Jewelry Makers’ Tarnished Safety Record Spurs Concern

In downtown Los Angeles’ bustling jewelry district, six blocks from City Hall, a team of fire inspectors this year found the makings of a potential toxic disaster: more than a ton of cyanide powder in one building, with 1,700 pounds of the poison in the basement alone.

Cyanide, widely used by downtown manufacturers to strip gold jewelry, can be vaporized into a lethal gas--a risk so deadly that the legal limit for an entire building is 10 pounds.

That massive cyanide cache, which remained in the building for months after its discovery, was among the worst of hundreds of safety violations logged by fire inspectors in the jewelry district in the last two years.

Yet despite widespread and often flagrant offenses, the agencies responsible for industrial safety have chosen not to crack down swiftly on the manufacturers. Instead, they have formed a task force with business owners that is rewriting safety standards to help many jewelry firms stay in business.

The task force, formed last year, is grappling with a problem overlooked by the industry and city government for nearly two decades: Because of its chemical and fire hazards, jewelry manufacturing is basically illegal downtown. None of the 31 downtown high-rise buildings occupied by jewelry makers is approved to house them.

To save the district, the task force proposes amending building laws to put jewelry making in the same category as less hazardous furniture making. It will also call on manufacturers to begin following the standard safety measures they have been violating.

This cooperative approach to regulating the jewelry district began last year as a model of former Mayor Richard Riordan’s business-friendly philosophy, and has continued under Mayor James K. Hahn.

However, some city and state officials familiar with the task force say the effort puts political and economic concerns ahead of safety.

“It’s just not appropriate to handle hazardous materials in those buildings,” said one official involved in regulating the area, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of retaliation by supervisors. This official said jewelry makers are better suited to less densely populated industrial parks--a move the industry says would raise its costs prohibitively.

The jewelry district issue is a byproduct of City Hall’s attempt to be business friendly. Under Riordan, the Fire Department changed its mission statement in the late 1990s, pledging to “foster economic growth” as well as protect lives and property.

One critic, city firefighters union president Kenneth Buzzell, said the task force is an example of that mission gone awry.

“It’s very political. The jewelry industry is a big industry that contributes a lot of taxes, and building owners don’t want their properties vacant. So a lot of people want a political solution that will cut them some slack from the fire code,” Buzzell said.

About 700 jewelry makers operate in the high-rises, employing about 15,000, according to industry and Fire Department estimates. It is the nation’s second-largest jewelry district, behind New York’s.

Open violations of safety and environmental laws in buildings legally restricted to office or retail use are easy to spot from the sidewalk on the district’s main thoroughfares, such as Hill, 6th and 7th streets and Broadway. After dark, suites glow bright orange from the flames of torches handled by workers without gloves or face shields. Smoke and metal vapors blow out open windows.

Since the 1980s, jewelry manufacturers have been downtown’s tenants of last resort, filling the elegant shells of former department stores and professional offices that fled decades before to suburban shopping malls or the skyscrapers of Century City and Bunker Hill.

Some developers say the jewelry district’s hazards limit downtown’s prospects for becoming a desirable residential and entertainment area. Prominent developer Tom Gilmore, who managed one of the largest jewelry buildings in the mid-1990s, said many jewelry makers are not conscientious about safety and environmental practices.

By not shutting down the rogue businesses, Gilmore said, “the city ends up promoting the use of buildings for illegal purposes, while precluding the use of these buildings for uses like housing.”

Fire Department inspection reports show that illegal blowtorches and furnaces are frequently used, hazardous chemicals including cyanide are carelessly stored, and industrial equipment is often hooked up to tangles of flimsy extension cords instead of proper wiring. Fire exit doors are frequently locked and alarm systems are often faulty, according to fire inspection records. Fire Department officials say they have not tallied the number of fires or accidents in jewelry businesses. The department refused to let a reporter interview firefighters who work in the area.

The jewelry district task force grew out of a 1997 complaint by tenants of the Park Central building on West 6th Street, who asked regulatory agencies to control pollution generated by jewelry manufacturers. Eventually, hazardous levels of cadmium, chromium, lead, copper and other chemicals, produced by furnaces and by grinding and buffing operations, were found in the building’s air and dust.

The tenants sued their landlord, who settled out of court. That litigation and a state investigation prompted the Fire Department to step up inspections in the jewelry district and convinced city officials and jewelry manufacturers to create the task force. Although the Fire Department found large numbers of violations in many buildings in the past two years, it has not penalized many of the offenders, believing the problems may be resolved by the new task force guidelines.

(In June, the state attorney general’s office ordered a halt to jewelry manufacturing in the Park Central building. Despite that order, jewelry makers can still be seen operating in the building.)

The task force is meant to be “a streamlining-government model,” said Andrew Adelman, head of the city Building and Safety Department. A traditional crackdown might “create resentment” and prompt some firms to leave the city or operate secretly, said Adelman, who remained in charge of the department when Hahn succeeded Riordan.

Then-Riordan aide Rocky Delgadillo--who replaced Hahn this year as Los Angeles city attorney--headed the unit of the mayor’s office overseeing the task force. Representatives of agencies including the city Fire Department, Building and Safety Department, Cal/EPA and the county Fire Department participate, along with building owners and jewelry manufacturers.

Meetings of the task force, which has more than 30 members, are private, said Tara Devine, Mayor Hahn’s representative to the group. The group has met in city offices and in the headquarters of the Downtown Center Building Improvement District, a powerful group of property owners.

Hahn said he chose to continue the task force because “the industry is really important to L.A., and it really wants to protect the health and safety of employees.”

The mayor said he believes many manufacturers are simply unaware of laws and need to be educated. “If somebody doesn’t know what the ordinances and regulations are, the first step isn’t to drop an anvil on their heads,” he said.

Members have spent more than a year drafting eight pages of guidelines for jewelry makers.

The biggest change--and, critics say, the riskiest to public safety--would eliminate the requirement that buildings housing jewelry makers be certified for hazardous occupancy.

Under current law, most downtown jewelry manufacturers should operate only in buildings with an “H” certificate of occupancy, which requires tougher fire-prevention features to compensate for hazardous uses. None of the jewelry district buildings are so certified.

Two of 31 Buildings Meet Height Standard

One condition for an H rating is a maximum building height of three stories, said Nick Delliquadri, assistant chief of the city Building and Safety Department’s engineering bureau. That height limit, intended to guarantee easy access for rescue workers, precludes nearly all of the current jewelry district buildings from an H rating: Only two of the 31 buildings are three stories or less, according to a Fire Department list.

Task force members say jewelry makers will be permitted in a less restrictive occupancy category only if they reduce their use of hazardous chemicals and address other dangerous practices.

Many of the guidelines, such as a requirement to “discontinue the discharge of untreated hazardous waste into the city sewage system,” simply direct manufacturers to follow laws that many routinely violate.

The task force also calls for steps such as switching from using cyanide powder to a liquid cyanide solution, which it contends is more stable, and installing mechanical ventilation systems.

Assistant City Fire Marshal Alfred B. Hernandez, a key task force member, said that the H occupancy category was intended for larger-scale manufacturers than jewelry makers and that with increased safety measures, jewelry making can be performed safely in high-rises.

Since the task force was formed, manufacturers have enjoyed a grace period from enforcement. Legal proceedings against repeat violators have been put off, and manufacturing has continued despite the lack of hazardous occupancy certificates.

Task force officials hope their recommendations will be in effect by January, but say they are uncertain whether the Building and Safety Department will first need City Council approval to change the occupancy requirement.

Jewelers say the presence of manufacturers in the same buildings as retailers is vital to the district’s survival because it eliminates transportation costs.

Task force member Peklar Pilavjian, who turned the former Bullocks department store building into a massive jewelry center, acknowledges that the industry needs to clean up its practices. But he warns that the area could become a ghost town of vacant buildings without jewelers. “Downtown was a dying place before we came. If we leave, who’s going to come in?”

Building and Safety Department head Adelman said the manufacturing industry evolved over decades as small businesses began making jewelry without applying for permits. City officials said they did not even know until recent years that manufacturers were operating in defiance of the H occupancy requirement.

Some of the buildings, Adelman said, hold an older type of office certification that allows “light manufacturing.” That prompted a few manufacturers to open, but “as the industry expanded, it grew to the extent that it now exceeds limits,” Adelman said.

The illegal use of chemicals, furnaces and torches was not discovered because the building department does not routinely inspect the hundreds of thousands of commercial buildings in the city, Adelman said.

The city has a history, however, of responding to problems associated with jewelry manufacturing.

Throughout the 1980s, jewelry district accidents--including large cyanide spills--were widely reported in the news media. In 1987, state officials even conducted a study of Los Angeles jewelry makers that found workers were overexposed to toxic substances. It noted that hundreds of manufacturing companies operated in 20 buildings downtown.

Some building owners were also granted city permits to install large-scale waste treatment systems and pollution control equipment.

Pilavjian said he received city permission in 1984 to install an industrial waste treatment system in his building, which cost him $350,000.

Developer Gilmore, who managed a jewelry building from 1993 to 1997, said he told officials about industrial practices in his 16-story building, but was never told that they weren’t allowed. “We put quarter-inch steel floors in one suite because a guy was melting gold hot enough to melt concrete. We got permitted,” he said.

Richard Alatorre, who represented part of the jewelry district on the City Council until 1999, called for the city to take action against the Park Central building’s owners in a 1998 letter to the Board of Building and Safety Commissioners.

A Question of Liability

Allowing violations to linger could also expose the city to future lawsuits, Alatorre said. “If there’s a disaster or somebody gets cancer, who will be liable? I tell you: The city of Los Angeles will be, because we were forewarned and did nothing about it. This one is blatant. There’s a paper trail.”

Friendly reform efforts like the current task force have been tried in the past. In 1991, a committee of seven agencies, including the city Fire Department and Building and Safety Department, formed a task force to address jewelry district environmental problems.

Adelman and his department’s heads of code enforcement and engineering said they did not know about the previous task force.

Pilavjian said he remembers the previous task force, but said it was not taken seriously by jewelry makers.

“The people manufacturing jewelry then were new immigrants. All they wanted to do was make a living. The concern for being safe and clean was not stressed then as it is now,” he said.

Pilavjian said that today, jewelry manufacturers “are more sophisticated. They have been in the district 15 years; they really do have a genuine concern to be safe.”