Roughing It Urban-Style at Dockweiler State Beach

To enjoy the slow rhythms of the Pacific Ocean, RV campers at Dockweiler State Beach must overlook a few things.

For one, they have got to ignore a backdrop of cranes and smokestacks from nearby utility plants. Then there’s those whiffs of rotting sewage that come with an offshore wind--and the deafening scream of 747s taking off overhead from Los Angeles International Airport.

On Sunday, the campers even had to look past plummeting chunks of jet engine, as flaming scraps of a KLM 747 came hurtling down into a heap of metal on the sand.

“It had that roar you could hear, right there,” camper Jim Levitt said Monday, pointing up and pausing 10 seconds for the overpowering sound of yet another jet to pass. “Then it had this 40 cycle tone, like a propeller, and it started puking parts.”

But Levitt, like others, said the incident did not faze him. He will keep camping at Dockweiler because he enjoys its gritty mix of marine beauty and urban jungle--even if that means a sea gull getting stuffed through a jet engine, causing scrap metal to rain onto an otherwise quiet beach.

A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said Monday that investigators still have not conclusively determined what caused the engine to come apart, but “we are focusing on the possibility of a bird strike.” After the burst of flames and debris Sunday afternoon, the four-engine plane circled over the ocean for an hour to dump fuel and safely landed at 6 p.m. with no injuries.

The campground at Dockweiler is just off the flight path, and plenty of campers saw the engine catch fire.

“I was going, ‘Oh, please don’t crash, please don’t crash,’ ” said Donna Osborne, 40, who has lived the last 22 months in two campers on Dockweiler with her husband and eight children. “I just didn’t want to see a plane go down.”

With 118 adjacent sites, the recreational vehicle campground at the end of Imperial Boulevard is the only place with electrical and water hookups on the Los Angeles County coast south of Malibu, officials say. The county manages the area under contract from the state.

Every couple weeks, the Osbornes--who were laid off from their jobs and lost their apartment--leave the campground for a day because a rule bans continuous living on the beach. But even with their forced biweekly sojourn and nagging water pollution problems, they say life on Dockweiler is sweet.

“Sometimes the water gets real bad after a rain,” said Gerry Osborne, Donna’s husband. “The foam just sits on the beach and doesn’t really go away. And when you jump in the water, you almost feel it itch.

“But where else can you live for $800 a month right on the beach?”

Straddling the beach is a sewage treatment plant, a power plant and an oil refinery. The airport flight pattern crosses above, and oil tankers sit just offshore. Still, the campground usually has an 80% occupancy rate, said Kenneth Johnson, spokesman for the county Department of Beaches and Harbors.

While some travelers are sorely disappointed upon arrival after reading about the area in guidebooks, others prefer the convenience of Dockweiler to the sycamore-laden canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. Dixie McGowan, 62, comes from Baldwin Park with her husband to use the bicycle trail that stretches from Playa del Rey to Redondo Beach.

“There’s other campgrounds, but they’re usually so crowded you can’t get in,” she said, eating lunch in her camper Monday. “It’s really nice to bike here.”

They say they have gotten used to the jets, and actually find the environment peaceful. Between the thunderous takeoffs, wind chimes and crumbling surf softly reign. The beach is wide and white and was still unblemished by footprints Monday afternoon after being raked clean in the morning. There are few people on most summer weekdays.

For “full-timers”--year-round recreational vehicle users--Dockweiler is just one more stop on the circuit. Two months ago, Cynthia Munday, 56, and her live-in nurse cruised down from Ventura in a rusty 1973 Calypso camper--with pink, lavender and green stripes.

Munday has multiple sclerosis and likes to sit under the awning with her pit bull, Willie, smelling the sea breeze. “About six years ago, I decided I’m not going to just sit in an apartment and look out the windows,” she said.

At her side is a specially designed wheelchair with fat tires made for off-road sand use. Her nurse, Keith Loree, 35, pushes her for strolls down the beach.

When she first moved here, she awoke one night to a foul smell from the treatment plant. “I thought it was the sewer in the motor home, so I told [Loree] to put some bleach in the holding tank,” she said. It didn’t work, and she soon realized it was one of the area’s own quirks of personality.

Now, she’s contemplating splitting her time between Dockweiler and Mexico. “This is just wonderful,” she said. “just sitting outside.”

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Times staff writer Anne-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story.