Supervisors Call for Tunnel Safety Probe

Los Angeles County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Mike Antonovich on Monday asked the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to investigate the safety of San Fernando Valley subway construction after The Times on Sunday reported potential dangers to the tunneling crews.

The supervisors, who are also MTA board members, also asked the authority’s chief executive, Joseph A. Drew, to consider stationing full-time safety representatives at all construction sites on the Red Line, which will go between downtown and North Hollywood.

Yaroslavsky further asked Drew in a letter to consider fines or withholding payments from contractors who do not follow the MTA’s safety guidelines. In the letter, the supervisor added that he feared that a contractor willing to cut corners on workers’ health will also cut corners on the construction work, putting the long-term quality of the project in jeopardy.

In the Sunday article, a reporter described a visit to twin subway tunnels being excavated by Traylor Bros.-Frontier-Kemper in Studio City. The reporter witnessed spotty use of personal protective gear, a diesel front loader that spewed excessive levels of carbon monoxide and diesel soot, a ventilation unit that in one instance blew noxious air toward workers, an overloaded personnel-lifting cage and a medical technician working as a gas tester without a license.

An official of Cal/OSHA, the state’s workplace safety agency, said those conditions would be considered violations of state labor law if witnessed by one of the agency’s investigators.

MTA construction executive Stan Phernambucq said Monday that the article misrepresented the MTA’s commitment to worker health, saying that “safety is priority No. 1” for the authority.

“You hold the line on safety, and everything follows from that,” Phernambucq said.

MTA safety chief Dan Jackson said the authority has already assigned a single safety representative for the Traylor Bros. construction work, as Yaroslavsky urged. He acknowledged that the safety engineer’s efforts are divided between different ends of the job that are separated by 2 1/2 miles of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Jackson also said that the authority had not found any written record of carbon monoxide levels in the tunnel exceeding legal limits. He said the medical technician was a trainee gas tester, although he acknowledged that Cal/OSHA does not recognize trainees as certified testers.

Yaroslavsky said he was appalled at the attitude of the Studio City tunneling contractor toward worker safety and that he believed putting contractors in charge of immediate supervision of safety measures, as the story described, was like “putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.”

“Rules are set in place to take discretion out of the hands of contractors,” Yaroslavsky said. “The boss in the trailer will cut corners on safety every day of the week if it takes money out of his pocket. This is a classic case of profits being put ahead of worker safety.”

Antonovich said Red Line tunneling had been “fraught with unknown obstacles and costs that are the result of either incompetence or graft. I believe there has been a deliberate attempt to cover up the cost of doing the job safely.”

Miners interviewed for the story described what they considered to be a lax attitude toward safety at the Traylor Bros. construction site.

One worker, Manny Gomez, said he had been forced to work in tunnels in which ventilation units failed to keep the level of carbon monoxide within legal limits.

“We don’t need meters to tell when we can’t breathe,” Gomez said. “Your eyes are watering, your throat is scratchy, your lungs hurt, you get a headache, you feel weak. Sometimes you can’t see because of the fumes.”