In Sun Valley : L.A. Severs Plant From Sewer Line

A Sun Valley chemical company accused of pouring hazardous wastes down its drains was disconnected from city sewers Monday by Los Angeles officials.

The action by the Board of Public Works requires that Redell Industries, suspected as the source of fumes that forced 450 people from nearby Serra Memorial Health Center last year, either haul the wastes to a dump or cease operation.

The order allows the plant to make extensive improvements in its disposal system to meet city standards, but Lloyd D. Dix, an attorney for Redell, strongly suggested at a board hearing that the $3-million plant would close.

“If you cap the sewer, it will shut down,” he told commissioners. “Don’t close the plant on inconclusive evidence.”

City crews were sent shortly after the hearing to seal the sewer. Officials said the shut-off was the third ordered this year for firms operating in the city.

11 Employees

Redell’s 11 workers manufacture a broad range of chemical products, including food flavorings, drug components, and an attractant used as bait for Mediterranean fruit-fly traps.

In the four months after the Serra evacuation Dec. 31, city investigators reported finding excessive amounts of several dangerous chemicals flowing into sewers from lines leaving the plant.

Fumes from one of those chemicals, toluene, a highly toxic ingredient of glue and cleaning fluids, are believed by authorities to have wafted from the sewer into the hospital.

Dix argued that toluene and other chemicals could as easily have been dumped by the other businesses on the 11600 block of Sheldon Street, such as an auto wrecking yard and a manufacturing plant.

But Norman Cotter, chief industrial-waste inspector for the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, said the neighboring businesses do not discharge into an industrial-use sewer line.

Although Cotter acknowledged that some toluene was found in sewer lines upstream of the plant, he said concentrations frequently increased just downstream of it.

Plant Raided

A city environmental task force raided the plant last month, and officials said they discovered evidence of chemical spills, faulty drainage arrangements, and ineffective equipment for filtering poisonous waste water before its release. Sewage considered illegal because of excessive acid, which is damaging to sewer lines, has flowed from the plant on five occasions since the raid, investigators said.

Paul Pratter, Redell’s founder and technical director, disputed those findings, telling commissioners, “We run a model plant. You can eat off the floor.”