Response Teams for Tunnel Woes Urged

Stung by community outrage over sinking buildings along a North Hollywood street where subway tunnels are being dug, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Friday that he is creating a team of trouble shooters to respond swiftly to such crises with repairs and cash.

Joseph A. Drew said that if the MTA board approves, the teams of specialists in structural engineering, construction, law, insurance, public affairs and quality assurance would report directly to him. They would have broad powers to make repairs and to secure immediate payments for owners of damaged property along MTA construction routes, he said.

“I want a leadership program in place that will make big and small decisions instantly to prevent problems from getting out of control,” he said.

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Speaking of the organization’s slow response in mid-March to the owner of El Sombrero, a popular nightclub on Lankershim Boulevard shut down by city building inspectors after its floor sank 15 inches in the wake of subway tunneling 60 feet below, he added: “If a business is yellow-tagged, I would never again want to wait three to four weeks to decide on a course of action.”

MTA board member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky hailed the proposal as an indication that the MTA is turning over a new leaf in its treatment of the public, calling it a whole new approach that will replace bureaucratic obstinacy with compassion.

“In the past, we have just let people hang, let our attorneys handle them, string them out and hope they go away,” he said. “That has to stop.”

Yaroslavsky said he has been prompting Drew to bring such a plan to the board and predicted that it would sail through.

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Drew said he would soon ask the board for approval to create what he called “problem-solving action teams” made up of employees with expertise in an array of fields.

“Having the right people look at problems quickly will result in immediate decision making,” he said.

Drew said that the size of the problem would dictate the teams’ authority, and that he could envision such a team declaring a problem so serious that he might call a special session of the agency’s board of directors to deal with it immediately at the highest level.

“I am willing to be inconvenienced myself before I’m willing to let the people on Lankershim Boulevard be inconvenienced,” he said.

Although the policies and financing for problem-solving teams have yet to be finalized or approved by the board of directors, the mission already appears to have had a result.

Yaroslavsky said the MTA would grant $5,000 to El Sombrero owner Isabel Lopez today to help her pay bills until the authority repairs the building at a cost that could range from $20,000 to $100,000.

Noting that the transportation agency has not yet determined whether subway tunneling is at fault for the damage, he added:

“You can always go after people who are at fault later, but you need to keep people in business while the dickering is going back and forth.”

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The MTA has not yet determined how much money it would set aside for payment to business people and property owners. Yaroslavsky observed, however, that $16 million budgeted for so-called construction mitigation in Hollywood might be better spent on helping businesses there rather than for landscaping later.

Serious issues of liability have also not been worked out, Yaroslavsky said.

Officials at the agency have expressed regret and embarrassment over recent news reports of damage to more than a dozen businesses and properties along the Lankershim route of the Metro Rail Red Line. Several businesses, from a car dealership to a Cajun restaurant, have closed because of the damage, ranging from cracked walls to broken water mains.

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On Thursday, a civil engineering expert appointed by Mayor Richard Riordan to review MTA methods publicly criticized the agency for excavating two tunnels in North Hollywood with what he called out-of-date digging machines.

The expert, Dan Eisenstein of the University of Alberta, said the type of machine chosen is seldom used anywhere in the world in the kind of loose, sandy soil found in the San Fernando Valley.

He said the $2.5-million machines, known as open-face shields, do not allow operators enough control over loose soil at the tunnel face. Over a period of time ranging from a few days to a few months, dirt that is supporting buildings above the tunnel slips into voids created by such machines, he said.

That can cause concrete slabs to sink, walls to crack and roofs to buckle, he said, although he did not specifically attribute the problems on Lankershim to the MTA tunneling--an issue still unresolved.

MTA board member James Cragin said news of damage to buildings along Lankershim has shocked some of his colleagues who believed that such problems had ended after the uproar over sinkages along the subway construction route in Hollywood in 1994 and 1995.