County to Challenge Citations in Dam Death : Accident: The state actions allege unsafe working conditions at the site, where a man died after falling 400 feet.

Los Angeles County officials said Tuesday that they would appeal state citations alleging that the county had allowed unsafe working conditions at Pacoima Dam where a worker fell 400 feet to his death, even as union officials were complaining that the state was too lenient.

A spokeswoman for the county Public Works Department said the department will appeal six safety citations issued last month by Cal/OSHA after the June 4 death of Mario Sanchez of San Fernando. She would not comment further.

Sanchez, a 30-year-old Cuban immigrant and father of two, died after a safety rope snapped as he dangled from a sheer mountain face while clearing brush next to the dam.

State investigators said they found that the hoist being used to lower Sanchez was not approved for raising and lowering workers, that safety ropes were improperly rigged and that other safety precautions had not been taken.

Cal/OSHA officials have said additional citations are possible, pending a review of training records. The state agency and the county district attorney’s office are also examining the case for potential criminal wrongdoing.

After meeting in Van Nuys on Tuesday with Cal/OSHA and county officials, county worker union representatives said state investigators are ignoring fundamental safety questions raised by the accident. Contending that county administrators knew that unsafe conditions existed and did not correct them, they said the state should re-evaluate the decision to classify the violations as not “willful.”

Cal/OSHA’s findings ignore the accounts of employees who say they had warned supervisors numerous times before the accident that someone would be killed in a dam operation because insufficiently trained workers were operating inappropriate hoisting equipment, according to the worker representatives.

“We believe there was clear and willful negligence on the part of the county,” said James Johnson, spokesman for Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents county flood-control workers. “I believe there is criminal wrongdoing here. We were very hopeful that Cal/OSHA would take an aggressive position and they haven’t.”

Cal/OSHA spokesman Rick Rice said the agency has not turned up evidence that workers had complained of dangerous conditions before the accident or of willful violations. But he said the investigation is not complete.

“It’s not over yet,” he said. “Any of those citations could be modified. There could be new citations.”

Johnson and Rees Lloyd, a lawyer for the Sanchez family, said Cal/OSHA has not explained how county officials could not have known that the hoist used in Sanchez’s death was not designed for use on human beings--only to raise and lower equipment--or that workers not trained as hoist operators were operating the equipment used to lower workers off hillsides.

They said Cal/OSHA investigators have not pursued leads from employees, such as veteran construction supervisor Rudy Rico, who says he told county safety officials a month before Sanchez’s death of his concern that someone would be killed because of a lack of training and qualified hoist operators.

In telephone interviews Monday, two of Rico’s co-workers backed his statement that he had warned a county safety official who visited their job site at Sierra Madre Dam in May about the dangers of the dam operations.

Rico said he called Edward Grimes, district manager of the Cal/OSHA office in Van Nuys, two weeks ago to say he had additional information. He said Grimes told him that he would be contacted, but Rico said he has not heard from Cal/OSHA since.

“It’s a sad thing when Cal/OSHA backs down,” Rico said. “I’m talking about a man who got killed unnecessarily. It can’t get worse than that.”

County safety officials have declined comment on the workers’ accusations.