Shipping in L.A. Harbor Resumes Day After Scare

Shipping in Los Angeles Harbor returned to normal Saturday after the Coast Guard reopened the main channel, ending a 24-hour emergency caused by a toxic chemical leaking from a container in the hold of a big freighter.

Fearing that highly flammable gases were leaking from the ship’s hold, Los Angeles city fire officials and hazardous materials experts closed the harbor Thursday night and began drawing up contingency plans to evacuate thousands of nearby residents--including inmates at the federal prison on Terminal Island.

The closure kept a number of large vessels waiting outside the breakwater. Two cruise ships, the Azure Seas and the Southward, were diverted to nearby Long Beach Harbor.

It was not immediately known how much the one-day port closure cost shippers, fishing boat operators and others whose livelihood depends on the harbor, but a Coast Guard official said: “There’s no question it did cost some people money. . . . It could be a lot of money.”

The Port of Los Angeles was reopened at 11:41 p.m. Friday. By mid-morning Saturday, the Coast Guard canceled an order sealing off a wide “safety zone” around the 54,000-ton freighter Ever Group. The vessel, tied up at Berth 232, was cleared to sail, officials said.

The chemical leak, which was confined to the ship’s hold, proved to be smaller and far less dangerous than first thought, according to Coast Guard officials. Instead of coming from pressurized cylinders of the highly explosive trifluoropropene, as first thought, the leak was traced to several barrels containing a less volatile liquid chemical called trimethyl phosphite, experts said.

Private work crews went into the ship and used a sawdust-like material to soak up the spilled chemical, the Coast Guard said. They said the toxic waste would be hauled to a hazardous waste facility.

The Ever Group, an 882-foot globe-circling container ship, was carrying a mixed cargo that included resins, cotton, machinery and several types of chemicals.

Some of the chemicals were in pressurized cylinders, others in 55-gallon drums. The drums and pressurized cylinders were stored in 20-foot-long containers and stowed in the hold, ship officials said.

The Ever Group, one of 60 freighters operated by the Taiwanese firm Evergreen International, entered the harbor early in the week to unload containers and take on outbound cargo. It was due to leave Wednesday for the Far East, a company spokesman said.

But before the ship departed, two port police officers and two longshoremen working near the ship became ill, apparently from breathing the noxious fumes that were later traced to the Ever Group, port officials said.

Emergency crews from a half-dozen agencies were called in and a two-mile section of the main ship channel between the Vincent Thomas Bridge and Reservation Point was sealed off Thursday night, Coast Guard officials said.

“We were afraid it was the (explosive) trifluoropropene. . . . We thought it had filled the hold,” said Evergreen spokesman Robert Kleist. “A slight spark could have touched it off.”

Working cautiously, hazardous materials experts probed the hold with chemical detecting instruments and determined that the leak was not the explosive trifluoropropene, but the much less dangerous trimethyl phosphite, according to Kleist.

When crews got the hatch off and explored the hold, they discovered several of the 55-gallon drums in one of the stacked 20-foot-long containers had spilled 75 to 80 gallons of the trimethyl phosphite, Coast Guard Lt. Lyle Rice said. The material is poisonous, but not highly flammable, he said.

Rice said the spill was confined to the hold of the ship and that none of the dock area or the water around the ship had been contaminated.

Evergreen spokesman Kleist had high praise for the way emergency crews responded. Referring to the 1976 explosion of the oil tanker Sansinena that killed nine people and caused $21.6-million damage in the harbor, he said, “None of us ever want that kind of experience.”