Cemetery Promises to Unclog Flood Channels

North America’s largest cemetery is finally vowing to unclog its plumbing.

Neighbors in Pico Rivera have long complained that two flood channels draining Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier were so plugged with trees and dirt that they backed up every winter and flooded nearby homes and businesses. The 50-year-old ditches are little more today than a dip in the ground covered by a jungle of bamboo and willow.

To avoid the giant task of scouring out the mess, the mortuary’s lawyers seem to have jumped on a legal merry-go-round.

In some court documents, they denied that the cemetery built the channels. In others, they said it wasn’t their duty to maintain them.

The tortuous tale continued this week in Los Angeles Superior Court. On the day a lawsuit was scheduled for trial, Rose Hills’ lawyers took full responsibility and pledged to roto-root the trees and debris by October.

Neighbors, many of whom are Spanish-speaking and lack money for prolonged litigation, said they thought the cemetery had been trying to sweat them out in court.

“The fact that Rose Hills agreed on the day of trial to do everything we had been asking them to do for years, that speaks for itself,” said Ken Livadas, partial owner of a business park next to one of the channels. “We, as well as the other property owners, should never have been put in the situation where we were forced to sue.”

Livadas, who owns San Gabriel Parkway Investment, said flood damage eroded a corner of his property, threatening truck access that is vital to him and his 50 tenants. Under an agreement reached Monday, Rose Hills will clean the adjacent channel, dig it out and reinforce Livadas’ property. His company is still seeking punitive damages and attorneys’ fees of about $300,000.

Rose Hills--which was sold to a Canadian company in 1996 for $240 million--would not comment on the litigation or the issue in general.

Previous owners of the cemetery dug the half-mile-long channels in 1952 to divert storm runoff and three meandering streams into the San Gabriel River. According to the lawsuits, the cemetery maintained the 50-foot-wide easements until the mid-1980s.

When the maintenance stopped, people living in the flat part of Whittier and Pico Rivera along the San Gabriel River Freeway began to reap the consequences, residents say.

Whenever it rains hard, they say, water running down Elford Drive into a storm drain--which empties into the channel--quickly backs up to inundate the elm-lined cul-de-sac. Residents say they must park their cars up the street and trudge through water up to their knees to get home.

“It comes right up to the house,” said Bandelio Jimenez, a homeowner for 30 years. “It’s a lake. We don’t know who to go to. We hear about Rose Hills, this and that, but we don’t know.”

Although most residents, none of whom were plaintiffs, say the water stops just short of their homes, Ignacio Martinez, 62, wasn’t so lucky. He said he had to replace the linoleum in his den after one flood several years ago; the carpets in his minivan are still musty from a deluge earlier this year, he said.

The retiree said he went to meetings with members of county Supervisor Gloria Molina’s staff and police in Pico Rivera, but nothing ever happened.

Just across the San Gabriel River Freeway in Whittier, the owners of Shepherd Management Services, which rents heavy machinery, have been fighting Rose Hills since the early 1980s over the channels. A 1984 letter from Dennis C. Poulsen, president of Rose Hills, to W.W. Shepherd states: “Rose Hills has no responsibility to clean out the referenced ditch. . . . Rose Hills has no intention of cleaning out the referenced ditch.”

When Shepherd sued the company in 1997, Rose Hills responded by stating that the channels were not built by Rose Hills, but were “natural terrain”--despite cutting a course as straight as an arrow from the cemetery to the San Gabriel River.

Shepherd’s attorney, Kit Knudsen, had to dig deep to find the origin of the ditches. “The law said whoever digs the ditches must maintain them,” he said.

Looking through old flood-control photos, Knudsen said, he noticed a water pipe crossing one of the channels. He went to Suburban Water Co. in El Monte, which owned the pipe, and found that, in 1952, Rose Hills had asked for permission from the utility to dig the ditches.

Just before Knudsen was to go to trial in August 1999, the cemetery’s lawyers settled, declaring that Rose Hills had “100% responsibility for the maintenance of the two [subject] drainage ditches,” according to court documents.

Nothing happened. So this year Knudsen was back in court again, alleging that Rose Hills failed “to perform a single act of maintenance on the ditches.”

By this time, Livadas had already filed his lawsuit. Just five months after conceding to Knudsen that Rose Hills was responsible for the channels, the company’s lawyers denied to Livadas that Rose Hills built the channels.

They reversed themselves in January, then again in court Monday, saying they did own the channels. Trial over damages and lawyers’ fees is scheduled for July 9.