Lake Project Shows How Metro Rail Can Take a Soaking : Transit: Draining the eight-acre body of water in MacArthur Park illustrates the costly surprises the subway system encounters--and absorbs.

Four months after workers started the job of draining MacArthur Park Lake--a task once budgeted for a mere four days--the last drops of cloudy water and first buckets of mildly toxic sediments finally are being removed.

As with a lot of jobs associated with building the Metro mass transit rail system, the task of emptying the eight-acre lake of about 23 million gallons of water took longer and cost more than planned.

The saga of MacArthur Park Lake is symbolic of the odd, often costly surprises that transit planners encounter as they try to shoehorn 300 miles of mass transit rail lines into a densely developed city. It is a tough job made even tougher by tight budgets and tighter environmental regulations.

In addition to the unforeseen safety problems, such as the current shutdown of tunnel work because of inadequate ventilation, and anticipated hardships that are greater than expected, such as relocating thousands of underground pipelines and cables, there is the matter of doing favors for friends.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which is building the system, is the only government agency with a budget that has grown appreciably in the last decade. When it asks revenue-short cities for permission to build its train lines, the cities often ask for something in return.

Long Beach, for example, asked the commission to rebuild some aging roads. Compton demanded the relocation of four miles of freight railroad tracks in the city. Everyone asks for new street lights, new sidewalks, new traffic signals and landscaping--all of which add millions to the cost of the commission’s basic function--building train lines.

But rather than fall behind its ambitious schedule to finish the nation’s second-largest rail transit network by the end of this decade, the Transportation Commission has generally agreed to the requests.

Rebuilding MacArthur Park Lake was one such request.

After the Metro Red Line subway builders burrowed out of downtown on their way to the Westside and Hollywood, Los Angeles city officials eagerly offered to empty MacArthur Park Lake and let construction crews dig through the lake bed and build the tunnels.

In exchange, however, the city Department of Recreation and Parks wanted the Transportation Commission to fulfill a “wish list” that the city hopes will restore some long-lost splendor and elegance to what has been for some time a polluted lake and crime-ridden park.

In addition to spending $1 million to restore those sections of the park being torn out for construction, the city asked for and was promised $7.5 million in additional compensation. That included millions of dollars to pave the dirt lake bed with tar to improve water quality, redesign drainage flows to keep toxic street runoff out of the lake and install a new aeration system, pump house and fountain. Vandal-proof lighting, new park benches and planters also were sought and granted.

But that was only the beginning.

The city was unable to deliver on its end of the deal--an empty lake forthwith. City workers had never thought to ask state water-pollution officials for permission to dump city lake water into city sewers. But this time, the Regional Water Quality Control Board said that MacArthur Park Lake water was so dirty that the city would need federal permission--a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit--before draining the lake into sewers that emptied into the ocean.

“Many procedures that nobody paid attention to in the past are considered very important today,” explained environmental consultant Shala Craig, who works for Parsons Dillingham, the management watchdog for the Rail Construction Corp., the Transportation Commission’s construction arm.

Concerned that the permit process could take many months and cost hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars, the Transportation Commission late last year relieved the city of responsibility for removing the water and started negotiations with state water pollution regulators. In February, the water board withdrew its demand for a federal permit and settled for seven conditions on how the lake water would be disposed of.

“We told them that if they would meet our conditions, we wouldn’t consider it a discharge of pollutants and would not require a permit,” said David Gildersleeve, the regional board’s supervising engineer.

Even this shortcut around the federal Clean Water Act came at a price. The water agency set high effluent standards, ordered constant human monitoring, required a lot of testing, mandated specific remedies for a host of potential problems and limited pumping to daylight hours.

“What one operator with a pump could have done in three or four days, we split into a very monstrous operation . . . because of the requirements of the water board,” Craig said.

The operation began in March with the introduction of peroxide into the lake to control the fecal coliform bacteria deposited there by ducks, cormorants and other waterfowl. By early April, the top seven feet of the 15-foot-deep lake had dribbled down the drain pipe normally used to control lake levels.

An attendant watched the water pour down the pipe, checking how turbid, or cloudy, it was. Once an hour, a sample was taken and turbidity was measured with a nephelometer, which estimates the amount of light that passes through liquid.

The lake discharge had to average 6.5 nephelometric turbidity units, or NTU. Craig said tap water usually registers 1 NTU and industrial waste registers about 150 NTUs.

After about 3 1/2 feet of water was discharged, water flowing into the sewer was tested for a variety of contaminants--17 metals, 25 volatile hydrocarbons, sulfates and inorganic matter--to make sure hazardous materials in the lake bed were not being stirred up. Craig said the water was safe.

When water dropped below the level of the drain pipe, the Transportation Commission had to hire someone to pump out the next four to five feet of water, to the point where the water was so cloudy that a new process had to be tried--after one could be found. Hiring such a contractor was not expected, Craig said, and it took more than a month to find someone at a fair price and get the board of directors to issue a bureaucratic, but legally necessary, “notice to proceed.”

At the end of this second phase of pumping, about 2 feet of very cloudy water still covered the lake bed. “It’s like decanting a bottle of wine: When you get to the bottom, you had better watch for sediments,” explained Xavier Swamikannu, a project engineer for the regional water quality board.

The Transportation Commission appealed to the Regional Water Quality Control Board to ease its standards for this remaining 13%, or 3 million gallons. The water board curtly refused.

Instead, Transportation Commission engineers decided to sit back and wait for the problematical gunk to settle to the bottom.

They waited for more than a month. The gunk refused to sink.

The gentlest zephyr stirred it up. The dewiest mist stirred it up. Paddling ducks stirred it up.

Finally, with the tunnel builder ready to resume work, the Transportation Commission decided earlier this month to fight chemicals with chemicals. It dumped a flocculent, alum, in the lake, to bind with suspended solids and physically drag them to the bottom. It worked. The water was clear.

But the lake bed was tainted. In addition to a second-hand store full of stuff uncovered by the shrinking lake--including shopping carts, batteries, bottles, a camera and a paddle boat shaped like a hippopotamus--tests found the sediment under the water held a century’s worth of pollution.

Besides high levels of moderately toxic copper, most likely the residue of a copper sulfate compound used to control algae, the sediment held high levels of oil and grease, lead, mercury and sulfides.

Marco Caltofan, science director of the National Toxics Campaign Fund, said the sediment-contamination levels reported by the water quality board should raise safety concerns, at least for the workers who muck it up and maybe even for nearby residents, including many Central American immigrants.

The muddy sediment, for example, contains 20 parts per million of petroleum hydrocarbons. “That’s a substantial amount of contamination; it’s very hard to work with,” Caltofan said from his group’s headquarters in Massachusetts. “It’s malodorous and it could be quite toxic.”

In granting permission to drain the lake, the regional water quality board instructed the Transportation Commission to inject hydrogen peroxide into the water “to minimize odor nuisance.”

Caltofan added that the reported level of sulfides, 150 parts per million, is “extremely high” and “could pose a problem to people.”

“(Sulfides) attack the central nervous system,” he said. “Unfortunately, the first thing they attack are the olfactory nerves, so you can’t always smell the danger.”

Craig, the construction consultant, said the sediment does not exceed state safety standards and is not classified as hazardous material.

The water quality board’s instructions on sediment are vague. They state: “Remaining sludge and water shall be concentrated into a water/solid mixture consistency to comply with landfill regulatory requirements for disposal at a legal disposal site.”

Water quality officials said they thought it was up to the state Department of Health Services to decide what type of landfill, but officials at that agency said the decision had been delegated to the water quality board.

Craig said she interprets the Transportation Commission’s original agreement with the board to allow the sediment to be trucked to the liner-equipped BKK dump in West Covina, regular sanitary landfill.

She acknowledged that state pollution officials have not yet approved this plan in writing, but said: “We truly believe we have the water quality control board’s blessing . . . they haven’t said it’s not OK.”

The task of finishing the lake bed cleanup--and finally building the twin subway tunnels beneath it--was turned over to a private construction company, Tutor-Saliba/Perini, on July 16.

Tom Tanke, vice president of the Rail Construction Corp., said that the lake bed hassle “hasn’t hurt our schedule at all”--largely because a threatened legal fight over the award of tunneling contracts required the agency to seek a second round of bids.

Even at that, costly headaches may lie ahead. Construction workers on the scene told bystanders Friday that they may have encountered a natural spring that is impeding the removal of sediment--and could delay work further.