Trash Truck Repair System Is Criticized : City Hall: After the fatal accident involving a school bus, two council members suggest maintenance be moved from General Services to Bureau of Sanitation. Meanwhile, 100 garbage vehicles remain idled.

As trash collection was delayed in many parts of the city for another day Monday, city officials suggested that an overhaul of the system for repairing the city’s fleet of garbage trucks may be necessary to prevent malfunctions like the one that led to the deaths of two 8-year-old boys on a school bus last week.

City Council members Richard Alarcon and Rita Walters grilled an array of city officials from the Bureau of Sanitation and the Department of General Services for nearly two hours at a special meeting about a long-range response to the accident.

They noted that the driver of the ill-fated truck reported a serious problem with it Tuesday night and that a supervisor who works for General Services failed to either get the truck fixed or place it on the “hold list”--preventing it from being used Wednesday. Consequently, they asked staff to analyze moving the truck mechanics from General Services into the Bureau of Sanitation.

“We’re losing something when we have a sanitation employee driving the vehicle and someone from another department fixing it,” Alarcon said. “This driver, by say ing “ram broke,” figured out what was wrong with it and somebody didn’t respect that. . . . It seems to me that results would be better” if they worked for the same department.

Meanwhile, city officials said drivers worked overtime throughout the weekend to catch up from last week’s delays, but fewer than half the trucks had been cleared to return to the road by Monday afternoon. More than 100 trucks similar to the one that caused the fatal crash were grounded for more thorough review and maintenance. Pickups were slowed throughout the city, particularly in West Los Angeles and near downtown, and those scheduled north of Mulholland Drive and east of Woodley Road were canceled altogether.

“I have a major public health problem on my hands. If I don’t get those trucks inspected, and if I don’t get them back on the street, I’m going to have rotting trash out there,” said fleet director Alvin Blain. “It’s very important that these trucks are safe so they don’t hurt anybody, but it’s also important that we get the trash picked up.”

At a special meeting of the Los Angeles City Council Public Works Committee, officials said they were not sure how long the delays would last--or how they would pay overtime costs. Dozens of drivers have been sitting idle in yards waiting for vehicles to be repaired and then have worked into the evening and on weekends to catch up on their routes.

“This would be a budget-buster,” Bureau of Sanitation Director Del Biagi told Alarcon, who chairs the public works committee and represents the East Valley area that is hardest hit by the delay. “There is no slack in our budget to pick this up.”

Assistant City Atty. Christopher Westhoff, who is overseeing much of the city’s response to the tragic accident, said the city is exercising “an overabundance of caution” to prevent the malfunction from reoccurring.

Francisco Mata and Brian Serrano, third-graders at Glen Alta Elementary, were killed Wednesday when the hydraulic trash-compacting system in truck No. 70 broke and a 12-foot piston broke through the side of the truck and struck an oncoming school bus. Westhoff said the accident occurred because the hydraulic arms that power the compactor somehow broke off from the blades, then rotated inside the truck, punching through the side when the system was turned on.

Ontario-based manufacturer Amrep Corp. is helping a city task force reinforce the hydraulic system by adding a heavy metal bolt like the one used in later models of the truck. The 124 trucks most like No. 70 are each undergoing at least a three-hour inspection. The packer is being removed, steam-cleaned and either repaired or replaced. City officials said they planned to do a similar review every 90 days because of the accident.

“When you have a bunch of metal that moves around like that and you’re pushing tons of garbage, you can break things in the process. . . . Is there an inherent problem? We don’t know that yet,” said Roland Marti, president of El Segundo-based Seal Laboratories, metallurgical experts brought in by the mayor to help with the special fleet inspection.

“There have been some problems identified,” Marti said. “We have made sure that if there is a problem on any of the trucks, that none of those trucks with problems are leaving the yard.”

Marti and the city officials who hired him have not yet been able to get a close look at truck No. 70 because it is part of the California Highway Patrol investigation into the crash, but they hope to see it today.

At the hearings Monday afternoon, Alarcon and Walters also criticized procedures at the trash-truck yards, ranging from inconsistencies on how supervisors sign off on work orders to a brand-new policy implemented after the crash mandating that drivers red-tag troubled vehicles by placing a warning directly on the dashboard. Instead, they suggested, problem trucks should be parked in a segregated lot.

“This system broke down. What’s to stop that system from breaking down?” Alarcon demanded. He frequently interrupted city officials as they struggled to answer his questions, and chastised Blain several times.

“I don’t want ‘believes.’ Either you know or you don’t know,” Alarcon snapped at Blain at one point. “This is getting very convoluted,” he said later. “I can see the problems we have in reporting this.”

Walters also lashed out when Blain, Westhoff and Biagi responded to inquiries about the frequent maintenance of the Amrep trucks by saying that automated trucks are “high-maintenance” because they lift heavy loads hundreds of times a day.

“The job of the truck is to make all these lifts,” Walters pointed out sharply. “That’s what you buy them for. Why should that be a factor in maintenance?”

Somber and exhausted, the staffers offered no direct answers, but repeated their insistence that Wednesday’s crash appears to be a unique occurrence, though there have been many other nonfatal accidents involving the trash trucks, most with parked cars.

As city officials continued reconstructing how the accident happened and how to prevent its repetition, 100 mourners--including Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, Los Angeles Unified School District board member Victoria Castro and three members of the Board of Public Works--joined Mata’s grieving parents in burying their young son at St. Kevins Church on Beverly Boulevard.

Glen Alta Principal James Allen gave the Matas $400 in donations and letters from several dozen elementary school students.

Pained but composed, Luz Maria and Juan Francisco Mata and their three surviving children walked slowly behind the small casket, draped in a white embroidered sheet and decorated with roses and lilies.

“How do we understand such a terrible tragedy?” Bishop Stephen Blaire of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles asked in his eulogy. “How do we understand a beautiful young boy and his life coming to an end so quickly on Earth? We cannot understand.”

Mario Garay, the 8-year-old cousin of Serrano who suffered severe head injuries in the accident, was in stable condition at Kaiser Foundation Hospital on Monday and is expected to recover.

The LAUSD Board of Education also observed 30 seconds of silence and adjourned in honor of the dead youths on Monday, marking the first fatal accident on a school bus in the district’s history.

Board members commended about three dozen district staffers--ranging from principals to busing aides--for their heroic response to accident scene and at schools later on. Supt. Sid Thompson also offered reassurances to bus driver Humberto Ojeda, who remains on leave from the district where he has worked for eight years.

“Just remember, you did what you were supposed to do,” Thompson said. “It was truly an accident.”

Alarcon and Walters asked Westhoff to brief the entire City Council in closed session today on liability and other legal issues related to the crash. Court records show that Amrep has been a defendant in 32 lawsuits, including one involving a Los Angeles city employee.

The 1991 lawsuit, which remains unresolved, involves a city worker who was killed when the bucket of an older-style trash truck came down on his head.

“If you manufacture a product, you’re going to get sued,” Amrep’s attorney, James Reed, said in an interview last week, adding that the previous suits represent “nothing similar” to the recent accident.

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Times staff writers Amy Pyle, Richard Simon, Erin Texeira and Jean Merl also contributed to this report.