Roof of Sewage Tank Collapses; 11 Workers Injured, 1 Critically

The roof of a giant sewage tank under construction in Carson collapsed Thursday, plunging 11 workers 50 feet into a jumble of wet concrete, buckled scaffolding and steel rods that impaled two of them.

After a delicate rescue effort that lasted more than two hours, the men were taken to hospitals. One of the two pierced by metal rebar remained in critical condition.

The rescue from the rubble at the tank’s bottom involved at least 10 firefighters recently returned from searching for victims at the World Trade Center in the wake of the terrorist assault.

“We are so lucky to have no deaths,” said Joe Haworth, a spokesman for the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, which owns the sewage facility where the 8:30 a.m. collapse occurred. “That [was] a very scary accident.”

Officials said the workers for the Kiewit Pacific construction company were pouring a concrete cap on one of seven tanks being built at the county’s 400-acre Joint Water Pollution Control Plant.

When the roof started to cave in, most of the workers scrambled for safety. But the collapse sent 11 men and tons of debris hurtling down into the tank, which was finished except for the roof.

Firefighters and Urban Search and Rescue squads from the Los Angeles city and county departments were lowered into the pit by a crane.

Victims Hoisted Out of Tank

“When we arrived, there was some pandemonium,” said Capt. Jeff Russell of the county Fire Department.

The situation, he said, required an improvised transport system. After freeing and stabilizing the injured victims, firefighters loaded them one at a time onto a wooden platform. The crane then hoisted the platform out of the tank, and the victims, many of whom suffered broken bones, were taken to ambulances.

Russell, who directed the rescue effort from a catwalk atop the tank, described seeing the trapped and injured workers in a “twisted mass of rebar, wet concrete and concrete finishing equipment strewn every which way.”

The rescuers used specialized cutting torches to extricate some of the men and relied on thermal imaging cameras to scan the rubble for possible victims, said Inspector Roland Sprewell of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Ruben Gutierrez, 46, was in serious condition at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, said Terri Starkman, a hospital spokeswoman.

UCLA/Harbor Medical center listed another man in critical condition after surgery, one in serious condition and four in fair condition. Three others were reported to be in good condition and one was treated and released, said UCLA/Harbor spokeswoman Cynthia Kushi.

Those victims, whose names were not released, ranged in age from 27 to 54, Kushi said.

The construction project is part of an addition to the sprawling Joint Water Pollution Control Plant, which processes roughly 300 million gallons of waste a day and serves close to 3 million county residents, according to Haworth of the sanitation district.

Kiewit Pacific, an Omaha-based heavy civil construction company, has a long history of public works projects in Southern California and has a “good reputation both in quality and safety,” Haworth said. “That’s why we use them.”

Susan Gard, a spokeswoman for Cal/OSHA, said the state occupational safety agency is investigating the cause of the incident.

She said Kiewit has a relatively good safety record.

In the last five years, the company has been investigated 10 times but cited only three times--two minor and one major violations.

The major violation involved an excavation site in Oroville in which workers did not have the appropriate gear, Gard said. Kiewit paid a $750 fine in that incident.

“They tend to work in [the] high hazards industry so I can definitely say they don’t stand out as a bad actor,” Gard said.

Jerry Pfeffer, a spokesman for Kiewit, defended the company’s safety record.

“We, of course, will be cooperating fully with [investigators] and the sanitation district in investigating the cause of the incident and making sure that [it] is fully understood,” Pfeffer said.