Major Defect May Shut Down New Trash Incinerator

City officials said they have uncovered a major defect in a $105-million trash incinerator nearing completion on Terminal Island that could shut it down for 8 months of repairs.

The discovery came less than 2 weeks before Long Beach must decide whether to accept the condition of its new Southeast Resource Recovery Facility, a high-technology incinerator that burns trash to generate electricity.

SERRF was designed to burn refuse from Long Beach, Signal Hill and Lakewood. The plant’s average daily consumption of 1,170 tons of garbage is designed to generate enough power for 45,000 homes. The plant is expected to produce $60,000 a day in electricity sales to Southern California Edison.

If the city insists on repairs before it accepts the plant, the decision could prove costly to the builder: Pittsburgh-based Dravo Corp. must pay a $40,000 penalty for every day the plant remains uncompleted after Dec. 8, the end of the demonstration period for the first stage of the project. The penalties are part of the contract between Dravo and the Long Beach Sanitary District and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

$4-Million Late Penalty

The city already plans to wring more than $4 million out of Dravo for being 128 days late in completing the first stage.

The defect is a pre-cast concrete wall deteriorating under the swinging blows of a bucket attached to an overhead crane. While the bucket was expected to bump against the wall--at the rear of the main refuse storage area--in normal service, it is striking harder than engineers predicted, a Dravo official said.

Other problems that have arisen during the plant’s 2-year construction include malfunctioning controls on the cranes, waste-water disposal and some emissions-monitoring complications.

Although Dravo is also contracted to run the plant, the company has told city officials to find a new operator, because it intends to get out of the trash incineration business.

City project director Bill Davis said last week that most of the problems can be fixed with relative ease, with the possible exception of the defective wall. The cost of repairing the wall will depend on the choice of solutions, but Davis said Dravo will have to absorb the cost, with no city funds involved.

The myriad problems have sent a shudder through at least one city councilman.

“I think they are too optimistic,” Councilman Warren Harwood said. “They are cruising through a sea of alligators and saying, ‘no problem.’

“I’m optimistic and have every assurance it’s going to work fine. It’s just a little unsettling,” the North Long Beach representative said.

Kell Expects Success

Mayor Ernie E. Kell said he has no reservations about finding solutions to the problems and expects the plant to be a major success.

“I’ve built buildings and you always have a few problems,” said Kell, a retired developer of shopping centers.

Overall, he said, he “couldn’t feel better. Other cities are going to be paying (a lot for disposal) of trash. Long Beach rates are going to stabilize.”

The city is banking that the plant will help it avoid the looming garbage crisis expected to strike Southern California as early as 1991. The Puente Hills Landfill, where Long Beach sends its garbage, is nearly full. With no new major dump sites planned within the Los Angeles basin, garbage collection could become increasingly expensive.

As one possible solution, administrators of the county sanitation districts are studying the feasibility of running garbage trains into the desert.

“Long Beach has done an effective job of insulating itself from the trash crisis,” said spokesman Joe Haworth of the county sanitation districts.

The Long Beach plant has three times the capacity of a similar waste-to-energy plant in the City of Commerce. The Commerce plant is the only other one operating in the Los Angeles basin. By burning the trash to produce electricity, it is reduced to ash that is a tenth as large and a seventh as heavy as its original volume.

“These plants are the cutting edge of the technology now,” Haworth said. “They are going to lead the way into the future.”

Besides electricity, the plants also produce smog. Davis estimated that SERRF will emit smoke that contains about the same amount of nitrogen oxides as are produced by vehicles on a 2-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway.

Testing Pollution Variance

The plant is operating under a pollution variance during testing, said Bill Kelly, an Air Quality Management District spokesman. “They are in a shakedown period. (It) allows them to exceed the emissions limit without being in jeopardy of a notice of violation.”

The variance did not help Aug. 24, however, when the plant was hit with a violation for excessive visible emissions, Kelly said. AQMD has yet to decide whether to levy a fine.

During testing, Davis said a white plume of ammonium chloride could sometimes be seen from the plant’s huge stack.

The plant will continue to operate on an interim permit. In another 2 or 3 months, Kelly said, AQMD will decide whether to issue a regular permit.

While other cities have hotly rejected proposals for similar facilities, the Long Beach plant has quietly been planned and built with barely a note of controversy. The plant has an ideal location on Ocean Boulevard, across from Long Beach Naval Station and far from residential or commercial areas.

If the plant will be operated by the company that built it, workers familiar with the facility would be in charge should anything go wrong. But Dravo wants to turn over the plant to Montenay International Inc., a French firm with North American operations running waste-to-energy facilities in Florida and Canada.

Davis said of the proposed switch: “I think it’s something we don’t like, but the situation is (Dravo) is not interested in doing this work, and the other company is interested.”

Three issues of bonds, totaling $170.2 million, paid for the $105.9 million contract to Dravo and $64.3 million in financing, site acquisition, change orders, city staff fees, a recycling program and other costs, Davis said.

The city will repay the bonds with lease payments that are supposed to start Thursday.

Quality-Insurance Bond

The city is holding $5.5 million in payments earmarked to Dravo as a quality guarantee, and the builder has posted a performance bond covering the cost of the project.

City officials warned Dravo during construction that the now-deteriorating wall might be too weak, Davis said. But under the building contract, Long Beach was precluded from forcing Dravo to make changes unless the city assumed the liability for the change.

Now that Dravo has declared the job complete, the city has the power to accept, conditionally accept or reject the plant by Dec. 8 for regular trash-burning service.

That decision could hinge on whether the city accepts Dravo’s recommendation to reinforce the deteriorating wall with steel or whether the city insists on shutting down the plant while the wall is rebuilt at Dravo’s expense.