County Firms Among Scofflaws Ignoring State Rule on Toxics

Thousands of California companies that use hazardous materials will probably remain in violation of a state disclosure law for years to come, officials have said, because local fire and health agencies lack the manpower and money to enforce compliance.

The 1985 legislation requiring users of hazardous chemicals to disclose the amount and location of their materials by last Jan. 1 mandated that local agencies enforce the law but did little to finance the effort, fire officials said.

Now, five months after the law went into effect, only about half of the affected companies statewide are in compliance, according to estimates by fire, health and legislative officials.

Because of a manpower shortage some cities and counties cannot even keep pace with the companies that are trying to comply with the law as their completed business plans wait months and possibly years to be checked for accuracy and processed for use.

The issue erupted earlier this week when a fire broke out at a Los Angeles area metal-plating plant that housed 26,000 gallons of lethal chemicals, including cyanide.

Builder’s Hardware Finishers, like an estimated 10,000 other companies in Los Angeles city and county, had not filed a plan identifying the materials the firm uses and certifying that it is complying with storage regulations, according to city fire officials.

The law is intended to help firefighters and public health officials deal with fires and other emergencies at these companies by identifying the location and amount of the hazardous materials on site.

Los Angeles City Fire Chief Donald O. Manning said that only about half of the 8,000 companies using hazardous materials in the city have complied with the law.

Officials of other large cities and populous counties in California cited similar statistics in response to a recent state study and queries from The Times.

The cities and counties of San Diego and San Francisco estimated their compliance in the 50% range, as did Sacramento and Los Angeles County.

Only Orange County, with an estimated 95%, and Contra Costa County, with 73%, reported above-average compliance.

The Fresno County Health Department reported to a state researcher that only about 12% of the companies in its jurisdiction have submitted the required plans.

In Sacramento County, only about 7% of the companies affected by the law have complied--in part because the county has extended the filing deadlines until business licenses come up for renewal--according to a soon-to-be-released study by the state Assembly Office of Research.

Perhaps even more troubling is the quality of the data that has been submitted.

About 93% of the reports submitted to Contra Costa County officials had to be corrected after inspection, according to the state study.

In Los Angeles County, 40% of the business plans could not even be corrected by fire officials, but had to be returned for a complete rewriting, according to the same study.

“If a city is at 50% (compliance), they are really moving along; they are doing quite well,” said Bruce Tsutsui, hazardous materials program manager for San Francisco.

Tsutsui said it took his agency two years to build the computer system that will eventually handle all of the filings. And even now that it is in place, he has only 10 inspectors to police an estimated 8,000 hazardous materials handlers.

The San Diego Fire Department has only five inspectors to monitor more than 1,400 major hazardous materials handlers, according to Terry Baird, deputy fire marshal.

Several thousand more companies are inspected by firefighters at local fire stations, but it took months to train those workers to do the job properly, Baird said.

Orange County officials said that part of the reason for their success is the relatively small number of companies using hazardous materials. Sylvan D. Hersh, hazardous materials program manager for the Orange County Fire Department, said that only about 2,000 companies using these materials have been located in the county.

But he said the biggest reason was that a similar reporting program was required under local legislation for about a year before the state law went into effect.

Other cities and counties are not yet ready to prosecute, officials said.

John Janzen, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said the department is attempting to complete paper work on the 5,300 companies that have filed reports, before attempting to find and prosecute the estimated 6,000 companies that have not yet responded to a county survey.

That process should conclude by August, Janzen said.