Toxic Stew Stays When Drug Lab ‘Cooks’ Leave : Safety: Chemicals threaten children, future tenants. Officials in O.C., elsewhere grapple with cleanup issues.

Richard Espinoza had already grown suspicious of one of his tenants, who seemed to have a stream of visitors at all hours, many of them carting packages.

When another renter complained, Espinoza called the police and threw on his bathrobe to accompany officers to the upstairs unit of his Fullerton fourplex.

There, the 77-year-old landlord came face to face with a stranger eating a midnight hamburger as a batch of methamphetamine “cooked” on the stove nearby. Noxious red stains were splattered across the counter and floor, the signature marks of a methamphetamine kitchen.

The increasing prevalence of meth labs in the close quarters of apartments, hotels and trailer parks across Orange County and the rest of Southern California is more than a worrisome drug problem; it has grown into a troubling environmental health risk that threatens neighbors, children who grow up with the labs and the unwitting motel guests and tenants who move in afterward.

So extensive is the cleanup job on these labs that the costs have outstripped the budgets allotted by state and local agencies, and the state agency that recently took over cleanup responsibilities is turning more and more to landlords such as Espinoza for payment.

Though the landlord assisted police last month, state officials said they now plan to send Espinoza a $4,500 bill for the cost of hauling away and disposing of containers brimming with more than two dozen chemicals.

Espinoza said he had no clue a bill might be coming.

“I don’t think I can be responsible for anything, because I didn’t know what was happening,” said Espinoza, who said he had done his best to keep an eye on his long-gone tenant, even jotting down suspicious license plates.

Methamphetamine, also known as speed or crank on the street, provides a cheaper, longer high than cocaine. Its popularity and the relative simplicity of cooking it from readily available ingredients has fueled a home-grown industry.

Toxic chemicals typically used in producing methamphetamine include iodine, hydriodic acid and caustic soda. The chemicals can irritate eyes and skin on contact and damage the lungs if ingested or inhaled, said Al Blevans, an industrial hygienist for Orange County’s Heath Care Agency. Ongoing exposure may cause long-term health problems, Blevans said.

Other chemicals, such as red phosphorus, can become highly flammable and in some cases explosive, environmental officials said. And some, such as iodine, evaporate when heated and emit toxic vapors easily inhaled by children who happen to be nearby.

“At room temperature, [iodine] may not cause any problems,” Blevans said. “But in a situation where somebody might be heating it up . . . there can be trouble.”

A package of red phosphorous ignited in a Stanton meth lab on a recent morning, prompting health officials to evacuate hundreds of children from an elementary school across the street in fear the fumes would waft that way.

But for children who live and play in apartments and motel rooms where their parents cook--a sight that law enforcement agents say is all too common--the hazards are more serious.

In Azusa last month, physicians treated a 9-month-old girl who was under the influence of methamphetamine.

The baby’s mother had brought her to the hospital, where the child was diagnosed with a 101-degree fever, dilated eyes and a pulse rate of 215 beats per minute--about twice the normal rate, Azusa Police Detective Steve Hunt said. There were traces of methamphetamine in the baby’s blood.

Police later arrested the mother’s boyfriend on suspicion of running two meth labs.

“There’s a lot of little mad scientists out there and they don’t really know what they’re doing,” said Greg McClung, a supervisor for the state Department of Justice in Los Angeles. “They don’t really consider the lives they’re putting at risk.”

For his master’s thesis, Justice Department supervisor Mitchel J. Brown recently surveyed his colleagues across California to see if any agencies were regularly giving blood tests to children found living at methamphetamine labs.

Of 14 children found at Butte County drug labs, five had tested positive for the presence of the potent psychoactive drug, Brown learned. And of 41 children who were not at the labs when their parents were arrested in the county, four tested positive for meth.

In other counties, including Los Angeles and Orange, agents at times call child welfare workers to lab busts. Orange County prosecutors are considering filing child endangerment charges in more cases, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Ferguson.

But Brown said his study showed that only Butte County has a systematic approach to dealing with children exposed to drug labs.

The county’s drug task force works in cooperation with prosecutors and child welfare authorities to dispatch social workers to drug labs and pursue endangerment charges against parents. Last April, the county began testing children found at the labs for the presence of drugs and other toxic chemicals.

The effort is a sharp contrast, Brown said, to other counties where busy authorities often overlook child victims.

“Agents are tested all the time, crooks are tested, and kids, we remove from labs and we give them to friends, neighbors or relatives,” said Brown, who works in Sacramento and hopes to develop a statewide protocol to address the hazards to children. “We leave them at the scene.”

Brown was moved to action three years ago by the case of a meth cooker who was married with five children and had manufactured chemicals at his Calaveras County house for years. The children, 3 to 15, all suffered severe liver damage, most pronounced in the youngest child, according to Brown’s study. The home and the land under the house were contaminated.

Jim Hall, a Department of Justice chemist in Riverside who has seen more than 250 labs in his 15-year career, estimates children were present in about 75% of the labs he encountered.

“I see toys. I see food. I see all sorts of stuff that are associated to children, often mixed in with the dope,” Hall said.

Often, toxic chemicals fill saucers, jars and other containers that may have also been used to store food, he said.

“I have to believe that there are people cooking every day,” said Gary Hudson, a supervisor with the state Department of Justice Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement who heads the meth lab enforcement team in Orange County.

“It’s the exact same hazards and the exact same danger, no matter what the size of the lab. If it blows, it blows. A fire’s a fire. If it burns, if you breathe phosphene vapor or acid vapor, the smallest amount will damage your lungs.”

Hudson’s team has busted more than a dozen labs in Orange County since the beginning of September, and he estimates at least three times that many are going undetected.

Years ago, the methamphetamine trade began among outlaw biker gangs, but in the past few years prosecutors say the manufacturing largely has been taken over by Mexican drug families. Many cooks operate in the state’s farm belt and remote desert areas.

In more urban areas of Southern California, the operations are smaller, and investigators say the cooks are more mobile, moving from motel to apartment to trailer park and sometimes leaving behind a trail of poison.

The cooking process alone is sometimes enough to contaminate a room--a disturbing prospect for motel guests who unknowingly check in after a cooker had checked out.

“If it’s cooking and it’s very volatile, it can be very, very hazardous,” said Robert E. Merryman, environmental health director for the Orange County Health Care Agency.

“There’s a certain amount of off-gassing that come into the air,” Merryman said. “When it gets into the carpets and drapes, this could be very hazardous to someone who is renting the room and goes to sleep breathing that.”

Fumes from the bungled experiments of amateur cooks also can harm bystanders and neighbors in close quarters.

In an Anaheim motel, the scraggly man was in Room 115 for less than two hours when the manager saw smoke. By the time she and a clerk got to the door and inhaled the toxic fumes, the occupants were gone.

What remained that September evening was all too familiar to law enforcement: reddish-yellow stains on the floor, sink, walls and curtains. Agents sent the hotel employees complaining of throat pain to the hospital. County health officials taped off the unit and more than a month later, the room is still unusable. Investigators said they found receipts that showed the speed cook had been motel hopping for months.

The toxic waste products often find their way into the environment, where they can present an immediate threat to children, although over time they are considered less dangerous. Cooks often are careless in handling chemicals, and byproducts typically end up down the drain or tossed out a back door, investigators said. For every lab, there’s an average of five pounds of waste, said Ed Machado, who heads the state Department of Justice’s clandestine lab program for the state.

“If they’ve cooked for a period of time, guess where it is? It’s thrown on the lawn or in the drain,” Machado said.

Up until July, the Department of Justice assumed the burden of cleaning up labs, but the department could not afford to haul waste for every agency that asked for help, and complained that toxic cleanup wasn’t a job for law enforcement.

The state Legislature quietly transferred the responsibility to Cal-EPA’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, putting the cleanup task in the hands of an agency that normally handles hazardous waste matters. The change was also meant to ensure that even small police departments could get the job done, said Karl Palmer, chief of the agency’s emergency response unit.

But less than half the anticipated funding materialized, and the state agency is fast outpacing its $1.3-million annual cleanup budget for the entire state, Palmer said. The money may run out well before the end of the state’s budget year in June. In addition, a general fund cleanup account created by state legislation, that was supposed to receive revenue from seizures and other sources, has never had any money deposited in it.

Since July, the state has cleaned up 230 meth labs across California at a cost of $711,000. By next summer, the state expects to have cleaned more than 650 of the labs. That doesn’t include cases handled by federal authorities.

But the work is not done once the chemicals are hauled away.

Spills and fumes can seep into walls, wood and concrete, creating low-level contamination that cannot be removed with regular household cleaners, according to a Cal-EPA report released in 1993 that included recommendations for improving the way the state handles drug labs. For those who unknowingly move into a former lab, that possibility is unsettling.

A pregnant woman who lives with her husband and a 16-month-old boy in a Huntington Beach apartment where a methamphetamine lab was discovered in June said the place was a mess when the family first moved in.

The woman said she found burn holes on the carpet the size of soup bowls and numerous stains on the floor. She said she had to scrub down the kitchen and living room with household cleaners to get rid of the blotches. She didn’t know that a lab was there before she moved in, and only found out after talking to neighbors.

“I should have been told,” said the 27-year-old woman, who requested anonymity out of concerns for her family’s safety. “My son could have dropped a cup and reached down for it, and there could be [methamphetamine] residue. That’s not the kind of thing that I want for my son.”

Removing any contamination that remains still falls to local agencies. One Los Angeles County lab in Lawndale, where occupants had cooked for more than six months, remained so contaminated a year later that officials would only enter in full protective clothing. They recommended razing it.

In Orange County, health care agency workers now join drug investigators on meth lab busts to assess what follow-up needs to be done.

The proliferation of meth labs has created an unprecedented marriage of law enforcement and environmental health agencies. Those agencies, officials concede, do not always share the same goals--or the same views on cleaning up.

When the Department of Justice handled disposal, agents often tried to take away everything that was contaminated, even electrical cords, Machado said.

“We didn’t want someone to pick something up unknowingly and get a chemical burn,” he said. “It could have red phosphorus on it. You could touch it and rub your eye.”

But Palmer of Cal-EPA said his agency removes only items that are “grossly contaminated,” leaving glassware and heating mantles with toxic residue behind to be taken to a regular landfill. “We don’t want to add a bunch of cost for something that doesn’t appear to be a real threat,” Palmer said.

That, Machado said, often leaves law enforcement to deal with the leftovers. Agents have sometimes left items from labs in a property owner’s trash bin, he said.

“We’ve gotten more than uncomfortable with that because that’s not right,” he said. “Just because it looks clean doesn’t mean it’s not contaminated. But we can’t take it all because we don’t have anywhere to put it. We’re really not garbage collectors.”

Enter landlords like Espinoza, who Palmer’s agency contends are technically liable for picking up the cleanup tab under laws normally aimed at corporate polluters with deep pockets.

The Department of Justice did not bill property owners, but Palmer said Cal-EPA has decided to do so, and that the first bills are expected to go out soon.

A cleanup typically runs about $3,200, but can go much higher depending on the size of the drug lab and the type of chemicals involved. A recent San Bernardino County cleanup cost $64,000, and a Stanislaus County lab cleanup ran $57,000 because a fire left toxic chemicals swirling in the soggy mess created by fire department hoses.

Even labs where cooking has not yet begun can prove potentially hazardous and costly to clean largely because of the high cost of chemical disposal.

At an Anaheim house across from a day care center, the state’s contractor recently hauled away 60 pounds of volatile red phosphorus, 18 gallons of hydriodic acid, contaminated glassware, and a highly flammable five-foot cylinder of lung-searing hydrochloric gas.

The bill: $10,000.

State officials said they plan to send it to Robert Inge, the 75-year-old owner of the rental home. Inge was incredulous.

“I lost money and the place is still vacant,” he said, noting that he already has spent more than $1,000 to repair damage to the house.

“Why should I have to pay more money? I had no way of knowing what they were going to do.”

Rather than billing property owners, Palmer said he would prefer to charge the drug makers, but they often are transient cookers who elude police. Those who are arrested rarely can afford to pay.

Property-owner groups have begun to complain to Cal-EPA about the new billing practice and some investigators worry the strategy could have negative consequences. Landlords and motel managers may be reluctant to cooperate with authorities, and the number of cookers who already slip away could increase, Hudson said.

“How many motel managers are going to come to us and say, ‘What do I need to do to clean up?”’ he said. “They’ll come in and see the chemicals, and down the toilet or into the trash they’ll go.”

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Addressing Cleanup

Here’s a partial list of the methamphetamine labs busted in Orange County this year:

Jan. 6

* Address: House, 500 block of Joann Street, Costa Mesa; resident smelled lab and led agents to it

Seized: Seven gallons of meth oil

****

Feb. 2

* Address: Apartment, 300 block of West Cliffwood Avenue, Anaheim; ephedrine extraction lab

* Address: Apartment, 11700 block of Sage Street, Garden Grove; ephedrine extraction lab

Seized: Ephedrine extraction equipment, handguns, assault rifles and pistol

****

Feb. 21

* Address: House, 12700 block of Buaro Street, Garden Grove

Seized: Operational lab

****

Feb. 25

* Address: Apartment, 800 block of Fairview Street, Anaheim

Seized: Sixty pounds of finished ephedrine

****

April 27

* Address: Motel, 1900 block of East Katella Avenue, Orange

****

May 19

* Address: House, 200 block of Ellsworth Avenue, Anaheim; neighbors heard propane tanks in garage

****

June 1

* Address: Apartment, 12700 block of Adelle Street, Garden Grove

Seized: Ten gallons of meth oil

****

June 2

* Address: House, 11400 block of Presidio Way, Garden Grove

Seized: Operational lab

****

June 29

* Address: House, 900 block of East Romneya Drive, in Anaheim

Seized: Dismantled lab

****

July 23

* Address: House, 6300 block of San Renaldo Circle, Buena Park

Seized: Operational lab

Cleanup cost: $1,600

****

July 30

* Address: House, 1100 block of Brantford Street, Anaheim

Cleanup cost: $2,000

****

Aug. 31

* Address: Apartment, 5800 block of McFadden Avenue, Huntington Beach

Cleanup cost: $3,100

****

Aug. 31

* Address: House, 6500 block of Grand Manan Avenue, Cypress

Cleanup cost: $2,610

****

Sept. 8

* Address: House, 500 block of East Washington Avenue, Orange; suspect knocked reaction into toilet, creating toxic fumes

Seized: Two gallons, two ounces of methamphetamine, worth $61,000

****

Sept. 6

* Address: House, 23200 block of Cavanaugh Street, Lake Forest

Cleanup cost: $3,056

****

Sept. 14

* Address: Motel, 5600 block of Lincoln Avenue

Seized: Two gallons, one ounce, worth $49,000

Cleanup cost: $1,500

****

Sept. 20

* Address: House, 10000 block of Perdido Street, Anaheim, across from a day-care center

Seized: Hydrochlorine gas, 60 pounds red phosphorus, 18 gallons of hydriodic acid

Cleanup cost: $10,000

****

Sept. 20

* Address: House, 1300 block of Diamond Street, Anaheim

Seized: One gallon of meth oil, worth $32,000

Cleanup cost: $1,800

****

Sept. 21

* Address: Storage locker, 4200 block of Westminster Avenue, Santa Ana

Cleanup cost: $1,185

****

Sept. 26

* Address: Trailer park, 9600 block of Westminster Boulevard, Garden Grove

Seized: Meth lab chemicals stored under a trailer

Cleanup cost: $7,600

****

Sept. 27

* Address: Motel, 1200 block of North Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim

Seized: Iodine, hydriodic acid and red phosphorus

****

Sept. 29

* Address: Apartment, 6400 block of Warner Avenue, Huntington Beach

****

Sept. 29

* Address: Motel, 400 block of Victoria Street, Costa Mesa

****

Sept. 29

* Address: Business, 8400 block of Cerritos Avenue, Stanton; chemicals ignited

Seized: Meth lab and explosives

Cleanup cost: $3,950

****

Oct. 11

* Address: House, 12100 block of Quatro Avenue, Garden Grove

Seized: Five gallons, one ounce of meth oil, worth $200,500

Cleanup cost: $1,950

****

Oct. 12

* Address: Apartment, 100 block of El Portal, San Clemente

Seized: Pseudoephedrine supermarket purchases, muriatic acid, pint of meth oil, red phosphorus

Cleanup cost: $2,400

Sources: State Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; Cal-EPA, Department of Toxic Substances Control

Researched by LEE ROMNEY / Los Angeles Times

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Toxic Mix

Here are some of the most dangerous chemicals commonly found at illicit methamphetamine labs:

* Ephedrine: Moderately toxic by ingestion; known to cause allergy sensitization

* Iodine: Poisonous by ingestion and inhalation

* Hydriodic acid: Poisonous by ingestion and inhalation; corrosive and poisonous irritant to skin, eyes and mucous membranes

* Red phosphorous: Poisonous and highly flammable; easily ignited with the smallest disturbances.

****

THE FINAL PRODUCT

Methamphetamine: Drug commonly known as speed or crank; a stimulant with psychoactive effects. After cooking, traces of final product often are left behind on walls and other surfaces. Health concern is especially high for young children who may come into contact with residue on uncleaned surfaces.

Source: Cal-EPA Department of Toxic Substances Control, 1993 report on clandestine drug labs

Researched by LEE ROMNEY / Los Angeles Times

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Speed Cleaning

Hauling away toxic chemicals from meth labs is an expensive business. During the first four months of the 1995-96 budget year, 230 cleanups cost a total of $711,000. Here’s the statewide trend of labs cleaned and the cost, in millions:

*--*

Labs Cost 1994-95 431 $2.0

*--*

Sources: State Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, Cal-EPA, Department of Toxic Substances Control

Researched by LEE ROMNEY / Los Angeles Times