Alatorre Links Jail, Threat of Pollution

Citing a potential water pollution threat, City Councilman Richard Alatorre on Monday asked the Environmental Protection Agency to halt expansion of the county jail in downtown Los Angeles.

Excavation at the site at Vignes and Bauchet streets could disturb toxic and carcinogenic substances left behind when a coal-gasification plant at the site was shut down half a century ago, Alatorre said. Some excavation already is under way at the site but no construction has begun.

Alatorre has attacked the expansion plan in the past, charging that the area already has too many jails and other lockups.

The chemicals, including benzene, pyrene, lead and mercury, are present in the soil in high concentrations and already have leached into ground water in the area, Alatorre said, citing EPA documents. Continued excavation could cause further water contamination and threaten aquifers that provide drinking water to 86,000 people, he said.

Department of Water and Power officials said Monday that they know of no threat to the city’s drinking water.

“I have asked the EPA to step in because of the evidence . . . and because of the total and complete runaround I have been getting from the county for the last two months,” Alatorre said.

Alatorre aides said they have been attempting to get information about pollutants from the county for several months, without success.

The expansion site is under investigation by the EPA as a possible Superfund site, according to Terry Wilson, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional headquarters in San Francisco. Such a designation would put the site on a priority list for federal cleanup funds.

However, the EPA has not yet found sufficient evidence to warrant an emergency shutdown of the expansion project, he said. EPA officials will study a letter sent by Alatorre to determine whether any additional evidence has come to light that would warrant a shutdown, Wilson said.

EPA investigators collected ground and water samples from the jail site last week, but have not yet analyzed them, he added.

A spokeswoman for the county Department of Health Services, which is in charge of monitoring the site, referred all questions on the matter to the county counsel’s office. Calls to that office were not returned.

In his letter to the EPA, Alatorre said he has learned that fill material being excavated from the site is being sent to recycling centers, where it is distributed to the public untested.

He called the situation a “serious and impending threat to public safety,” and said that workers at the site are not being protected from the pollutants.

Preliminary test results--disclosed in a March, 1989, EPA report about the land around the abandoned gasification plant--indicate unacceptably high levels of some pollutants, Alatorre said.

“These findings are of great concern to the city, since ground water at and near the . . . site is connected to a system of aquifers which provides drinking water to over 86,000 residents,” the letter said.

But DWP officials said they see no danger. “We don’t have any wells in the downtown area,” said Robert Yoshimura, an assistant water quality engineer. The closest wells are about nine miles away, he said.