Work at Sewage Plant Shakes Up El Segundo

Since the bulldozers began excavation work at the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, Henry and Ethel Zagorski’s lives have been unsettled--to say the least.

The kitchen cabinets shake, the hot-water tank pipes shake, the glass shower door shakes, the bed shakes--in fact, their entire home on Pine Avenue in El Segundo shakes, from early morning to early evening, six days a week.

‘Like an Earthquake’

“It’s all day long,” said Henry Zagorski, a retired statistician. “It’s just like an earthquake.”

The Zagorskis aren’t the only ones who say their homes are being shaken by the bulldozers’ activity. In fact, so many of the neighbors along Pine and nearby Hillcrest Avenue have complained to the City of El Segundo that it is considering revoking the permit it granted for the project.

The City of Los Angeles, which operates the plant, is excavating a million yards of sand to make way for a new sedimentation tank, part of an expansion that will increase the plant’s capacity by about 25%.

But as the work has progressed, residents contend, cracks have appeared in the walls and ceilings of their homes on the bluffs overlooking the 153-acre plant.

Other residents complain that their homes, driveways and yards have been covered by wind-blown sand as vegetation has been removed from the bluffs. To add insult to injury, they say, Los Angeles officials have failed to comply with conditions of the El Segundo permit that prohibits any work from taking place on Sundays or before or after certain hours.

“There is a lack of sensitivity on the part of the City of Los Angeles,” said Dave O’Reilly, who lives on Hillcrest. O’Reilly, who manages the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, spent part of his Memorial Day weekend brushing sand from the sides of his house.

Despite reassurances by Los Angeles officials that they will make the contractor abide by the agreement and that homeowners will be reimbursed for any damage caused to their homes, El Segundo officials are not taking the officials at their word.

Public Hearing Slated

After listening to the residents’ complaints, El Segundo City Council members last week instructed city staff to determine whether the conditional-use permit for the tank construction should be revoked. Because 6% of the new tank will be in El Segundo, Los Angeles--which is under a federal court order to expand the plant--needs the permit.

The El Segundo Planning Commission will hold a public hearing June 30 and then recommend whether the council should cancel the permit--something the city contends it has a legal right to do.

“What has happened, unfortunately, is that the Hyperion people have lost their credibility,” said Mac Dalgleish, El Segundo’s director of building and safety. “It’s gotten to the point right now where they could tell me it was daytime and I would go look outside” to make sure.

In January, council members delayed the Hyperion permit until Los Angeles officials agreed to place restrictions on construction work so that residents would not be disturbed. But officials from both cities agree that there have been violations.

Broken Sprinklers

El Segundo Councilman Scot Dannen said he went to the construction site to try to fix broken sprinklers that were supposed to wet down the sand and prevent it from blowing onto nearby homes.

Kathleen Brown, a Los Angeles Board of Public Works commissioner who has met several times with El Segundo officials, said part of the problem is that sewage treatment plants and residential areas are not ideal neighbors.

“It ain’t easy being a treatment plant, and it ain’t easy being a neighbor of a treatment plant,” said Brown, who is to meet with residents June 27. “I think that’s the bottom line.”

Greg Buchanan, vice president of Chadwick and Buchanan Inc., the Long Beach-based contractor performing the work, conceded that his company has occasionally violated the agreement while rushing to meet a county-imposed July 15 deadline to move more than 350,000 yards of the excavated sand to the beach in El Segundo.

Those violations have included working on Sundays, beginning work before 7 a.m. and continuing after 6 p.m., and failing to wet down the sand sufficiently, according to Ralph Kennedy, the city engineer overseeing the Hyperion work.

Kennedy said he met with the contractor Wednesday and told him that the agreement Los Angeles made with El Segundo must be strictly followed.

However, Kennedy said most of the complaints he has received stemmed from an incident the Sunday before Memorial Day. The contractor, fearing that high winds and high tides would damage his equipment, started moving sand from a hillside near homes to the beach below. “Now, that’s unforeseeable but necessary,” he said.

Kennedy said he has been surprised by the number of residents who have complained about their homes vibrating. Although aggravating, the constant movement probably poses little danger to the homes, he said.

“Normally, you would not expect any structural damage, not even hairline cracks,” he said.

Even before the work began, the Los Angeles City Council established a $2-million fund to cover damage claims.

One person who expects to collect some of that money is Craig Wilder, who has lived in El Segundo for five years. He said he has filed a $40,000 claim, although he concedes that he doesn’t know how much he is entitled to.

“They’re destroying my house,” Wilder said. Leading a visitor through his home, he pointed to numerous wall and ceiling cracks. The cracks were not there before the Hyperion work began, he said.

Wilder and other residents expressed fear that they may never be fully compensated because it will be difficult to prove what condition their homes were in before construction began and whether the work caused the damage.

No Documentation

None of the residents anticipated so much vibration, so they did not document the condition of their homes before the work began, they said.

“How do you go about measuring the damage they’ve done to the houses around here?” said Gerhardt Van Drie, 62, a civil engineer. “What the city should have done before beginning the work was to go around and check the houses for cracks already there.”

In the meantime, some residents say they are bracing for more, perhaps stronger, vibrations.

This week, Los Angeles officials distributed a flyer saying that work would soon begin on a retaining wall and that “vibratory” equipment would be used to drive pilings into the ground.

“It’s going to get worse before its gets better,” Wilder said.