Words That Can Save Lives : Bus tragedy shows that L.A. must remove barriers to interdepartmental communication

Efficiency experts in Los Angeles city government have been pushing the idea that separating operations from maintenance would save money. The notion certainly looks good on paper. However, as the fatal accident involving a city garbage truck and a school bus earlier this month illustrates, without proper interdepartmental checks and communication, such an approach could have a detrimental effect on public safety.

Francisco Mata and Brian Serrano were killed Dec. 7 when the school bus in which they were riding was hit by a compacting piston that burst from within the garbage truck.

On the eve of the accident, a supervisor should have flagged a driver’s paper form that pointed to a problem with the piston ram. Paperwork should have been sent immediately across the maintenance yard to the Department of General Services, the city agency responsible for fixing vehicles. Tragically for the two 8-year-olds killed in the bus, no one walked a football field’s length to deliver a work order to General Services mechanics.

In reaction, the city government has made changes that include placing red “Do not operate” tags on unsafe trucks. Also,it now requires signatures of both a General Services supervisor and a Department of Sanitation supervisor to clear a repaired vehicle.

That’s a good beginning. But the mayor and the City Council, working with city agencies and General Services, must devise a better system to uncover any pattern that poses a public danger. Mechanics and drivers, for instance, had complained about problems with the trash-packing mechanism on trucks manufactured by Ontario-based Amrep Corp. There were two documented instances in which pistons broke free of packing mechanisms and shot out through the sides of trucks.

As part of an ongoing effort to reduce costs, the Richard Riordan administration is examining whether General Services should do the work on the fleet vehicles of the Police, Fire, Water and Power, Parks and Recreation, Airport and Harbor departments. Before the city moves in that direction it must answer some hard questions about whether General Services--with its cuts in budgets and staffing--is up to the task.

Given the fact that various mechanical problems with the trash trucks did not come to light until the two boys died, there are doubts that the city’s many operations and maintenance units were adequately communicating among themselves. Now they are. And now the city has a moral obligation to make sure that no future threat to the public’s safety is overlooked.