Violence Endangers Utility Workers : Crime: On-the-job safety for crews in some areas means dodging drug dealers and bullets. Sometimes, repairs are delayed.

J.T., a telephone cable repairman, was working on a utility pole in a Long Beach alley recently when a vicious fight erupted on the ground. A man attacked two others with a six-foot iron pipe, leaving one unconscious and another covered with blood.

After the police and the paramedics arrived, a neighborhood woman went up to J.T. and gave the GTE worker some advice. “You shouldn’t be around here. This isn’t a good place for you to be.”

The same can be said of many neighborhoods that utility workers find themselves in. Not so long ago, on-the-job safety meant proper tool use and watching out for open manholes. Now, with the spread of crime, drugs and gangs from Los Angeles to Long Beach and Santa Ana, it is also a matter of dodging robbers, cocaine dealers and random bullets.

“Ten years ago, one incident a year was a lot,” said Janice Wood, a Communication Workers of America official who represents telephone workers in Los Angeles. “If someone had been shot, it would have been a major topic of conversation and everyone would have known about it. Now it’s not. It’s something that happens.”

Although utility officials say that the number of serious incidents is relatively small, the threat of danger on the streets has changed the way crews work and sometimes left customers without service for hours or days.

Repairmen assigned to dangerous neighborhoods try to perform their work early in the day, when the streets are quiet. Later repair jobs are sometimes left until the morning. Companies install equipment that can be tended to from a central office rather than in the field.

At least one utility company has occasionally asked for police protection for emergency crews. Workers are trained in how to deal with gang members and how to read graffiti. They are told to pack up their tools and leave if they feel endangered, even if it means delaying repairs.

“A lot of times, it’s been two or three days before we could give people service,” said George, a Long Beach GTE repairman, who, like most other fieldworkers interviewed, did not want to identified.

“(Service crews) have been harassed and shot at and threatened,” said Rae Sanborn, who represents Southern California Edison Co. workers as business manager of Local 47 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “There’s a lot of concern, and that’s a tough one. Do you leave the whole community in the dark? How do you protect your people?”

Sometimes the intimidation and gunplay are simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“(Recently) we had two workers caught in a cross-fire,” Bob Simmons, a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power manager, said. “Our guys just happened to be in-between and a bullet went into their truck.”

Neither worker was hurt and Simmons said none of his 650 construction and maintenance employees have been seriously injured in recent years. Nonetheless, he added: “A lot of guys are afraid. . . . They talk about hearing gunshots on a regular basis.”

A Pacific Bell technician in Compton did not just hear gunfire. He felt it. About six weeks ago, he was shot in the foot when he was caught in a drive-by shooting and has yet to return to work, according to a company spokesman.

Other episodes are not so random. Utility workers have been attacked, had guns stuck in their faces or been chased out of neighborhoods by people who assume they are undercover police officers or are in league with law enforcement efforts.

Within the last two years in Long Beach, one GTE worker had a gun put to his head and four others were ordered out of neighborhoods with threats of violence. “Especially in the last six months, there’s been an escalation,” said Dan Smith, a spokesman for GTE California Inc. “Some of our employees are reluctant to perform their jobs in certain areas (of Long Beach).

“What we’re running up against is that street gang members and drug dealers believe our employees are informants,” he said.

Repair workers tell of having passersby shout at them, “Morning, officer” or of people angrily accusing them of tapping phones.

George, the GTE worker, has been accosted while working at terminal boxes on the street. “They say: ‘Why don’t you find another terminal to work on?’ I say: ‘This is the one with the trouble.’ And they say: ‘You have 10 seconds to get out.’ ”

About two years ago, Wood said, “a field technician was walking down some steps and when he reached the bottom, someone bashed him in the face with a board.”

The problem has become so pronounced in Long Beach that GTE recently asked city and community leaders to help get the word out that their workers are not undercover agents and are not “ratting on anybody,” as Smith described it.

Although Long Beach officials say that to their knowledge local police have never disguised themselves as utility workers, Los Angeles police have.

Union complaints and employee concerns about being linked to police activity have prompted utilities to bar the use of company equipment or uniforms by police officers.

Conceding the danger of retaliation, the Los Angeles Police Department last year adopted a policy requiring undercover officers to obtain written permission from public utilities or companies before posing as their workers, according to a department spokesman.

Repairmen who routinely work in high-crime areas have learned to mind their own business and to quickly scan the streets for potential trouble.

A Southern California Gas Co. bill collector in Los Angeles said that when he sees gang members milling around a block, “I’ll work a few jobs someplace else and come back and hope they’ve done their thing.

“It really isn’t that bad,” he continued. “It’s all bluster half the time.”

One thing George A. Washington, a gas company service technician who works in the Compton area, never does is watch drug deals in progress. “Just don’t sit there and look and stare. Don’t (try to) attract attention to yourself or you will be successful,” said Washington, who was involved last year in a company effort to teach employees how to survive tough neighborhoods.

Whenever J.T., the GTE repairman, is in an alley, “I won’t turn my back on anybody, not for a second,” he said.

Even the color of a worker’s garb can become a life-and-death issue. Simmons said DWP workers “have been accosted and been asked to take off their overalls and remove their jackets.” The overalls and jackets are orange, apparently too close to red, a gang color.

Wood, president of CWA Local 9000, said that a few years ago, “(Pacific Bell) bought everyone satin jackets with their name embroidered, and there were two colors--red and blue.” Blue is another common gang color. “When they arrived, everyone said: ‘Well, I don’t think so.’ So I think they shipped them to Northern California.”

Sometimes, repairmen will answer a service call and find themselves in a crack house. “A lot of times you say: ‘I have to grab a wrench and I’ll be back’ and you get to the truck and you get out of there,” Washington said.

Many fieldworkers leave their money at home, but that does not keep the thieves away. Wood recalled the experience of a Pacific Bell worker in Los Angeles. He was kidnaped at gunpoint in a company van, made to drive around the block and held up for the $2 in his wallet. “I guess that wasn’t enough,” Wood said, “so they took his lunch.”

The tension of working in neighborhoods where a worker can lose not only his lunch but his life contributes to the turnover in inner-city areas. Mark Akiaten, a Local 9505 CWA official who represents Pacific Bell and AT & T workers in the San Gabriel Valley, said a couple of repairmen, shaken by close brushes with danger, have transferred there from Los Angeles. One man, who had been shot in South-Central Los Angeles “got all freaked out and ended up quitting,” Akiaten said. “It’s like a war, it’s the aftermath we have to deal with.”