Cleanup Effort Starts at Creek in Compton

Strollers, refrigerators, a Barbie jeep, sofas, a headboard, rusting paint cans, industrial waste--all this was hoisted Wednesday out of notoriously trashy Compton Creek, where a city official has accused the federal government of environmental racism.

Using jail inmate crews on work detail, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department launched its first attack on the illegal dumping in the four-mile stretch of the creek that bisects Compton. City and county public works agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers also pitched in for what is expected to be a two- or three-week job.

Questions remained, however, about why the Sheriff’s Department was leading a cleanup of what is supposed to be a federally maintained part of the creek. The corps characterized the 7 a.m. media event as a public relations ambush by the Sheriff’s Department, which last year took over policing Compton amid worry that such a big agency could not respond to local concerns.

“They failed to inform us,” said an angry Frank-Otto Egler, public affairs director for the corps in Los Angeles.

Sheriff’s Capt. Cecil W. Rhambo, commander of the department’s Compton substation, was in charge of the operation and explained to reporters that Sheriff Lee Baca felt the need to “just do it” after learning of the creek’s condition.

“It’s apparently been a problem for a number of years, and Sheriff Baca’s philosophy is, ‘We’d rather charge ahead and ask for forgiveness later than to wait for permission,’ ” Rhambo said. “All we really did was ask for permission to go down and clean it ourselves.”

County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke helped provide the resources for the Sheriff’s Department effort, he said.

The channel is about 20 miles long and runs through several cities north and south of Compton en route to the Los Angeles River and then the ocean. But no other community has the shocking level of dumping and vandalism that Compton endures in the creek, politicians and bureaucrats agreed.

Mounds of snowy white Styrofoam and other junk are carried by storm drains and end up, as they do in other urban rivers and creeks, in flood control channels.

A staggering volume of debris--including ironing boards, a bird cage, dolls and construction waste such as paint thinner and concrete--clearly is dumped there intentionally.

Officials say concrete berms placed in the street to prevent trucks from backing into the creek fencing to deposit waste get nudged away. Hundreds of feet of chain-link fencing have been cut open to allow easier dumping. At those spots, mattresses, refrigerators, water heater tanks and barbecues can be found.

“See that fence,” said Army Corps of Engineers official Terry Wortherspoon, pointing from his truck to a chain-link swath dangling loose from its post. “Our people will go out to mend fences, and there will be kids standing beside them with bolt cutters, saying, ‘I don’t know why you bother.’ ”

Compton officials bristle at the assertion by Army officials that the federal agency spends four to 10 times more money and time on its twice-yearly Compton Creek cleanups than on similar-sized projects.

“It’s been very difficult to have this situation, and to hear that we in Compton have more trash than anyone else,” said Council member Delores Zurita, standing beside the creek south of El Segundo Boulevard, gazing at Centennial High School and a grade school across the creek from each other.

“You know, someone tells you that, and you tend to curl your tail up. It’s pride. But you know, the Sheriff’s Department has been getting calls from parents. There’s an elementary school right there. Think of all the germs.”

Public officials stress that witnesses to illegal dumping of garbage must help law enforcement officials curb such activity by reporting it.

“I think it is underreported here, because people are maybe afraid of gangs or gang retaliation,” said Wortherspoon, maintenance supervisor for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Los Angeles area district.

“It’s not the people of Compton that are the problem; it is outsiders coming in, contractors not wanting to pay to dump hazardous wastes--that sort of thing,” he added.

Amid a tide of media coverage of unconfirmed reports that dogs were dropped from the creek’s bridges, government agencies felt public pressure to act. But which agency could have or should have done what, and when, remains in dispute, as does the future cleanliness of the creek.

Compton City Council member Yvonne Arceneaux has worked for years to get the creek thoroughly cleaned and get more federal money to spruce it up. After the rumors about the dogs made news, she stepped into the limelight and charged that the corps effectively was committing environmental racism by neglecting the creek in Compton, a city with a predominantly black and Latino population.

“I strongly doubt you would see this kind of mess in a Beverly Hills creek,” she said this month. “I definitely think this is allowed to go on because we are a minority community.”

On Wednesday, as he traveled the glass-riddled creek in a four-wheel-drive truck, Wortherspoon responded “absolutely not true” when asked about her charges, one of which is that the corps had diverted money destined for Compton Creek to an Arizona community.

The corps says it spends three weeks at a time, twice a year, cleaning the Compton segment of the creek and regularly is called to repair fences and do other maintenance.

Rhambo said the department wanted not to point fingers but to “get the job done” with a “multi-agency task force.”

So on Wednesday, a couple of skip-loaders and forklifts from city and county public works departments, two Army trucks and enough sheriff’s personnel to oversee the dozen or so orange-clad jail inmates--convicted of misdemeanors--were on the scene and available to talk to reporters. The earthmovers moved and the battle commenced to rid the creek of its heaps of garbage otherwise bound for the ocean. But if past experience is an indicator, Wortherspoon said with a sigh, “I guarantee you in two weeks, this creek will look exactly the same.”