirty. The harbor area has a fairly high amount of particulate matter in the air.”

The battle between boat owners and operators of the Harbor Department’s bulk loader is not a new one, port officials say, but with the recent opening of the city’s 1,100-slip Cabrillo marina in the West Channel, the antagonism between industrial and recreational interests in the harbor has flared up, they said.

While most complaints about the black gunk do not come from boaters at the Cabrillo marina, those who do complain--primarily tenants at the 200-slip Holiday Harbor marina just a few yards from the bulk loader--point to the new marina as evidence that recreational uses should take priority over industrial ones in the West Channel.

“The Harbor Department shot themselves in the foot when they decided to build that marina,” said Norm Burgher, who with his wife, Camilla, lives on a boat in Holiday Harbor and sells yachts there. “Why did the city build a big marina over there if this area is supposed to be for industrial use?”

“What the new marina has done is open up space so that people can move from here to get farther away from the slime,” said Brian Asher, a Holiday Harbor tenant who lives on his boat, which he has covered with Army-green canvas to protect it from the residue. “I repair boats for a living, and a good portion of my work now is repairing the damage caused when people use abrasive cleaners to scrub off the grime.”

Cal Hurst, an environmental scientist for the Harbor Department, said the tug-of-war between the boat owners on one side and industry on the other is an outgrowth of the growing popularity of the harbor. Businesses want to expand their port operations so they can compete better in thriving Pacific Rim markets, while residents, looking to improve the quality of life in the area, demand greater access to the waterfront for recreational uses.

“While our natural resources here are finite, the demands on them are rapidly increasing,” Hurst said. “We didn’t build a marina because some planner went off to a corner and dreamed up a cute idea of his own. We were trying to respond to the demand that was being very forcefully articulated by the community.”

Sid Robinson, the port’s director of planning and research, said the development of recreational facilities in the harbor is “an evolutionary process” that must be accomplished in phases. Long-term plans call for moving the bulk loader to a landfill next to Terminal Island, but channels near the landfill currently are too shallow to handle the large ships that regularly haul cargo from the facility, and there is no rail service there, he said.

“The bulk loader was put in in the ‘60s, and the recreational areas have just now been developed or upgraded,” he said. “Something that fit 30 or 50 years ago may not fit in the future, but it is an evolutionary process and by necessity there will be transition phases.”

Port plans call for expanding the city-operated marina and recreation complex to Watchorn Basin on the east side of the channel, possibly including the Holiday Harbor site. Eventually, the site of the bulk loader, which at one time was a marina, could revert to recreational use, Robinson said.

But Harbor Department plans for relocating the bulk loader--and expanding the city-operated recreational complex to Watchorn Basin--have no deadlines. Kaiser International has a lease for the bulk loader through 1993, and many boat owners say they are not willing to wait that long for the Harbor Department to clean things up.

Last summer, with complaints about the black gunk streaming into her office, Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the harbor area, established a task force to study the pollution problem. The group, composed of representatives of Kaiser International, the Harbor Department, local residents and boat owners, has met monthly.

Some task force members have complained that most of the meetings have produced little more than disagreement among members, but last month the group agreed to ask the city to hire a consultant to evaluate the black gunk to determine its composition and origin and to make suggestions about how to eliminate it.

“There is no doubt that most of the residents and boat owners think it is coming from Kaiser, but we really don’t know that,” said Lewis H. Chaney, a Flores aide who heads the task force. “We have an ambiguous statement from the AQMD (the South Coast Air Quality Management District) saying that maybe Kaiser contributes to the problem, but that they aren’t the sole one. We have this beautiful new marina down there, and we have several million dollars worth of boats that are getting this black stuff on them. We need to find out where it comes from.”

The task force drafted a request for proposals, the first step in the city’s bureaucratic process in hiring a consultant, and forwarded it to Flores, who must now find some way to pay for it.

The request carefully avoids offending members of the task force by mentioning the “undesirable fallout and suspended particulates” that settle on boats as well as the port’s cargo operations “that are vital to the local and regional economy.” The request never mentions Kaiser International by name.

Michael Martin, an environmental scientist for the Harbor Department who serves on the task force, said the department sees the consultant as a way to educate the group about the black gunk.

“If you are standing on a boat that has black residue on it and you see a big black pile not far away, it is easy to assume that it is coming from the big black pile,” Martin said. “But it is much more difficult to substantiate that. There are a lot of other products in the harbor, and a lot of other things that cause dust and dirt.”

Martin said the Harbor Department has never made a complete environmental assessment of the bulk-loading facility since Kaiser International took it over, but he said assessments conducted before then--when, he said, the facility sometimes handled even larger quantities of material while operated by American Bulk Loading Enterprises--fell within state requirements for “fugitive dust.”

Boat owners, though, insist that the problem has never been so bad.

“It has always been bad, but it is worse now,” said Bill A. Gribble, manager of Holiday Harbor. Gribble estimates that over the past several years he has lost 10% to 15% of his tenants because of the black gunk.

“I have lost tenants who have been here as long as 20 years,” he said. “A lot of people love it here, but they just can’t stand the filth.”

Ron Ketcham, a spokesman for the air quality control district, which enforces state and federal air quality standards throughout the Los Angeles area, said that Kaiser International has been cited occasionally for creating too much dust, but he said that monitoring at the facility has not substantiated complaints that the company is responsible for the persistent black residue.

“There is just not the evidence that coke from Kaiser is causing the nuisance,” Ketcham said. “We have done lab analyses of the fallout, and unfortunately a lot of the evidence is inconclusive.”

Kaiser International was cited last year for six violations of air quality standards and was fined $3,000, Ketcham said. So far this year, the district has received 40 complaints about the facility and has cited the company five times, he said.

Two of the citations, issued last week, declare the facility a public nuisance because of dust created when coal was being dumped into a storage shed, he said. The agency considers violations a public nuisance when visible emissions are determined to have had a direct effect on neighboring residents, or in this case, boat owners, he said.

Those citations alone, however, do not build much of a case against Kaiser International, he said, because the last public nuisance citations issued against the company were in February, 1985.

“There has to be a history of an ongoing problem before the company is brought before the board for an abatement order,” which would force the company to eliminate the nuisance, he said. “Twenty-one months apart would not indicate an ongoing problem.”

Indeed, the evidence collected thus far has been so weak that the district is expected to grant Kaiser a temporary permit by the end of this month to increase the amount of petroleum coke the company can store at the site, Ketcham said. The permit would allow Kaiser to increase its coke piles from 30,000 to 80,000 metric tons, Ketcham said.

Holdaway, president of Kaiser International, said the company needs permission to store more coke because many of the large ships that haul the material to Japan and other Pacific Rim countries can carry more than 100,000 metric tons of it. For economic reasons, he said, the company needs to have the coke on hand and ready to load when the vessels anchor in the harbor.

He said coke--a black, solid residue left over from the oil-refining process--is a popular industrial fuel in the Orient, although burning it is forbidden in this country by air-pollution laws.

The temporary permit would be valid for six months, Ketcham said. During that period, Kaiser International would be required to install air-quality monitoring devices that measure the amount of particulate matter entering the air from the facility, he said. In June, the air quality district would review data from the devices and hold a public hearing before the agency would issue a permanent permit for the increased coke storage, he said.

“That would be an important period for the company to show that the emissions are not affecting the marinas,” Ketcham said. “It would be up to the company to prove that they are not a public nuisance.”

Holdaway said his company welcomes additional studies and tests because he is convinced that they will show that the black residue consists of numerous pollutants common in the harbor area--not simply dust from his piles of coal and petroleum coke.

“The prevailing winds are to the east, and the complaints are coming from the west,” Holdaway said.

“I feel it is a shame that people are trying to shut down a facility that is very essential to maintaining our country’s exports. What you have here is a few radicals who won’t be satisfied until they turn this harbor into a Marina del Rey.”

While acknowledging that Kaiser International has from time to time violated air quality standards, Holdaway said the violations have been isolated and relatively infrequent considering how much attention the facility gets from the agency, the Harbor Department and area boaters.

Aside from the black gunk, some boat owners have complained about truck traffic and the dirt it creates along Miner Street, and about noisy trains that sometimes block Miner Street and access to the marinas in Watchorn Basin. On busy days, about 40 trucks an hour carrying petroleum coke file into the facility, and boat owners at the north end of Watchorn Basin near the entrance to the facility say it is the trucks that are dirtying their boats by spilling dry coke and stirring up dust on the road.

“It seems the only time we get dirty is when the coke ships are working,” said Harold Struthers, who has a boat near the facility’s entrance and is president of Los Angeles Boat Owners, a group of about 400 members. “The trucks really cause a nuisance.”

Ketcham, of the air quality management district, said one study by the agency showed that emissions from the bulk loader were higher upwind than downwind from the facility. “We decided it was probably because of the trucks kicking up the dust on the road,” he said.

Ketcham said the temporary permit for increased coke storage that Kaiser is expected to receive this month includes a provision that the company provide better “truck washing” services--hosing down the coke coming in on the trucks--to reduce the amount of dust on Miner Street.

In a separate action, Kaiser indirectly won a battle last month against some harbor-area residents who took the city to court for allowing the bulk loader facility to operate at all. The Coastal and Harbor Hazards Council, a small watchdog group from San Pedro, challenged a 1965 ruling by the city’s chief zoning administrator that permitted the Harbor Department to build the facility in an M2 zone, which is reserved for light industrial uses.

The group had taken the department to court after the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals upheld the current zoning administrator’s decision to support the 1965 ruling. The court ruled in favor of the city and the Harbor Department.

While council members and boat owners said they were disappointed by the court’s decision, they said they have not given up.

Last week, boat owners all along Watchorn Basin gathered more than 75 signatures on petitions alleging that the Kaiser International facility is a public nuisance and stating that boat owners have experienced “a graphic increase in inconveniences and health hazards” because of the company’s operation.

Meanwhile, Camilla Burgher, who runs San Pedro Yacht Sales in Watchorn Basin, was collecting Air Quality Management District complaint forms from boat owners that she hopes can be used to build a case against Kaiser.

“It is the main topic of conversation around here,” said Tolby, the boat owner from Arcadia. “About two dozen people around here have left and gone over to the new marina to get away from it. It has gotten so bad, I would consider it, too.”