‘A Sad History’ : Capri Controversy Marks State Superfund’s Debut

Second of two parts

The Capri Pumping Service was not a pretty place.

Wedged into a crowded Eastside Los Angeles neighborhood, the Capri site absorbed 2.4 million gallons of hazardous chemical wastes in the 1970s--enough to form a lake more than seven feet deep over the one-acre site.

Its lot was littered with the corroded, leaking carcasses of barrels and tanks, city files and photographs show. Scrap metal and junked cars were heaped at one end, and an old house stood nearby on the wildly discolored soil. Puddles and sumps of toxic chemicals dotted the rest of the site.

Some of the waste trucked to Capri, city officials said in reports and memoranda, was dumped into sewers in violation of city regulations. The rest, they speculated, either soaked into the ground and leached into neighboring yards or was neutralized and rendered harmless. In fact, they are not exactly sure where it all went.

People living nearby knew little of what went on there. They knew only that they could not get grass to grow near the fence that separated their backyards from what they knew only as la fabrica pipa --the pipe factory.

City and county inspectors knew about Capri, but it still took them two years to persuade city officials to close it down and 2 1/2 years more to get a cleanup started.

“There’s no question the city has a sad history on Capri,” said former Deputy City Atty. Barry C. Groveman, now the top environmental prosecutor in the district attorney’s office. He pointed out, however, that Capri is the only major cleanup finished by the state’s 4-year-old Superfund program.

When city and state officials finally stepped in two years ago and urgently made Capri the top priority of the Superfund, they promised an end to the political and public-health controversies that characterized Capri as much as its own chemical stench.

The controversies, however, had really only begun.

The first step in the cleanup, choosing a contractor for the job, generated controversy of its own. Public officials in Sacramento and City Hall questioned the way the Los Angeles Board of Public Works came to award the lucrative, image-building job to R. E. Wolfe Enterprises.

Quality Questioned

Questions were raised, too, about the quality of the cleanup. Gov. George Deukmejian and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley swapped bitter accusations about this last summer--each taking credit for doing the job right, perhaps just in case they face each other again in the 1986 race for governor.

And recently, Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro, in his campaign to unseat the mayor in their City Hall race, revived an earlier controversy over why the Bradley-appointed public works board allowed Capri to operate as long as it did in violation of the law.

Considering the swirl of controversies buffeting the project at nearly every step, it may not be surprising that the Capri cleanup took longer than expected--and, some officials believe, cost more than it should.

In May, 1983, the state allocated $1.26 million for the job. City workers familiar with the problem estimated the cost at $700,000. Both city and state officials said the job would take six months. Before it was over, however, the cleanup consumed 17 months and $1.3 million, even though two of seven steps were dropped from the contract.

Of the money spent, nearly three-fourths of it--more than $950,000--paid for work not included in the contract, such as extra digging and a late fee paid to the contractor during one especially long work stoppage of 3 1/2 months.

Some of the delays and added costs at Capri can be attributed to the unexpected extent and amount of contamination at the site, where puddles, sumps and buried tanks allowed chemicals to soak into the soil at different rates and in different directions for several years.

“It’s like if I came to you as a contractor and said, ‘I want to build a house. How much is it going to cost?’ and I have no plans and no blueprints,” said Wolfe’s foreman at Capri, Louis Kneiper.

Complicating the problem was a lack of toxic-cleanup experience among government workers and, to a degree, on the part of the contractor. One city employee, for example, wore his clean-air respirator upside-down, two co-workers said, and another was described in several memos as having taken back a beaker of mud when asked to collect a sample of water.

“This was Project No. 1, it was a learning experience” for everyone, Kneiper said.

Adding to that, documents and interviews show, were bureaucratic slip-ups--chiefly the state’s failure to make sure that the city and contractor understood who was in charge of each major task at the site, from problem-assessment and planning through the excavation of toxics and their disposal.

This confusion was magnified at Capri because the city demanded the role as intermediary between the state and the contractor. City officials said they wanted to ensure that the job was done quickly and properly but, because they worried about being forced to pay for work the state might not like, they often held up work while consulting with state officials in Sacramento.

“You had start-up and wait, start-up and wait, start-up and wait,” said the chairman of the Wolfe firm, R. E. Wolfe, describing how state and city agencies continually were “trying to get their heads together” on how to proceed with certain tasks.

The problems at Capri, especially the bureaucratic problems, concern Sacramento and City Hall because of what they portend for bigger, more expensive toxic cleanups.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated for dozens of high-priority cleanups in California, including the McColl dump in Fullerton and the Del Amo site in Torrance.

The problems at Capri also concern people living near McColl, Del Amo and the other urban dump sites throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties. Some live close to sites targeted for Superfund cleanups; thousands more drink water threatened by toxics in the soil.

Especially worrisome to these people was that, despite the good intentions of government agencies, people living near Capri were not kept fully informed of the health danger posed by the toxic dump.

Some have heard about Carmen Pineda, who was told that her yard was dangerously contaminated and then waited for help that never came. A year later, she took out a $10,000 second mortgage on her modest duplex to pay for a concrete cap on her own yard.

Some problems encountered at Capri already have been addressed, if not solved.

Deukmejian has suggested forming a new state department of waste management to consolidate and streamline state agencies. At the same time, the public works board drafted a “protocol” for future cleanups--a road map, of sorts, around the pitfalls encountered at Capri.

Early Pitfall

The board has been blamed for one of the earliest pitfalls at Capri, the one that permitted Capri’s owner, Refugio Carrasco, to stay in business despite repeated violations of the board’s regulations.

Attempts to interview Carrasco for this story were unsuccessful.

Internal city memoranda acknowledge that officials believed as early as 1968 that Capri and its subsidiary, A&R; Vacuum Trucking, were operating without a city permit and that they believed in 1971 that Capri had started to dump wastes into sewers in violation of city regulations. In 1978, they concluded that Capri was a potential health problem.

A state Regional Water Quality Control Board wrote that year that Capri’s puddled wastes and rusting tanks--the leaks in one of them were unsuccessfully plugged with twigs, a state Department of Health Services report shows--were “potentially serious sources of water pollution.” Later, city memoranda show, one large tank disintegrated, unleashing a flood of toxic chemicals over the yards of nearby homes.

Despite these reports and others like them, Capri was able to continue operating. In part, city officials said, this occurred because the state’s strict hazardous waste law did not take effect until 1979 and because there was little public concern about how toxics were handled.

Politics also played a part.

For example, city inspectors revoked Capri’s sewer permit in 1978 after allegedly observing company employees dump raw toxics down a sewer, according to a Bureau of Sanitation staff report. When Carrasco appealed the revocation, Bradley aide Art Gastelum asked the Board of Public Works to reinstate the permit. The board complied. Gastelum declined to discuss why he asked the board to intervene, referring a reporter to 1980 newspaper accounts of his actions.

Later, when the regional office of the state Department of Health Services sought a court order against Carrasco, former state employee James Stahler said the Sacramento office briefly held up the move at the request of former Assemblyman Art Torres, now a Democratic state senator from Los Angeles. Torres could not be reached for comment.

Even when the state attorney general and Los Angeles city attorney used another court order to shut Capri down, state records show that toxics continued to spill from leaky tanks for three years while officials wrote letters to Carrasco asking him to clean up his property. Carrasco replied that he had cleaned up the site.

At the same time, state officials also asked Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bruce Geernaert to order Carrasco to clean up. Carrasco and his politically well-connected attorney, former Assemblyman Walter Karabian, repeatedly convinced Geernaert that the site was clean.

Each victory for Carrasco, however, was followed by new allegations from city, county and state officials of improper handling and disposal of toxic waste at Capri.

As the legal battle dragged on, only the worst problem--the potential mixing of some poison gas components--was corrected by the state in the fall of 1980, state records show.

The Superfund cleanup promised in 1983 was supposed to provide a quick solution. No one foresaw the problems to come, most of which fell into three categories:

Coordination. Confusion and missed communication among the city, state and contractor was a common problem. More than 3 1/2 months into the project, for example, the bewildered contractor requested a letter “describing . . . the various roles of the contractor, the city and the state.” Earlier, the state used three letters, two phone calls and a personal visit to tell the city to proceed from one step to the next.

(It is possible that the state’s letters in that case were simply lost in city files. Many of the documents for the landmark case were kept haphazardly in cardboard boxes; a number of papers were kept in folders labeled anything from “Barrera’s Sausage Factory” to simply “WXYZ.”)

An unclear chain of command also hampered coordination. The authority of the city “project director” and state “project officer” were not clear, so decisions waited for concurrence. Some waits were quite long, as when the city and state waited months before agreeing how clean Capri should be and how to determine when that goal was reached.

Bureaucratic procedures. Despite the urgent nature of the cleanup, both the city and the state adhered to routine procedure for many actions, including the writing of contracts, testing of lab samples, paying of bills and issuance of permits. Normal procedure often meant red tape and down time.

For example, it took more than three months to choose and sign a contractor, and it usually took weeks to receive lab-test results. Even when the city paid extra for quicker lab service, the results were the same because the contractor neglected to expedite the computer analyses.

Sluggish payments by the city caused the contractor to shut down the cleanup for two weeks, although that was prohibited by the contract. But even during regular periods, acquiring permits caused frequent delays--digging a hole, for example, required three permits.

Distrust. City officials believed that the state was tightfisted and slow; the state saw city leaders as politically ambitious and eager to exploit Capri to further their own careers. Each side grew to distrust and dislike the other, a phenomenon that tended to exaggerate the other problems.

“It became them against us: Who’s winning and who’s losing?” Groveman recalled. “Believe me, we weren’t interested in winning battles; we were interested in getting the site clean. (But) it came down to winning battles.”

Groveman said that much of the problem was with the state, which he accused of treating Capri “like a hobby” by not providing adequate leadership.

Former city Sanitation Director Tadao Isomoto agreed: “To the state, this was small potatoes, a single lot. They were busy looking at the (larger hazardous waste dumps) and forgot this.”

The chief of the state’s Superfund program, Tom Bailey, said that Capri, as the program’s debut, was anything but “small potatoes” to his department. He said city officials asked permission to direct the on-site work and that his agency did what the city wanted. In the end, he concluded, the city was often too hesitant to act on its own.

Groveman was listed by both city and state officials as the cause of several delays because, they said, he publicly embarrassed colleagues with whom he disagreed and manipulated people living near Capri to win arguments. “He was constantly getting people excited, and once hysterical people get involved, it’s going to cost someone,” Isomoto said.

Groveman said he filled a critical void. “I’ll admit that a lot of these discussions (he had with residents) should be the focus of a project manager, not a city attorney,” he said. “But in the absence of anybody else doing it, in a way I thought was responsible, I assumed that role.”

Kneiper, the Wolfe firm’s foreman at Capri, said a “natural antagonism”--of whatever origin--between city and state officials caused costly delays, revisions and repeated work.

Of the $1.3 million spent to clean up Capri, more than $950,000, or 73%, was paid for “change orders,” or work that was not anticipated before the project began, city records show.

At various times, other city documents show, city and state officials argued at length over such issues as the best method to handle off-site contamination, proper sampling techniques and the correct way to deal with pollution that had soaked deep into the soil.

Kneiper said the city-state bickering benefited his company by causing additional work. He said this helped him collect the full $1.26 million allocated for the job, regardless of what officials predicted it would cost.

“Our job as cleanup contractors is to clean up, make the world safe for democracy . . . and make a buck,” he said, only partly tongue-in-cheek. “If a city comes to me and tells me, ‘We have $1.2 million appropriated for this job’ . . . I tell them, ‘It’s all mine.’ That sets the rules for the game.”

Kneiper also said his firm acted properly in its dealings with the city.

Isomoto, the recently retired city sanitation director, said that contractors routinely exploit problems to squeeze as much as they can from municipal contracts and that Wolfe was no exception.

“All contractors tend to hit you up with change orders, claiming inadequate plans, changing conditions in the field or something,” he said. “That’s why contractors love these jobs, because they know that . . . it is all unknown when you go into a cleanup, and you keep working--and paying--until it’s done.”

Perhaps the most vivid example of delays occurred between mid-November, 1983, and the end of February, 1984. Virtually no work was done during that 3 1/2-month period, which cost $82,000 for security and late fees.

“I remember that as a period of incredible frustration--just incredible frustration,” said Maureen A. Kindel, president of the Public Works Board.

The confusion and delay resulted in considerable political pressure, much of it directed at the state. Officials there conceded that this sometimes led them to approve work for political reasons as well as for scientific or public-health concerns. Joel S. Moskowitz, deputy director for toxic substance control with the Department of Health Services, for example, said he agreed to especially high cleanup standards for property next to Capri--property the county Department of Health Services had earlier certified as safe--to avoid a public row with city officials.

The state’s on-site engineer at Capri, Christopher E. Koerner, said in a memo to superiors that he agreed to post guards on the site just “to reduce the . . . crisis attitude” he sensed at the public works board and city attorney’s office.

City officials also approved some payments that may not have been necessary. For example, one city contractor overlooked some liquid waste that it was supposed to haul away; five months later the city paid Wolfe to do the same job rather than call back the first company.

City officials, in an effort to see if Capri’s owners could be charged with a crime, also ordered additional, often expensive, cleanup work. Groveman once asked that a large buried tank be dug up in one piece, a task that cost $200,000, city records show.

Groveman defended the practice, even though Carrasco has not been accused of any crime. The prosecutor said it is important to at least try to punish those “who caused this nightmare for all these people and the agencies and the taxpayers.”

Times staff writer Claire Spiegel contributed to this story.

THE CLEANUP AT CAPRI

Sept., 1968, to July, 1978. Capri repeatedly found operating without proper permit and cited for improperly disposing of hazardous wastes in sewers. City nonetheless issues an industrial waste permit. Later, state calls leaking tanks on site “potentially serious sources of water pollution.”

Aug., 1978, to Aug., 1980. City staff revokes permit, but Board of Public Works reissues it at mayor’s request when Capri owner pledges to improve operations. State denies Capri toxic-waste facility permit. Suit filed by state attorney general and Los Angeles city attorney stops operations at Capri. Public works board later cancels sewer permit.

Aug. to Oct., 1980. City, county and state order Capri owner to clean up property. His effort is frustrated when BKK toxic-waste landfill refuses to accept Capri material.

Oct. to Dec., 1980. County inspectors find leaking drum of cyanide near barrels of acids, posing toxic gas threat. State, using the new Superfund, launches limited cleanup.

Dec., 1980, to March, 1983. City, county and state order cleanup of remaining pollutants by Capri’s owner, who challenges orders in court while doing some cleanup. Superior Court repeatedly declares site clean, only to have city and state find new problems. State asks Capri’s customers to pay for cleanup, starts planning its own cleanup if all else fails.

March to Aug., 1983. Superfund action begins. City and state sign contract. City seeks general contractor while trying to stop spreading pollution. Board of Public Works rejects staff recommendation for contractor and reconsiders the bids. A contract is signed with R. E. Wolfe Enterprises of California Inc.

Aug. to Sept., 1983. Contractor removes surface materials from site. City of West Covina sues Los Angeles, challenging plans to use BKK landfill for disposal of Capri material. Court rejects plea for environmental impact report but limits amount of material to be shipped from Capri.

Sept. to Nov., 1983. Contractor locates underground tanks, begins soil removal to allow more tests. While digging, contractor breaks open buried tank, releasing toxic fumes. False rumors spread that fumes are dangerous, prompting emergency action by city. Tank is reburied until it can be removed.

Nov., 1983, to March, 1984. Work stops because of delays in filing documents with court and in obtaining soil-test results and poor communication between city and state.

March to April, 1984. Excavation of final pockets of pollution and remaining buried tanks begins. April to June, 1984. Odoriferous chemical escapes from bottle broken during final grading, sparking public complaints and prompting a search by hand for other bottles rumored to be buried nearby.

June to July, 1984. City, county and state argue over cleanup’s progress, decide to remove three more truckloads of suspect soil.

July to Aug., 1984. Contractor temporarily stops work at site in pay dispute with city, then begins final soil sampling. Work stops again pending laboratory result.

Aug. to Nov., 1984. Contractor digs up final pockets of contamination.