Firms Dump Toxics Suit on Cities, County : Environment: A consortium of major corporations seeks to spread the blame for the shutdown of a Monterey Park dump. It wants help in paying the cleanup bill.

In what may be a landmark lawsuit, 29 cities in Los Angeles County have been sued by a consortium of high-powered corporations in an attempt to spread the blame for the lingering toxic contamination that closed a major Monterey Park dump site six years ago.

The companies, a virtual Who’s Who of corporate America, already have been blamed by federal officials for the contamination, and have agreed under a previous federal court settlement to help finance multimillion-dollar cleanup efforts at the Operating Industries Inc. dump.

But now the corporations, in a novel approach to toxics litigation, are trying to get the cities to pay part of the bill as well. The cities named in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles late last year range from Beverly Hills and San Marino to Cudahy and Walnut. Also named are the County of Los Angeles and the state Department of Transportation.

The suit argues that the municipalities, Caltrans and the county are partly responsible for the contamination because they dumped toxics there themselves, or hired companies to do it for them.

The attempt to establish a pollution trail is likely to be a landmark case, regardless of its outcome, federal environmental officials said.

“It’s very unusual,” said Lisa A. Haage, an attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco.

EPA spokesman Terry Wilson added, “It raises a lot of liability questions and ones of chain reactions.”

A number of the corporations face clean-up claims at other landfills as well. If their suit regarding the Monterey Park dump succeeds, comparable claims may be made at similar sites elsewhere, legal and environmental experts said.

Among the 1,200 Superfund sites across the country, more than 200 are large, municipal landfills such as the one in Monterey Park.

The issue in the litigation is fairness, said David Giannotti, the Los Angeles attorney representing the corporations, including Fortune 500 firms such as Chevron, Exxon, General Motors, Hughes Aircraft, Texaco, TRW and Xerox. “All parties responsible should contribute their fair share,” he said.

The Operating Industries Inc. landfill started as a sand and gravel pit on Monterey Park’s southern edge. During nearly four decades after World War II, it grew from a local dump into a regional one. In addition to the garbage and trash buried there, oil companies, food processing firms, aerospace industries and waste haulers dumped a variety of hazardous liquids, in cluding such potentially cancer-causing substances as vinyl chloride, trichloroethylene, benzene and toluene at the site.

In 1984, in response to years of public outcry, environmental and health officials ordered it closed. By then, a mountain of smelly trash extended over 190 acres.

Some cities deny transporting waste to the dump. Others maintain their records on the subject are long lost, or never existed. Still others acknowledge that their trash may have been trucked there, but say it was non-hazardous.

The suit does not ask for a specific amount of money damages. Federal officials estimate the cleanup costs will run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stephanie Scher, Monterey Park’s assistant city attorney, said an unfavorable ruling against the cities could bankrupt them. “I don’t know what (the corporations) are aiming at, presumably to bring in insurance companies and get as much money from cities as they can. But they won’t get much. Every city I know is operating on the edge.”

Attorney Giannotti, however, said the cities would not be greatly burdened because “most cities may potentially have insurance.” But officials in many of the cities dispute this, saying their municipal liability insurance policies do not cover pollution.

Maywood’s Chief Administrative Officer, Leonard Locher, said the suit is puzzling to his community of 24,611 residents. Maywood lies about five miles southwest from the former dump site. “We knew about the landfill,” he said, without saying his city had dumped there, “but we had no idea we’d be sued. Surprise! Twenty years later, we get sued.”

The landfill has been ranked as one of the worst toxic dumps in the nation and is one of four federal Superfund sites in Los Angeles County.

Until now, the emphasis in cleaning up such sites has been on tracking down corporate polluters. Last year, as part of a federal court settlement with the EPA, more than 110 companies agreed to finance the cleanup at the Monterey Park dump, although they admitted no liability.

At the time of settlement, the corporations divided into two groups. About half of the companies, including the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., Coca-Cola Co., and Times Mirror Co., the Los Angeles Times’ parent firm, agreed to make combined cash payments of $31 million. Most of those companies are not suing the cities.

The rest of the companies banded together and agreed to pay for a longer-term solution, spending up to $34 million to oversee the cleanup, which EPA officials estimate could take 45 to 60 years. This second group of companies, joined by a few of the others, filed suit against the cities.

And the EPA, still on the lookout for more corporate polluters to fund the cleanup, is scouring records that show that more than 4,000 companies may have dumped waste at the site. But the agency did not choose to go after the cities because it does not consider them to blame for the problem, Haage said.

Although the corporations’ suit has been filed, the defendants have not yet been formally notified. The deadline for that is April. Meanwhile, the companies are pushing for an out-of-court settlement.

And, although the defendants claim the corporations’ charges are unreasonable, they are taking the lawsuit and its possible ramifications seriously.

“It seems to me it’s kind of a novel lawsuit, but we have to take it seriously. These are big corporations,” said David Kelsey, chief of the county counsel’s public works division.

City Manager John Nowak of San Marino said records indicate that his city may have sent only one load of concrete rubbish to the dump. “We’re a little dismayed that the Fortune 500 companies would make such an attempt. We’re going to fight it.”

BACKGROUND Before the 190-acre Operating Industries Inc. landfill in Monterey Park was closed in 1984, oil companies, food processing firms, the aerospace industry and waste haulers had dumped a wide range of hazardous liquids there, including such potentially cancer-causing substances as vinyl chloride, trichloroethylene, benzene and toluene. Although a 1988 federal study praised the cleanup efforts at the western San Gabriel Valley dump, a top federal environmental administrator nevertheless describes it as “one of the most complex and contaminated sites in the nation.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s latest remedy calls for placing an elaborate plastic cover over much of the site, combined with a system to dump out hazardous wastes.

(Southland Edition) WHO’S SUING WHOM

THE 31 DEFENDANTS

The State of California (Department of Transportation), the County of Los Angeles, Alhambra, Artesia, Baldwin Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, Beverly Hills, Commerce, Compton, Cudahy, El Monte, Huntington Park, Industry, La Puente, Lynwood, Maywood, Montebello, Monterey Park, Norwalk, Paramount, Rosemead, San Gabriel, San Marino, Santa Fe Springs, Sierra Madre, South El Monte, South Gate, South Pasadena, Temple City and Walnut.

THE 65 PLAINTIFFS:

Transportation Leasing Co., Allied-Signal Inc., American National Can Co., ARMCO Inc., Atlantic Richfield Co., Beatrice/Hunt-Wesson Inc., Bethlehem Steel Corp., Betz Laboratories Inc., Borden Inc., Borg-Warner Corp., Chevron Chemical Co., Chevron U.S.A. Inc., Conoco Inc./Douglas Oil Co., Continental Can Co. Inc., Cooper Drum Co., Deft Inc., Dunn-Edwards Corp., Exxon Corp., Flint Ink Corp., GATX Terminals Corp., General Latex and Chemical Corp, General Motors Corp., Georgia-Pacific Corp., Henkel Corp., Emery Group, Hughes Aircraft Co., Insilco Corp. (Sinclair Paint Co.), Jaybee/Ajax Manufacturing Corp., Kenosha Auto Transport Corp., Knoll International Holdings Inc. (formerly General Felt Industries Inc.), Liberty Vegetable Oil Co., Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Co. (a division of Lockheed Corp.), Wilmington Oil Field--California (operated in Long Beach by THUMS Long Beach Co., agent for Field Contractors), Martin Marietta Corp. (on behalf of Martin Marietta Carbon Inc. and Commonwealth Aluminum Corp.), McDonnell Douglas Corp., Mobil Oil Corp., NI Industries Inc., NL Industries Inc., Occidental Petroleum Corp., Oryx Energy Co., Owens-Illinois General Inc., PPG Industries Inc., Parker-Hannifin Corp., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Co., ProMark Group West, Reynolds Metals Co., Safeway Stores Inc., Santa Fe Energy Co., Shell Oil Co., Soule’-Arnon Liquidating Agency, Southern California Gas Co., Southern California Rapid Transit District, Southwestern Engineering Co., Superior Industries International Inc., Supracote Inc., Texaco Inc., TRW Inc., USG Corp. (Hollytex Carpet Mills), Unocal Corp., Union Pacific Resources Co., Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Co., Van Waters & Rogers Inc., Welch’s Overall Cleaning Co. Inc., Willamette Industries Inc. and Xerox Corp.