Toxic Hot Spots Halt More Busway Work

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority suspended construction work over the weekend on two more segments of a 14-mile busway in the San Fernando Valley after finding unusually high levels of arsenic and lead, officials said Monday.

In a separate development, the MTA and Los Angeles city officials said they would no longer install a recycled-water pipeline during the busway’s construction because of high costs and likely delays.

Two weeks ago, the MTA found hazardous levels of arsenic and lead at two construction sites near Pierce College, leading the transit agency to halt work on a 1 1/2-mile stretch of the bus corridor recently renamed Metro Orange Line.

Over the weekend, soil samples taken near Oxnard Street and the San Diego Freeway revealed lead levels 95 parts per million higher than the state Department of Toxic Substances Control’s hazardous materials threshold. The busway soil near Colfax Avenue and Chandler Boulevard showed levels of arsenic 98 parts per million higher than the threshold established for the busway, said the department’s regional chief, Sayareh Amir. The contamination is not a danger to the public because hazardous levels were not found in the air and the contaminated spots will be paved over, Amir said.

The busway, which will connect the North Hollywood Red Line subway station with Warner Center in Woodland Hills, is being built over rail tracks that were used for more than 100 years, and officials say they believe the contamination resulted from the use of pesticides and the dumping of toxic materials.

Over the weekend, workers dug out the contaminated soil under a state-monitored cleanup plan, MTA environmental specialist Chris Liban said. All four sites will remain cordoned off until the Department of Toxic Substances Control completes its review, agency spokeswoman Jeanne Garcia said.

MTA spokesman Marc Littman said more toxic hot spots could be found in the next few days when the agency receives the final round of test results from 246 soil samples.

In the meantime, officials said, construction elsewhere for the busway is proceeding as scheduled, with completion still expected by August 2005.

The busway’s construction schedule was a major reason the MTA and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power abandoned efforts to lay recycled-water pipes under the busway.

Under the plan, recycled water from the Tillman Reclamation Plant at Sepulveda Basin would have begun irrigating landscaping and other greenery along the busway as early as 2005.

But officials said the extra work would have delayed the busway’s opening by six to 12 months, a prospect the MTA found unacceptable.

The MTA selected the busway contractor in December 2002 but wasn’t approached by the DWP about the pipeline until February 2003.

“Had the DWP’s desire to build been known to us well before we went out to bid, it could’ve been accommodated,” said Roger Dames, the MTA’s project manager for the busway. “We put a lot of effort trying to find ways to make it work... but it got to be too difficult to do without significant delays to the completion schedule.”

DWP officials said they now plan to install the pipes on their own, under streets parallel to the busway. “This is something our own crews can do, and a lot of time we can do things cheaper than contractors could,” said Richard Harasick, assistant director of water resources for the DWP. The pipeline probably would not be completed until at least 2007, he said.

“Had this concept been worked out in the beginning, it might have been cost-effective” to do the construction work together, said Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino and a steering committee member of the city’s Integrated Waste Water Program.