UCLA Mixed Medical Waste, Human Ashes : Environment: Director of funeral at sea service makes the discovery when a box breaks open. Criminal probes begin as school confirms the error.

Criminal investigations have been launched after the discovery of hazardous medical waste inside boxes of cremated human remains being disposed of by UCLA, it was learned Tuesday.

The discovery was made accidentally on Oct. 31 by skipper David (Red) Saber, a Redondo Beach funeral-at-sea operator who was hired by UCLA to dispose of the contents of the boxes in Santa Monica Bay. Saber said he was loading boxes of cremated remains onto his boat for last rites when a box burst open, littering the deck of his trawler with debris and coating him and his wife, Pam, with ash. He said he was shocked when he found that the debris included broken parts of syringes, glass vials, clumps of used gauze and a rubber glove.

UCLA confirmed the mishap Tuesday. Steve Panish, an administrator with the UCLA School of Medicine, said the cremated remains were from the university’s willed-body program. He confirmed that materials such as needles were mixed in with ashes, something he said “should not happen.” Panish said UCLA’s internal environmental health and safety unit was conducting its own investigation.

“These kinds of materials should not be mixed. We are very concerned. We are taking it very seriously,” he said.

An investigator with the medical waste management branch of the state Department of Health Services confirmed the contents of bags inside the boxes. A state investigator found scalpels with dried blood, broken syringes, needles and other materials “that should not have been there,” said Jack S. McGurk, who is heading up the state investigation.

McGurk said that UCLA may have been operating an illegal crematory on the Westwood campus and may be in violation of a number of environmental laws governing the disposal of medical waste. He said the incinerator has been shut down.

“It looks like there was an on-site medical waste disposal facility that was not permitted and which was being operated without a permit,” McGurk said.

McGurk said strict laws govern the cremation of cadavers, covering such things as emissions into the air and the proper temperatures required in the furnaces. He also said that it was improper to mix ashes from cremated remains with the medical waste.

The environmental crimes unit of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has launched a separate investigation.

After a preliminary inquiry, Panish said UCLA investigators believe the mishap would pose no danger to the Sabers.

“We have determined that no biological hazard existed in this incident,” Panish said.

McGurk said that even if the material was incinerated, there could still be a significant health and environmental hazard. He said the disposal of toxic waste was covered by a much tougher set of laws than those covering the cremation of human remains.

McGurk added that the ash from hazardous materials must be handled properly to ensure that toxic residues are not put back into the environment. “Certainly we don’t want it scattered at sea,” he said.

McGurk’s unit was created in part because of public outcry over the discovery of used syringes and medical waste along the shoreline in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties in the late 1980s. Similar materials were washing ashore on beaches on the East Coast.

At the time, McGurk said, the suspicion was that the medical waste was being tossed overboard by ships at sea or might have been tossed into the sea by someone on land. But he also said there were suspicions that hospitals or clinics were dumping the materials.

Panish questioned any possible link with the problem of medical waste on beaches, saying that UCLA normally buried remains and that this was the first time it had used the funeral-at-sea process. The policy change was brought about when Robert Trelease of the UCLA department of anatomy and cellular biology contracted earlier this year with Saber’s firm to dispose of the cremated remains of cadavers used in research. Trelease was unavailable for comment.

Saber said that after he discovered that medical waste had been mixed with the ashes, he immediately called the UCLA delivery service on a telephone pager, thinking a mistake had been made and that he had gotten a delivery meant for a toxic waste site. But Saber said the driver was back within an hour to collect the materials and assured him that a mistake had not been made.

Saber, a former lead singer with the folk singing trio The Lettermen, started running the company Ashes at Sea six years ago. In the days after his discovery, he said, he was frantic with worry that he and his wife had been contaminated. He also wanted to report the incident.

He said he called UCLA repeatedly, believing officials should tell him what materials were in the bags and give the Sabers a complete physical, but got no satisfaction. He said he finally went to his own doctor, who gave him a shot of gamma globulin to boost his immune system but did not provide additional treatment because uncertainty over what was in the box.

Saber said the district attorney’s office began the investigation after an environmental watchdog group, the Santa Monica Bay Keeper, collected evidence on its own and presented it to the prosecutorial agency.

Terry Tamminen, head of the watchdog group, conducts independent investigations of pollution, patrolling the bay in his agency’s trawler. Tamminen said he became alarmed when he heard about the incident on Saber’s boat. “The possibility that toxic material and other contaminated waste was going into the bay was extremely alarming. If the box hadn’t opened, this might have been dumped into the bay,” he said.