Safety Panel Not Told of Gasoline Removal at School

The Los Angeles Unified School District has removed 12,000 pounds of gasoline from the soil under a downtown elementary school, without informing either parents or the district’s own environmental safety team of the potentially hazardous situation, according to district staff.

School officials say most of the contaminants at Gratts Elementary School have been removed over the last three years and that an air sampling conducted last weekend shows that the remaining gasoline poses no health threat to students. Because no monitoring was done before, they could not rule out that some students had been exposed to harmful chemicals, but they said they think the chances are slight.

The problem at the school, built in 1996 on a former Yellow Cab service station site west of downtown, is just one of several examples of possible toxic pollution that school officials are only now beginning to come to grips with.

Despite publicity about the issue that goes back nearly two years, officials still “don’t know the exact number” of contaminated sites, said Erik Nasarenko, spokesman for the district’s chief administrative officer.

District officials are scrambling to come up with a list of those schools. “We estimate it to be about a handful,” Nasarenko said. The district’s safety team, meanwhile, has begun quietly preparing to test an undetermined number of other schools that might have been built on contaminated land.

Despite last summer’s highly public flap over environmental problems at Jefferson Middle School and the continuing controversy over contamination at the Belmont Learning Complex construction site, members of the district’s environmental safety team have been told only in the past few weeks that several other schools, including Gratts, have equipment either to remove contamination or to protect students from potential exposure.

The environmental team was formed to ensure the safety of sites purchased for new schools, and its members did not learn until recently of Gratts or any other schools with toxic pollution.

Angelo Bellomo, the safety team’s environmental scientist, said he learned of Gratts a couple of months ago only by chance when it came up during a facilities staff meeting. The district was petitioning the Regional Water Quality Board to shut down the vapor extraction operation based on the contractor’s opinion that the cleanup had accomplished as much as it could. The 1,000 pounds of remaining hydrocarbons would dissipate and degrade, said Ulf Lindmark, president of the environmental firm that built and operates the extraction machine, in an interview.

At that point the safety team asked the district to produce a list of all schools with toxic problems and began negotiations with the water board on a plan to test all of them for student safety.

Nasarenko said the list will be complete early this week.

Since being opened, Gratts has had a vapor extraction machine tucked into the campus to remove gasoline that leaked from seven underground tanks. District safety team members said that last weekend’s tests at the school have indicated the presence of chemical solvents in some classrooms, but only at concentrations considered safe.

However, safety team officials remain concerned that the contractor operating the equipment was overseen by the district’s design and inspection unit rather than the environmental office.

“If you had a quality health and safety person watching the contractor, I would say everything is fine,” said Bellomo. “But you can’t put a maintenance person in charge.”

The safety team’s attorney, Barry Groveman, said the oversight arrangement was “a regrettable situation that is being corrected without delay.”

Groveman said testing for airborne toxins should have been done during construction of the school.

The potential for hazard was particularly acute when the vapor extraction machine broke down six months after its installation and remained sidelined for seven months.

During such a breakdown, Bellomo said, it would have been prudent to analyze classroom air because vapors in the soil could migrate upward into classrooms.

Lindmark said his firm was responsible for cleaning up the soil, and was not hired to monitor air quality on the campus.

However, he said there was little danger because gasoline vapors are heavier than air and would tend to migrate downward. Children were further protected, he said, by a plastic liner under portions of the school.

The issue of potential toxic exposure of schoolchildren has received intense scrutiny for two years since state officials prevented the opening of Jefferson Middle School in South Los Angeles for a year after learning that it was being built across the street from an abandoned chrome plating factory.

Soon after opening last summer, Jefferson faced the possibility of closure again after state officials disclosed that a vapor extraction system on the site had frequently been shut down because of malfunctions.

The disclosures led Supt. Ruben Zacarias to create the safety team and seek certification from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control that the campus was safe. After an initial finding that the campus was safe, further tests are being done to examine potential long-range hazards.

In the meantime, because of the past problems with the Gratts vapor extraction system, the team decided to conduct tests June 11-13 at the campus on West 3rd Street.

“This is an example of the safety team being proactive,” Groveman said.

The testing found a number of chemicals at levels similar to those in ambient air throughout Los Angeles County, Bellomo said.

Two chemicals--methyl ethyl ketone and 1,4-dichlorobenzene--were detected at higher levels but within the state’s safety range, he said.

Bellomo said those solvents are in common use and probably had come from elsewhere in the neighborhood.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), a harsh critic of the district’s environmental practices, objected to the secrecy of the testing at Gratts.

“It doesn’t surprise me that the tests came back OK, but what surprises me is that they had to be done at all, and that they were done so quietly,” Hayden said. “They did it over the weekend when students were not in school. The parents weren’t informed and the public wasn’t informed.”