Demolition of a School in Lennox Faces Delay : Arson: The vacant Larch Avenue Elementary has been torched twice. But asbestos removal regulations have kept it from being torn down.

The demolition of a vacant Lennox school, which was badly damaged by two arson fires this month, will be delayed until early December because some of the buildings contain asbestos.

The state Department of Transportation, which now owns the Larch Avenue Elementary school, expects to take bids and award an emergency contract to tear down the school next week.

However, the school cannot be demolished until the asbestos, which was used in floors and air ducts, is removed. That process requires permits from the South Coast Air Quality Management District and other agencies and will probably take several weeks, David Patler, a Caltrans right-of-way agent, said Friday.

Fire officials had sought the immediate demolition of the building this week after the second fire in three weeks was set there Tuesday night.

“Asbestos is the big hang-up,” Patler said. “The big problem is getting all the approvals to remove it. It’s kind of bureaucratic because (the buildings) have to be inspected so much.”

Despite the presence of asbestos, Hawthorne Fire Marshal Tim O’Rourke said Friday that the buildings are too great a safety hazard to remain standing. In a letter to Caltrans sent Friday, he urged the agency to immediately demolish the school.

“There’s a concern not only for the community but for the firefighters, and there may be some potential state liability if” there are more fires, O’Rourke said in an interview Friday. He said some Caltrans-owned buildings have burned nearly 10 times before they were torn down and the school’s buildings should be “demolished as quickly as possible to remove the possibility of any future fires.”

Larch Avenue Elementary has been vacant since late July, when teachers and administrators moved to the newly constructed Kenneth L. Moffett Elementary School a block away. Caltrans paid the Lennox School District $13 million to build the replacement school, and expects to begin constructing a transition roadway to the Century Freeway on the site of the old school early next year.

Although water and electricity services had been turned off and Caltrans had erected a chain-link fence around the vacant school, transients cut their way through and began living in the buildings. The school also became a meeting place for gang members, fire officials said.

On Sept. 11, two buildings with eight classrooms went up in flames. Two weeks later, another fire destroyed two more buildings and damaged two others. A firefighter received an eye injury cutting through the fence, but no one else was hurt.

Investigators believe both fires were started with gasoline and matches. They had identified a teen-ager who lives near the school as a possible suspect. The case against the boy was dropped, however, after witnesses failed to pick him out of a photo line-up, State Police Sgt. Lawrence Hernandez said.

Hawthorne fire officials said they were not surprised the school was set ablaze, noting that most of the vacant buildings along the Century Freeway corridor have been targeted by arsonists.

“We’ve had lots of fires where that whole freeway is going through,” Hawthorne Fire Capt. Gene Miller said. “The vacant structures have been more or less playgrounds for kids and meeting places for gang members and flop houses for the homeless. . . . A few blocks from there on Grevillea Ave., an abandoned apartment building burned eight or nine times before Caltrans tore it down.”