Evacuation of Sun Valley Hospital Blamed on Firm : City Raids Chemical Plant Suspected of Toxic Dumping

A four-month investigation into the seepage of poisonous fumes into a hospital culminated Monday when a city environmental task force raided a Sun Valley chemical company a third of a mile away.

The company, Redell Industries, is suspected of illegally dumping dangerous waste into the city sewer system, Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn said.

Redell’s president, Paul Pratter, and his former wife have run other chemical-related businesses that have drawn similar charges, including a Sun Valley plant that burned in 1985, hospitalizing 56 people who inhaled toxic fumes.

A spokesman for Pratter denied the city’s allegations, calling them “a witch hunt.” Redell did not even possess some of the chemicals it was accused of dumping, and the fumes detected at the hospital were from the hospital’s own sewage, said George Watson, director of environmental affairs for Redell.

Redell, which occupies a 32,000-square-foot building in the 11600 block of Sheldon Street, manufactures a variety of chemicals, including a substance that attracts Mediterranean fruit flies. Hahn said fumes from glue and spray-paint infiltrated the sewer and emerged in Serra Memorial Health Center, forcing the evacuation of more than 100 patients last December.

“The investigators knew they had a major source of pollution before they even found it,” said Hahn, “because they knew it took a massive amount of toluene in the sewer to create the fumes that seeped into the hospital.” Toluene is a toxic component of spray-paint.

A check of Redell’s sewer flow uncovered “massive” illegal dumping, including the pouring of dangerous acids into the sewer for as long as eight hours, Hahn said.

Investigators Monday discovered concrete drains they believe were used to funnel wastes into the sewer, he said.

Hahn said his office is preparing criminal charges against the company.

Watson said the equipment used by investigators detects the amount of hydrocarbons in the air “but cannot identify specific substances, such as toluene, or butane or methane or whatever.”

He said a private detective hired by Redell discovered that the outlet of the pipe that vents methane gas from the hospital’s sewage is next to an air-conditioning inlet. “They were detecting simple swamp gas generated from their own sewage,” he said.

The company’s hazardous materials procedures were regularly inspected by the Los Angeles Fire Department without complaint, he said. Redell mostly manufactures food flavorings, he said, and has no use for the dry-cleaning solvent the city attorney’s investigators said they found in the sewer runoff.

Pratter operated the National Chemical Co. on the site until it was closed in December, 1985, for fire-code violations, including incompatible storage of hazardous materials, Hahn said. Pratter founded the Research Organic & Inorganic Chemical Co., a Sun Valley plant leveled in a 1985 fire.

His former wife, Marianne Pratter, owned the company when the blaze consumed a warehouse filled with cyanide compounds and caustic acids. Radioactive uranium salts were also found at the site.

She was charged last April with two felony counts of unlawful disposal of hazardous wastes and three misdemeanor counts of maintaining a public nuisance, unlawful storage of hazardous wastes and failure to properly store a radioactive substance.

The charges stemmed from her failure to remove hazardous wastes after the fire, prosecutors said. Marianne Pratter was named in an $18-million suit by 20 police officers and a newspaper photographer who claim they were injured at the fire.

In 1984, she pleaded guilty to illegal storage of hazardous materials and endangering the public as a result of leakage at a chemical warehouse she owned in Belleville, N. J. The leaks were severe enough to close a nearby elementary school.

She was fined, placed on three years’ probation and ordered to do community service.