Officials Didn’t Hear of Previous Truck Mishaps

Despite two previous instances in which a bizarre mechanical failure sent a hydraulic piston bursting through the side of Los Angeles trash trucks, it took the death of two children in an accident triggered by a similar malfunction last week to bring the recurring problem to the attention of even the city’s middle managers.

Elected and appointed policymakers expressed outrage Thursday that bureaucrats running the city’s maintenance yards apparently ignored the potential of the defect in the trash-compacting system of hundreds of trucks, simply patching up the holes in the steel side panels of the vehicles and returning them to the street instead of launching a widespread inspection of the fleet.

Members of the City Council and the Board of Public Works were similarly irked that officials at the Bureau of Sanitation and fleet operations--as well as representatives of the Ontario-based manufacturer, Amrep Corp.--maintained for days that the malfunction was a unique occurrence, when drivers and mechanics knew it had happened before.

“I would think that if a ram protrudes through a metal wall on a vehicle like this that all kinds of red flags and bells and whistles go off, and immediately call into question the design of the vehicle,” said City Councilman Richard Alarcon, who chairs the Public Works Committee and has ordered an audit of all maintenance records. “I am completely baffled how that did not get conveyed up the ladder.”

Meanwhile, trash continued to sit on curbs around the city Thursday--with more than 200 trucks grounded for inspection and repair--as the man who was driving the bus during the accident and firefighters who helped rescue the other 46 young passengers visited Glen Alta Elementary for a Christmas party with classmates of the third-graders killed in the crash.

In the East San Fernando Valley, 33 trucks scrambled to pick up four days’ worth of trash. In one Encino neighborhood trash remained at the curb for the ninth day. Other parts of the city also experienced delays. But in West Los Angeles and the Harbor area, pickups were back on schedule.

At City Hall, attention was focused on the recently disclosed incidents of previous malfunctions and the lack of coherent policies about how to handle surprises when maintaining expensive equipment.

“I hope that this would be a warning for us. The loss of life is too high a price to pay,” said Councilwoman Rita Walters, who sits on the Public Works Committee. “It’s counterintuitive that no one spoke up about it. Anyone discovering something that appears this major and certainly this unusual [should] be required to report on it immediately.”

The first confirmed incident happened more than a year ago, when then-driver Joe Zuniga was unloading truck No. 50 at the Lopez Canyon landfill in August, 1994. The second occurred in July on truck No. 13 while on a route in the Harbor district, according to Public Works Commission Vice President Frank Cardenas and Commissioner Sharon Morris.

City fleet director Alvin Blain said the East Valley yard where Zuniga worked sent truck No. 50 downtown to the city’s major-repair facility. From there, it was returned to Amrep to be fixed under the warranty, according to Blain and maintenance records.

Mike DeLeon, the supervisor whose name is on the request for warranty repairs, could not explain why he did not notify his boss.

“I don’t have any information,” DeLeon said. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long time. I don’t remember anything.” After a moment, DeLeon continued: “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even there that day.” Told that his name appears on the warranty request, he added: “If my name’s on it, I don’t know. I don’t have that information.”

Blain’s name also appears on the warranty request, in the space next to “approved by,” but the fleet director said Thursday that was just a formality and that he was never told of the problem. He acknowledged, however, that he heard last weekend that there may have been previous instances of pistons shooting through truck shells, yet said nothing about them Monday while at a Public Works Committee hearing in which Alarcon repeatedly asked if there had been previous malfunctions.

Asked whether his maintenance workers should have told someone about the problem, Blain said simply, “Yes, they should.”

“Hindsight is 20-20, that’s all I can say,” he sighed. “In this business, I think the day-to-day workings of it . . . become routine.”

Very little detail was available about the second incident because the city has not yet released the maintenance records on truck No. 13. Morris and Cardenas said the driver, whom they declined to identify, was on a neighborhood street when he heard a loud bang, got out of the cab and saw a large metal object protruding on the street side of the vehicle.

Like Zuniga, the driver called immediately to have the truck towed, and never reported it to any supervisors, they said.

“To us, as outsiders, it seems like common sense that this would be a big deal,” Morris said. “I don’t know that it’s so much a communication problem as a perception problem as to what is important enough to pass on to a higher level.”

Cardenas, who drafted a letter Thursday to the city’s 750 drivers urging them to come forward with any information about similar incidents, added: “There are a number of things that are going to have to be done differently in the future.”

But some city bureaucrats said they see nothing wrong in the way the previous incidents appear to have been handled.

Department of General Services Director Randall C. Bacon said “it’s hard to say” whether the incident should have been brought to the attention of higher-ups.

“There was no fatality involved, there was no injury involved,” said Marilyn McGuire, head of the refuse collection division. “Breakdowns happen. If it is not something that was going to injure somebody or something is going to be life-threatening, then I’m not going to find out about it.”

Times staff writer Lorenza Munoz contributed to this story