PCB Spill Shuts 6 Miles of Beach

A six-mile stretch of beach was closed today in Long Beach after more than 1,000 gallons of a PCB-laced oil spilled into the Los Angeles River during Tuesday’s electrical transformer fire in downtown Los Angeles.

Oil booms were strung across the river Tuesday afternoon as a precaution after the pre-dawn fire in the transformer owned by the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles that blacked out four square miles of downtown. Fire Department spokesman Robert A. Caldon said the beach closures were taken as a precaution pending results of tests to determine the concentration of oil containing the polychlorinated biphenyls, believed to be carcinogenic, in local waters.