Brewery Flushes Creek to Clean Last of Spill : Sepulveda Basin: Anheuser-Busch had tried to dry out the stream after leaking cleanser posed a possible threat to wildlife.

Anheuser-Busch poured thousands of gallons of water into Haskell Creek on Wednesday night in an attempt to flush away the last vestiges of a caustic solution that spilled from its Van Nuys brewery Monday, raising fears of damage to the Sepulveda Basin wildlife area.

The company began dumping water into the stream after all but sucking it dry during the last two days in an effort to retrieve 5,400 gallons of a cleaning solution of water and sodium hydroxide that flowed from a broken pipe at the brewery. The solution flowed into a storm drain that empties into Haskell Creek north of the Sepulveda Basin.

Between Monday and Wednesday afternoons, crews from IT Corp., an environmental cleanup firm, siphoned about 200,000 gallons of water from the creek into tanker trucks, which hauled it to the brewery to be neutralized and discharged into city sewer lines.

But that operation left residual puddles of water with high alkaline levels. The flushing operation was aimed at returning the creek water to neutral levels.

“We’re going to put several hundred thousand gallons” of “good old city water . . . down there,” said a brewery executive who asked not to be identified.

“I would say once that’s flushed out, we should be in great shape tomorrow,” said another executive, plant manager Earl Burke. “If it’s not correct, we’ll keep after it until it is correct. We’ll make it right.”

The giant brewery in the 15800 block of Roscoe Boulevard is about 2 1/2 miles upstream from the 108-acre wildlife area, which is wedged between Woodley Avenue and the San Diego Freeway in the southeast corner of the Sepulveda Basin. Haskell Creek, an intermittent stream, flows through the wildlife area, where reclaimed water from the Tillman sewage treatment plant augments its flow into the Los Angeles River.

By Monday night, cleanup crews had fashioned a makeshift earth dam at the northern edge of the wildlife area to keep the tainted water out. They pumped water around the clock, using a small generator and portable floodlights to work throughout Monday and Tuesday nights.

Water samples taken late Monday afternoon showed that some of the contaminants reached the wildlife area before the dam was erected, said state fish and game Warden Cindy Haight.

However, officials said they saw no signs of distressed or dead fish or waterfowl. The only visible damage was in small areas where tanker trucks had crushed vegetation.

There is “no obvious wildlife or fish life loss at this point,” said Lt. Joe Pecsi of the state Department of Fish and Game.

City parks officials, who administer the Sepulveda Basin, praised the cleanup effort. “We are very pleased with the response from Anheuser-Busch,” said Dick Ginevan, chief San Fernando Valley supervisor for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

“They jumped on it as soon as they found out and they haven’t left the scene.”

Still, officials of the state fish and game department and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board said they will consider legal action against Anheuser-Busch. Both agencies administer no-fault statutes that provide for penalties or assessments against water polluters whether or not negligence was involved.

“We’ll be completing a report and referring it to the D.A.’s office for review,” Pecsi said.

“We just fractured a line, and the damn line just happened to be above a storm sewer,” said Burke, the brewery manager. “We responded to it as quickly as possible, and I think that diminishes” any blame, he said.

Although it took place in a public park, the cleanup operation went on for two days without attracting publicity. Even then, facts about the spill and cleanup were hard to come by.

Anheuser-Busch and IT Corp. officials supervising the cleanup refused to answer any questions, referring inquiries to the Los Angeles office of Fleishman-Hillard Inc., Anheuser-Busch’s public relations firm. However, employees there said they had no knowledge of the incident and were unable to provide information for more than five hours.

A state fish and game official who called Anheuser-Busch to discuss the cleanup with company officials said that he, too, was referred to Fleishman-Hillard.

Late Wednesday, the public relations firm issued a three-paragraph statement saying the “leak constitutes no threat to the basin.” Later still, brewery officials were made available to answer questions about the accident.