Owner Promises to Begin Cleaning Up Rubble Pile

The owner of a rubble pile that residents in Huntington Park call “the mountain of death” will begin removing the debris within 60 days, an attorney for the owner said Wednesday.

The 375,000-ton mountain of debris consists mostly of chunks of the Santa Monica Freeway damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Sam Chew, the owner of a defunct concrete recycling firm in Huntington Park, had planned to crush the three-story mountain of concrete and sell it as road base or for other commercial uses but has yet to do so.

Residents of a nearby neighborhood have complained for years that dust and grit from the heap have caused health problems. They call the pile la montana de la muerte.

An attorney for Chew promised to begin the cleanup Wednesday after Chew lost the latest round of legal maneuvering in a federal bankruptcy court.

For three years, Huntington Park and environmental groups have been trying to force Chew to remove the rubble. The city declared the property a public nuisance in 1996.

All legal efforts against Chew were put on hold when he filed for bankruptcy in February. On Wednesday, however, federal bankruptcy Judge Alan Ahart cleared the way for a San Francisco-based environmental group called Communities for a Better Environment to sue Chew for violations of the federal Clean Water Act.

Chew’s attorney, Levi Reuben Uku, told Ahart that Chew believes the rubble heap is worth $3 million.

Environmentalists “want to take a very valuable asset and just dump it,” he said.

Beatrice Wong, a staff attorney for Communities for a Better Environment, urged Ahart to allow her group to proceed with the lawsuit, claiming water runoff from the pile is a threat to the area’s ground water.

“Mr. Chew has done nothing for three years to effectuate the cleanup,” she said.

Chew did not appear at the hearing.

Although Ahart cleared the way for the lawsuit, Uku said the ruling was moot because Chew was already planning to move heavy equipment onto the site within two months to begin the cleanup.

Chew’s critics are skeptical of the promises to begin cleanup.

“Sam Chew has been telling the city and everyone else in the community that he is going to clean up la montana for many years and he hasn’t,” said Cesar Zaldivar Motts, a spokesman for state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier), whose district includes the rubble heap.