Eastern Europeans Seek Advice on Environment : Pollution: A trade panel at City Hall listens to ecological horror stories from former Cold War adversaries.

Los Angeles in the mid-September smog may seem an improbable gathering spot for Eastern and Central Europeans looking for help in cleaning up their befouled environments. But it made perfect sense to Owen Olpin.

“Where else could you go find a community more sensitized to air pollution problems and (efforts) to try to solve them?” asked Olpin, an environmental attorney from Los Angeles and one of dozens in the environmental business who attended a trade panel Monday at Los Angeles City Hall on how California technology can help Eastern Europe undo decades of environmental devastation.

Speaking of virtually uncontrolled pollution, emissaries from five East Bloc countries told of enormous environmental problems and their need for American know-how and money.

“It is very, very, very bad,” said Irene Zikova, commercial attache from the Czechoslovakian Embassy. At least half of her country’s forests, soil and water are extremely polluted, she said.

The morning’s discussion was peppered with ironies as Zikova and others talked of struggling democracies, while a few feet away, a Soviet science consul, also a panelist, listened amiably.

An executive of a Hughes Aircraft Co. environmental subsidiary detailed for America’s former Cold War enemies how thermal detection and infrared systems developed for electronic defense could be used to pinpoint their environmental contamination.

The participants ended the session with a lunch served on plastic plates in City Hall’s Tower Dining Room, which offered a smog-obscured view of the Los Angeles Basin.

And when the emissaries recited environmental problems ranging from dirty rivers to contaminated military bases, they didn’t sound very foreign.

“We have our own huge problems,” conceded Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, who helped organize the gathering to promote business for California companies in the environmental field. “And we have some of the same problems in this country of having the political resolve to come up with the money (for cleanup). . . . But we’re much farther along.”

Experts said that after decades of ignoring pollution controls in favor of industrial growth, Central and Eastern European countries are in need of an environmental cleanup that could cost as much as $500 billion.

Wrestling with emerging governments and chaotic economies, the countries are looking for foreign investment and U.S. aid to help pay the bill. Already, the U.S. has set aside $75 million for environmental improvements in eastern Europe.