Hull of a Mess Raises Traffic Questions

Thirty-six hours after overturning on asphalt, the Crippled Corsair of Culver Boulevard was bulldozed and carted away by a city Bureau of Street Maintenance crew Tuesday afternoon.

But questions remained about why Los Angeles officials let the hulk of the 26-ton pirate ship replica clog a major artery for three successive rush hours before finally calling in heavy equipment to demolish it.

On Tuesday morning, commuters were again forced to fume in stalled traffic in the Playa del Rey area for up to 30 minutes because of the closure of Culver Boulevard between Jefferson Boulevard and the Marina Freeway.

“You’d think by this morning they could have cleared it,” Century City worker Chris Kehlenbach said. “Traffic is a nightmare; it’s really backed up.”

Salvatore Grammatico, head of a Westside coalition of community activist organizations, also complained about the city’s response time to the closure of a roadway that city officials say carries 30,000 vehicles daily.

“Taking into consideration the impact on the community, the city street maintenance department should have been able to respond to this type of situation quicker so the streets could be freed,” said Grammatico, president of the Coalition of Concerned Communities. “This points out how sensitive our arteries are. One accident like this plugs up our entire transportation system.”

The Bridgette Smith, owned by Santa Monica restaurateur Jay Fiondella, capsized on the boulevard about 12:45 a.m. Monday as it was being towed on a trailer from a Culver City storage yard to a similar facility in Marina del Rey.

Although the 25-year-old homemade vessel, which has never been in the water, was cracked nearly in half and sprawled across the roadway, street maintenance officials did not respond to calls from Los Angeles police to take action on the terra firma shipwreck until early Monday afternoon.

At that point, maintenance supervisors declared that it was too late to demolish the grounded galleon before the coming afternoon rush hour and allowed private efforts to remove the remains to continue into the night.

For much of Monday, two boat movers and a crane operator had sought to lift the heavy hulk onto a trailer with a jury-rigged combination of a nylon sling, a jack and two dozen wood blocks. However, the task proved tedious because the crane was too small to lift anything but the stern of the 65-foot-long ship.

After 19 hours, the crew finally succeeded in raising the vessel onto the trailer, but only a few hundred yards down the road it again listed to port and plopped back onto the pavement on a bridge over Ballona Creek.

Pat Howard, the city’s director of street maintenance, defended his bureau’s reaction time in a telephone interview late Tuesday morning. He said city workers gave the boat movers all day Monday to attempt to move the ship--which Fiondella had readily acknowledged could not be repaired--in order to reduce the possibility of city liability.

“I just don’t want to arbitrarily walk in and bulldoze it and say tough luck,” Howard said. “A little bit of inconvenience for the public, versus liability downstream, is worth it.

“We do not want to fall into a situation where a pile of kindling is put in a landfill and people who believed there was no value to it come back to the city later and say you destroyed something of value.”

Howard added that he also “didn’t want our people working during the night. I didn’t want to put anybody in a dangerous situation.”

Fiondella, who termed his boat a back-yard dream, claimed that he had been planning on finally making it seaworthy and launching it into Santa Monica Bay early next year. Now he hopes to collect up to $250,000 on the insurance policy held by the boat mover, Cooper Boat Moving of Long Beach.

The operator of Chez Jay said he may turn portions of the plywood carcass of the vessel, which for years had served as an apartment for a shipwright, into coffee tables for his Santa Monica saloon.

Times staff writer George R. Fry contributed to this story.