Advice on Dump Gas Ignored, Official Says : Lopez Canyon: Air quality engineers urged deeper wells to control methane emissions from rotting garbage at the landfill.

A top Los Angeles sanitation official admitted Thursday that the city disregarded the advice of regional air quality engineers when it installed an inadequate collection system to control methane gas emissions at Lopez Canyon Landfill in Lake View Terrace.

“The results were disappointing,” Michael Miller, assistant director of the city Bureau of Sanitation, told the South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing board.

He said sanitation officials realize there may have been a flaw in the design of the initial 18 wells the city installed by an AQMD-mandated deadline in January of this year.

“We realized the failure,” Miller said. “Certain elements were not operating efficiently.”

Since January, the city has installed more than 100 additional wells to collect methane and other gases given off by garbage rotting underground at the northeastern San Fernando Valley dump, Miller said. The sanitation bureau also has plans to spend millions of dollars more on additional measures demanded by AQMD officials to control the emissions, city officials said.

The AQMD hearing board, a quasi-judicial body, hopes to wind up testimony today in hearings it has been holding since April on the emissions problem.

The hearings led to a new agreement aimed at satisfying all three sides in the long-running dispute--city sanitation bureau administrators, regional air quality officials and dump neighbors made ill by the emissions--that has been submitted to the five-member board.

Board members agreed this week to conclude testimony on city efforts to control gas emissions today, conduct a public hearing Oct. 18 in Lake View Terrace and rule on the agreement Oct. 19.

“We’d like to wind this thing up,” board member James Joyce said. “Some people think these hearings have gone on far too long.”

On Thursday, Miller said he believes the new agreement will bring the landfill into compliance with state laws governing methane gas emissions because it is more specific as to the steps the city must take.

He admitted that the initial wells installed at the dump were shallow--25 to 75 feet deep--rather than deep wells of 100 feet or more recommended by AQMD engineers. “Our engineers believed their system would work,” Miller said. He refused to answer a question as to which city official made the decision to install shallow wells.

In other testimony, AQMD engineer Robert Pease said there was also a problem with the initial system the city installed because the capacity of the flares was not great enough to burn off all the gas collected by the wells.

An expanded flare system will be installed by the city, in addition to more and deeper wells, Pease said.

AQMD engineer Jay Chen testified that he had advised the city to install deeper wells because “the first 18 wells were inadequate to control gas emissions.” Other landfills, including Sunshine and Scholl Canyon, have followed the AQMD’s advice and have controlled emissions, Chen said.

“I don’t particularly like the locations of the 18 wells” at Lopez, Chen told the board. “They are too low.”

He said the city also failed to submit all the monthly reports to the AQMD and to monitor emissions at the dump as often as required by an Aug. 2, 1989, order issued by the hearing board.

Board members said they were disappointed that the city had not installed an easily accessible 24-hour telephone hot line to accept public complaints about landfill odors, which was required in last year’s order.

“One of the most infuriating and disgraceful things about all this is the way that hot line was installed,” board member William F. Banks said. The hot line is connected at night to a sanitation facility near Los Angeles Harbor where the employees are unfamiliar with Lopez Canyon, critics say.

“I’m concerned about having to hand out clothespins to the community,” board member Esther Lewin said about the odors.

Although city officials have maintained that the present gas-collection system is operating more efficiently, an AQMD inspector was called to the site as recently as Saturday morning because of the large number of complaints about odors.

“The smell made some of us gag,” said Rob Zapple, a Kagel Canyon resident who has been a leader in fighting the dump.