Chemical Firm Defies Stop Order : Industry: Santa Clarita told HASA Inc. that it poses a health and safety risk. The chlorine refining company’s permit expired nearly a year ago.
A Saugus company that refines chlorine gas into swimming pool bleach and other disinfectants continued to operate Friday despite a cease-and-desist order from the city of Santa Clarita.
The city issued the order Oct. 8 to HASA Inc., contending that the company poses a health and safety risk and has operated for nearly a year without a zoning permit.
City officials said Friday that Los Angeles County Fire Department inspectors have contended that in recent years HASA Inc. has not complied with city codes and that the company’s systems that detect leaks of poisonous chlorine gas are deficient.
“If any gas leaks while it’s being piped from those 90-ton rail tank cars into the plant, and if the wind is strong enough, it could fill up this entire valley with chlorine gas, and there could be fatalities,” Assistant Chief Gary Nelson of the County Fire Department’s Santa Clarita station warned. “It takes only a couple of breaths of chlorine gas to kill you.”
The issue heated up Friday in City Manager George Caravalho’s office, where an otherwise routine weekly news conference turned into a tense, impromptu confrontation between city officials and HASA’s attorney, Steven L. Feldman, who was joined by company President Don Wilson and Comptroller Elaine Henderson.
Feldman said the company has operated safely for 22 years, that the city’s order applied only to what he called “purely a technical zoning issue,” not safety concerns, and that HASA has been denied due process requiring a hearing and administrative appeal rights.
The city’s order, issued by zoning code enforcement officer Vytautas P. Adomaitis, states that Los Angeles County had granted HASA a conditional-use permit in 1970 and that the permit expired last November, nearly four years after the plant’s Saugus site became part of Santa Clarita when the city was incorporated.
HASA poses “an immediate threat to the health and safety of city residents,” the order states, and noncompliance could bring a civil or criminal complaint from the city.
“We’re willing to comply with all lawful orders of the city and the Fire Department,” Feldman told city officials. “We’re willing to sit down and work it out with the city of Santa Clarita. More than 100 jobs are at stake in this bad economy.”
Then, Feldman asked Caravalho: “Has there been any sort of public safety hazard order issued to shut down HASA?”
“You’ll have to ask the fire chief,” Caravalho said. “There have been some pretty serious concerns from the Fire Department, and that had a lot to do with the city’s initiative as it relates to the expiration of the permit.”
Wilson said he told a fire captain during his most recent visit to the three-acre plant site, located in an industrial area near San Fernando Road, that “all we wanted to do was sit down and work this thing out.”
“We felt that what they wanted was not as safe as what we proposed, which was far safer,” Wilson said. “His reaction was that it was too late.”
After the meeting, Caravalho said HASA did not apply for a permit extension. He said that until the matter is dealt with administratively by the city, or possibly in court, it was “premature for us to make a determination as to where we are on it.”
This is not the first time HASA has been a safety concern. In 1984, four chemical spills occurred at the plant, and seven employees required emergency hospital treatment, Fire Department officials said. In 1988, officials said, the company was fined by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which had found that employees were inadequately trained for emergencies.
The dispute is a familiar refrain in the Santa Clarita Valley, where rapid urbanization encroaches on once-rural areas dotted by heavy industry.
In July, 1985, an explosion at the now-defunct Bermite military weapons plant in Saugus caused about $500,000 in damage after two workers had been seriously burned in separate accidents two months earlier. In 1989, a now-defunct Sand Canyon defense contractor, Space Ordnance Systems (SOS), became embroiled in a controversy over alleged industrial pollution.
“As the urban Los Angeles area moves out here and you have far more people here, some of these chemical industries aren’t compatible unless they can meet certain requirements,” Caravalho said.
