Lopez Canyon Closure Ends City’s Long Haul as Owner of Landfills

The last city owned dump accepted its last load of garbage Monday, pushing Los Angeles into a new and uncertain era of waste management.

During its 21-year life span, the Lopez Canyon landfill was regularly buffeted by protests from neighbors in the northeast San Fernando Valley and dogged by controversies over gaseous emissions that occasionally sent workers to the hospital. In the end, the dump, civilization’s least-respected handmaiden, closed without a whimper or a bang.

Instead, the sound was the familiar rumble of city owned trash trucks depositing their last loads of broken Barbies, unread junk mail, and the lawn trimmings of another Southern California summer. Buried somewhere in the detritus may be a winning lottery ticket, a misplaced diamond ring, or--this is Southern California after all--a body or two.

“There’s a good quantity of the history of the Valley in this place,” said Diane Weber, 33, a front office worker at Lopez Canyon who was organizing a party to be held today commemorating the closure and featuring pastrami sandwiches and cake.

“It’s been a good place to work.”

But those waxing nostalgic about the passing of an era in the history of Los Angeles were badly outnumbered by those celebrating the closure of a facility that had been a target for years of community protests over noise and odors.

Councilman Richard Alarcon, whose district contains Lopez Canyon, and who had made opposition to the dump a key issue, asserted that shuttering Lopez Canyon will convince people in the modest working-class area that their voices are heard downtown.

“This has been a rallying cry for the northeast Valley,” he said.

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) said closure of Lopez not only keeps a long-held and once-broken promise, but will push the city into a new era in which reuse and recycling replace refuse. Or as Katz put it: “We can’t keep taking it out there somewhere.”

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That logic was lost on a pair of trash haulers who dumped their loads Monday and stood around watching other trucks with their beds tilted at 45-degree angles.

“Say goodbye to Lopez Canyon,” sighed one of the men, who identified himself only as John.

“I’ve been coming up here for 10 years,” said Carl, John’s partner. “We’re definitely going to miss it. This is our dump. It’s the only one the city’s got. Now they’re going to close it before it’s full.”

The two men reminisced about their adventures in waste handling. Carl recalled the time he picked up a load in Reseda and was chased by a frantic jeweler who said his wife had accidentally thrown out a box full of cash receipts.

“He said it was about $100,000,” Carl said.

Carl couldn’t allow the man to search the truck, so the jeweler followed Carl on his route all day. “We even stopped and ate lunch together,” Carl said. “Finally we got up here to the landfill, and he found” the money.

Carl got a $50 reward.

Now begins the process of capping the 392-acre dump with a layer of soil and compacted clay. When they’re done four years from now, the former dump will resemble a park with native plants and grasses.

Lopez Canyon opened in 1975. As other city-owned dumps were closed, more and more of the city’s garbage was sent to Lopez Canyon. At the end, 80% of the city’s total of more than 1 million tons of trash per year was dumped there.

“For gosh sakes, it was a long time coming!” exulted Phyllis Hines, land use chairwoman of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn. Hines recalled the early days of the struggle against the dump.

“It didn’t really become too obnoxious until 1979 or so,” Hines said. That was the year dirty diapers and other landfill trash washed down Kagel Canyon in a storm.

In 1982, another trash flow washed down the canyon with the winter rains. “That was when the problems really started,’ she said.

Still, despite the past and the long battle with the city to close the dump, Hines does not harbor any hard feelings toward the dump’s 71 employees.

“I think they did their honest best . . . but a landfill is a monster nobody can control. It burps up gas, and you never know what kind of putrefied this or that is going to appear.”

Problems with gas emissions added to the furor. In 1989, a landfill supervisor was hospitalized for 11 days after being overcome by hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas, while installing a gas collection system.

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In August 1993, three workers were overcome by methane gas fumes and were treated at a clinic.

Some council members were wary of closing Lopez Canyon, despite the outcry in the northeast Valley. They cited a study that showed it would cost $8 million more a year to transport the city’s trash to private landfills.

Katz and Alarcon questioned the veracity of those figures. And whatever the cost, Katz said, the city’s word was at stake. He said the city made a deal with residents five year ago to close Lopez Canyon.

“This city ought to keep its word,” he said.

At first, it didn’t. Amid allegations of betrayal, the City Council voted earlier this year to keep the dump open until July 1. “There is no justice in this hall,” shouted Mary Edwards, past president of the North Valley Coalition, when the council voted.

In the wake of the closure at Lopez Canyon, the City Council has decided to spend $65.4 million to send the trash to Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley and Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Granada Hills.

Despite the victory at Lopez Canyon, Alarcon doubts the outcome will quell secessionist fever in the Valley. “My sense is, people in the San Fernando Valley feel a lot more has to be done before they feel a complete sense of equity,” he said.

He also denied that closing Lopez is an example of “knee-jerk NIMBY-ism.”

It is “the threshold to a new era” of more responsible waste management policies, including recycling and reuse, he said.

Even some of the workers at Lopez Canyon credited residents with improving conditions at the dump.

There was no methane gas collection system when Turner L. Johnson arrived in 1988 to supervise the dump. “But the citizens started calling our hand on things.” Indeed, residents pressured the city to control noise, dust and the inescapable odor.

“This place was a dump when I came here,” he said. “Now, it’s a landfill.”

Correction. Now it’s a memory.

John Johnson is a Times staff writer and Tim May is a special correspondent.

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Lopez Canyon Closing

Lopez Canyon landfill closed on Monday, after nearly two decades of community protest. The 392- acre dump was the last city- owned landfill and took in about 80% of the city’s trash.

Lopez Canyon Dump

* Opened 1975

* Trash per day: 3,700 tons, enough to fill 370 trash trucks.

* Total trash since opened: 16.5 million tons, enough to fill about 1.7 million trash trucks.

Source: Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation