Businesses Say Subway Work Is Causing Cracks

Three weeks after a couple of subway tunnel digging machines burrowed southward past their front doors, stores and restaurants along a two-block stretch of Lankershim Boulevard are cracking up.

The owner of the El Sombrero nightclub was the first to notice, complaining to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that her dance floor had sunk five inches.

The MTA, which is building a citywide subway system, has blamed that problem on recent rains that poured down a next-door rain gutter, saturating the ground below her club.

On Wednesday, however, the owners of Cousins Country Cafe, two doors north of El Sombrero, said that cracks across its floor closed them down four months ago.

The owner of In and Out Stereo across the street says he is watching cracks spread like spider webs across his showroom floor. The owner of Jack’s Auto Repair a few feet west can now look through a crack in his back wall into the parking lot next door.

And the owner of the Pedal Shop a block south put down a throw rug to keep customers from tripping over the separation in his floor.

Each fears the fate that befell Isabel Lopez, proprietor of El Sombrero. A city building inspector slapped a yellow-tag notice on her front door, barring entry until the subsidence--which she says now measures 18 inches--is fixed.

“I need help, I’m almost on the street,” Lopez said Wednesday after appearing at the MTA’s monthly board meeting downtown to plead her case. “I’m about to lose my house, I can’t pay my bills.”

Some of the group are among the more than 1,500 Hollywood and North Hollywood merchants who have filed a $2-billion lawsuit against the MTA over damage they allege has been caused by the MTA’s subway tunneling.

John Adams, the MTA’s deputy executive officer for construction, said the damage reported by each merchant will be investigated separately by the agency’s risk-assessment team.

But he said the team has already decided on Lopez’s property: “We don’t believe it’s our problem.”

That attitude strikes fear in the heart of Amira Brooks, co-owner of the Cajun-style Country Cafe next door.

“We’re behind in all our bills. I had to take my youngest daughter out of private school, and my oldest daughter now has to send me money,” said Brooks in a soft Louisiana accent. “Every day the cracks get larger.”

Shimon Barsano, an immigrant from Israel who launched his stereo-installation business on Lankershim four years ago, said hairline cracks first appeared in his concrete floor a month ago. Now they’re up to an inch wide and extend the length of his showroom.

The coup de grace came on Tuesday, when Barsano said he heard a booming noise and discovered his water main had burst.

Next door, Jack Petrossian also has no water, and the wooden roof beams of his auto repair shop are bowed where a crack running up one wall hits the ceiling--showing “much worse damage than we had from the earthquake.”

Adams, the MTA executive, said the agency’s contractor had taken extraordinary steps to prevent settlement while boring twin 21-foot-wide tunnels 60 feet below Lankershim Boulevard.

The tunneling job was initially bid at $65 million, he said, but the tunneling firm has since received permission to order an additional $19 million in grout to create a cement arch over the tunnels to prevent the settling of soil.

“We’re always concerned about problems at businesses along our route, but we need to determine whether it’s us,” he said.

If the agency determines that it is at fault, he said, it will jack up the buildings, level the floors and rebuild the walls.