The Avenue 34 project is a mixed-use development being built on a highly contaminated property in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. Our community fought for years for the site to be tested, which revealed contamination at concentrations thousands of times higher than what is safe for homes. Our community discovered that the site was formerly used as an illegal toxic waste dump, where hundreds of corroded barrels of solvents were discovered underground. The CA Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) initially refused testing beyond the property boundaries, and approved a cleanup that will not clean up the site to federal residential safety standards. Help us protect Lincoln Heights from environmental injustice!

A long-forgotten toxic dump site is raising new worries for this Los Angeles neighborhood

A drone image of industrial warehouses at 141 West Avenue 34 in Lincoln Heights, where real estate developers want to build a five-story apartment complex.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

By Jonah Valdez Staff Writer 

April 30, 2022 5 AM PT

In the summer of 1984, investigators peered into a cave dug beneath the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles and found dozens of rusted 55-gallon barrels filled with toxic chemicals.

Some of the barrels lay nearly empty after their contents had leaked through corroded metal and escaped into the soil.

“I saw the hole and I said, ‘I can’t believe it — who would do something like this?’,’' recalled Barry Groveman, the head of the now-defunct Los Angeles Hazardous Waste Task Force. At the time, he described the dump as “a violent crime against the community.”

Groveman and his investigators went on to uncover 252 barrels buried in similar caverns surrounding a manufacturing warehouse at 141 West Avenue 34, where the American Caster Corp. operated. Some of the chemicals were also dumped into sewer lines. Before the discovery, the dumping practice had carried on for four years.

After a hasty cleanup, and as the company’s executives and several employees served six months in jail and paid thousands of dollars in fines, investigators moved on to other cases. The court records were eventually destroyed — common for old municipal documents — and the case largely faded from memory.

Now, nearly 40 years later, environmental concerns at the Avenue 34 site have once again shaken the neighborhood as real estate developers want to demolish the industrial warehouse and, in its place, build a five-story apartment complex, retail space and an underground parking garage.

Lourdes Garcia and her 8-year-old son, Enzio Parra, on their way to Hillside Elementary School. At an abandoned industrial warehouse on Avenue 34, a developer wants to build a five-story apartment complex.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Until recently, community activists had opposed the project because they said it would gentrify their predominantly working-class, Latino and Asian neighborhood. They also worried that contamination from a neighboring dry cleaner could be disturbed during construction and leave them vulnerable to exposure.

While regulators deemed the former dry cleaner site to be unfit for residential development, due to lingering chemicals beneath the surface, the state allowed developers to build housing on the neighboring Avenue 34 site.

But when a community member recently came across archived Los Angeles Times articles highlighting the 1984 case, the revelation shocked residents. They are now accusing California regulators of failing to properly test the decades-old dumpsite and surrounding properties, and are calling for a new cleanup plan.

In December 2021, Sara Clendening, president of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council, dug up this Los Angeles Times article from 1984, revealing a hidden layer of the Avenue 34 development site’s history. (Click image above to view a pdf.)

Neighborhood activists Patricia Camacho and Michael Hayden, who both live across the street from the proposed housing development, worry that illegally dumped chemicals may have migrated to other areas.

“Toxins don’t stop at property lines,” Camacho said. “It’s just so disappointing that the cleanup plan didn’t include testing outside of the property. Those of us who live 30 feet from where this is happening, we feel like we aren’t being protected.”

When project developer R Cap Avenue 34, LLC sought approval from the city and state to build in 2020, the group insisted the Avenue 34 site had little to no contamination and chemicals were confined to the dry cleaning site.

A school bus on Pasadena Avenue in a neighborhood where a developer wants to build a five-story apartment complex on what is currently an abandoned industrial warehouse.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

However, testing done at the property in late 2021 revealed levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that were more than 4,000 times higher than what is recommended for residential standards. The compounds included the dry cleaning solvent tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says may harm the nervous system, reproductive system, liver and kidneys, and may possibly cause cancer.

Despite community protests, reignited by discovery of the 1984 case, the developer’s plan to remove chemical waste from the site was approved by the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, which has overseen cleanup at the laundry site. The agency declared that “nearby residents, businesses, and schools are safe from contaminants found at the Site,” and in its determination, added that “there is no significant risk beyond the property boundaries.”

The department said the 1984 case has no impact on the cleanup of the site.

“Most responsible parties want to make sure once they develop a property there won’t be lingering concerns or exposure that could harm future residents, or people nearby — that’s not the case here,” said Angelo Bellomo, former head of environmental health for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and a former DTSC official who has been critical of the project’s cleanup plan. “How could this get support from city council, local regulatory agencies and the state regulatory agency?”

The American Caster Corp., which operated at the Avenue 34 site, was forced to buy a full-page advertisement in the L.A. Times after being convicted of burying and dumping toxic waste in Lincoln Heights. “The entire purpose of it was deterrence,” said Barry Groveman, an attorney who prosecuted the 1984 case. (Click image above to view a pdf.)

Today, hulking and abandoned warehouses span most of the development site. Feather reed grass and weeds sprout from cracked asphalt and obscure walls. DTSC work notices announcing last year’s testing are zip-tied to fences, while an abandoned security patrol car with a toppled office chair on its roof sits beside a large pile of sandbags and metal barrels.

“I spent every day in 2012 and 2013 on that site, and we had no idea it was contaminated and poisonous,” said Fernanda Sanchez, who in high school took kickboxing lessons at a gym that once operated at Avenue 34.

Born and raised in Lincoln Heights, she joined efforts in 2020 to inform her neighbors of the new development, which along with the threat of contamination, she feared would drive up property values and price out current residents. Last year, she was elected to the neighborhood council.

“It’s just a form of environmental racism,” Sanchez said. “Our low-income, immigrant communities are not seen as valuable, whether it’s displacing us or poisoning us — they completely disregard our human rights.”

Developers hope to transform the abandoned property into “a healthy and vibrant community” with public open space within walking distance to two Metro Gold Line stations. The project promises 468 apartment units, most at market rate, with a small portion, 66 units, set aside as affordable housing.

“We will shortly begin the process of a site cleanup that was approved by and will be carried out under the supervision of the State Department of Toxic Substances Control,” the development group said in a statement. “As was always required by the Avenue 34 project’s entitlement approvals from the City of Los Angeles, the site has undergone extensive environmental review, analysis, and testing.”

Parents drop their children off at Hillside Elementary, located on Avenue 35, very close to an abandoned industrial site on 141 W. Avenue 34 in Lincoln Heights.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The demolition of warehouse buildings and the cleanup of soils is scheduled to begin in early May and will continue for several months.

Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, who has voiced concerns about the project since last year, also questioned why the state didn’t conduct more testing after the community discovered the 1984 case.

Williams and others say they are worried about the presence of VOCs in soils beneath the development site. These often odorless compounds may enter buildings through cracks, windows or utility lines in a phenomenon known as vapor intrusion.

To protect against vapor intrusion, experts are trained to track how far chemicals have traveled beneath the ground before removing them from the soil.

“We always look very carefully at a site that’s getting developed and ask, ‘Are we protecting against this phenomenon of vapor intrusion?’” said James Wells, an environmental geologist who was an advisor to the state during its cleanup of the Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon and has recently been advising Lincoln Heights residents. “At this site, I didn’t feel like the [cleanup plan] met that standard.”

State regulators continue to assure the community that dangerous chemicals on the property have not spread to nearby homes.

Wells, however, said such a conclusion was premature, given the rediscovery of the 1984 chemical dump.

Wells and Bellomo are calling on regulators and developers to pause demolition and conduct more testing. They also want regulators to conduct a full investigation into the nature of the illegal dumping as well as how the chemicals were cleaned up.

Exactly how deep DTSC looked into the 1984 case before approving the developer’s cleanup plan remains unclear. However, Groveman, the head prosecutor in the 1984 case, said DTSC contacted and interviewed him in early April, which was several weeks after the department had already adopted the cleanup plan.

In the days since then, DTSC confirmed that it has looked at county and state records and could not find any documents that show the location of the buried barrels or how they were cleaned up.

Neither the cleanup plan nor DTSC’s summary in the state’s Envirostor database — an online source where officials store records of contaminated properties — make any mention of the 1984 case.

“This is a massive area of uncertainty. How could we not want to fill that gap of uncertainty, given that this is a sort of notorious site back in the ‘80s,” Wells said. “The cleanup standards were nothing like they were today.”

Javier Hinojosa, a DTSC official who is working on the testing and cleanup at Avenue 34, said he agrees cleanup standards were not what they were 40 years ago. However, he stood by the department’s testing at the site, which also looked for the chemicals discovered in the 1980s case.

“There should be some confidence in the data and that we’re going to do the cleanup,” Hinojosa said.

A metal gate blocks the entrance to a complex of an abandoned industrial warehouse.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

It remains to be seen whether the newly revived concerns about the 1984 dumping case will delay development of the site. However, even in December, public officials like Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis and U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) have said approval of the cleanup plan was premature and more testing should be done. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has also met with DTSC officials in December and expressed concern that their testing standards were less stringent than federally-recommended standards for residential developments.

In the meantime, longtime residents like Cesar Salazar, 72, said the pace of development in northeast Los Angeles was increasing.

Salazar recalled a string of developments that resulted in the eviction of residents to make way for new housing projects. However, he said he was surprised to learn of the latest project, given the site’s history of toxic waste.

Salazar remembered decades ago in the 1980s, watching bulldozers bore trenches into the soil near warehouses on Avenue 34 and as workers hauled canisters of chemicals, tossing them into the holes like coffins of a mass grave. The smell, he recalled, was foul, similar to the stink of car grease.

“I was very surprised they were so daring and blatant,” Salazar said. “They didn’t even wait for the sun to go down.”

JUST UNCOVERED - The Avenue 34 project is a former illegal toxic waste dump!

The City of Los Angeles has approved building a 468-unit apartment building in Lincoln Heights at W Avenue 34 and Pasadena Ave, across the street from Hillside Elementary School. Since early 2020, the Lincoln Heights community called on the developers to test the property, because the neighboring property had been seriously polluted. The developers refused to test the site and lied to our community, saying they had already tested the site to prove it was not contaminated. We appealed to the City Planning Commission, which required the developers to work with the Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC). The testing that DTSC required showed that the site is highly contaminated, with toxic vapors tens of thousands of times higher than what is safe for homes, posing a health risk to the site as well as to neighboring Lincoln Heights residents and workers. In December of 2021, Lincoln Heights residents learned that the property is a former toxic waste dump, where hundreds of barrels of toxic waste were buried in holes in the ground. The City knew this history, because Los Angeles fought a landmark court case against the polluters, sending them to jail for 6 months. The property was never cleaned up to modern standards. The developers and the City never disclosed this history in any of their applications or in their statements to the public. They were ready to build hundreds of luxury apartments in a low-income community on top of a toxic dump without telling anyone about the risks. How did LA approve this project, when LA also prosecuted the former owner for making it a toxic dump? Our community has been lied to, and our lives have been put at risk for a developer’s private profit.

Help us protect our community from exploitation and environmental crimes. Anyone who helped hide these crimes must be held accountable.

Amateur Sleuthing Uncovers History of Toxic Waste Disposal at Redevelopment Site

Published on December 17, 2021 By Dan Ross

Amateur sleuthing has unearthed archival records from the 1980s showing how the site of a proposed housing development in Lincoln Heights, north of Downtown Los Angeles, was once a massive illegal hazardous waste dump that led to a milestone prosecution in California.

The findings raise questions anew about plans to remediate the property, the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s regulatory oversight of the project and how important information might have been hidden from a largely low income community already highly distrustful of the planned development.
 

A landmark investigation in 1984 found that employees from the American Caster Corporation had buried 252 barrels of toxic waste across a portion of the five-acre site.

 
According to online database records, a landmark investigation by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office in 1984 found that employees from the American Caster Corporation had buried 252 barrels of toxic waste — many of them highly corroded and leaking by the time they were removed — in “cavernous holes” across a portion of the five-acre site now earmarked for the Avenue 34 Project, a 468-unit apartment complex. The disposal site in question was at 141 West Ave. 34.

These records only recently surfaced, however, because of a local resident who conducted an online archival search of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. None of the key documents on the DTSC’s public EnviroStor database — those that typically list information on hazardous waste releases — mention the site’s history as an illegal waste dump. Multiple environmental reviews authorized by the site owners over years also fail to mention it. A 2019 mixed-use project report states “there are no reported spills, releases, or violations” associated with the site where the 252 barrels of toxic waste were illegally dumped in the early 1980s. “[B]ased on the available information,” the report declares, “the listings do not represent a significant environmental concern.”

In response to questions concerning what the Los Angeles City Planning Department knew about the illegal waste disposal, a spokesperson pointed to a 2017 report that forms part of the project’s environmental review process. That report found “no indication from a review of regulatory records and a Project Site inspection that the Project Site has had any problems concerning the storage, usage or disposal of hazardous materials in relation to these properties.”

According to L.A. Times stories from 1984, authorities conducted a “speedy cleanup” of the site in less than a day, removing barrels and contaminated soils before taking them to a hazardous waste landfill in West Covina.
 

“The consequences of this illegal dumping are not adequately understood.”

~ Jim Wells, environmental geologist, L. Everett & Associates

 
Local residents are now worried that a draft removal action workplan to safely manage soil excavations during construction — the public comment period deadline for which is Dec. 20 — doesn’t take into account the full risks that the site’s toxic history could pose to workers and the community. The draft workplan doesn’t mention the illegal toxic waste dump, though it mentions the site’s other industrial and residential uses from as far back as the late 1800s.

According to Jim Wells, a professional geologist with the firm L. Everett & Associates, more extensive site investigations need to take place before the project should move forward. “The consequences of this illegal dumping are not adequately understood,” he said.

The DTSC failed to respond to multiple emailed questions about its knowledge of the illegal toxic dump and possible ramifications for the redevelopment moving forward.

*   *   *

The current owners of the site are listed as R Cap Avenue 34, LLC and R Cap Avenue Two, LLC, companies affiliated with the Ratners, a powerful family in the real estate industry in Cleveland and Denver, as well as Los Angeles. The site’s previous owner is listed as Eric Ortiz.

In a statement attributed to the “Avenue 34 Development Team,” the developers wrote that they are “currently working under the oversight of the State Department of Toxic Substances Control to develop a comprehensive remediation plan.” Soil sampling conducted thus far has uncovered elevated contamination levels at the site.

The statement added that the development team is “both committed and legally required to ensure this site is fully cleaned up in accordance with today’s strict environmental standards.”
 

Most of the 52-gallon barrels, which held a highly toxic soup of chemicals including xylene and toluene, contained less than five gallons of waste by the time they were hauled away.

 
According to archival newspaper records, American Caster Corporation employees buried the drums over the course of four years, also allegedly pouring toxic waste directly into the city sewer system. Most of the 52-gallon barrels, which held a highly toxic soup of chemicals including xylene and toluene, contained less than five gallons of waste by the time they were hauled away, according to reports. The company’s president and vice president were both handed fines and six-month prison sentences, and the company was ordered to run a $15,000 advertisement in the Times relaying news of the crimes.

The punishments handed down in the case, led by the Los Angeles Hazardous Waste Strike Force, constituted California’s first prison sentences for industrial polluters, according to an L.A. Times article from March 1985.

*   *   *

Councilmember Gil Cedillo filed a motion in April — one ultimately tabled — to provide the proposed development up to $105 million in tax-exempt bond funding. In an emailed response to questions,  spokesman Conrado TerrazasCross wrote that while Cedillo was “not aware” of the illegal toxic dump,“He would have disclosed his knowledge of this incident to the public,” if he had.

This marks the latest twist in the tale of the proposed Avenue 34 redevelopment project, which immediately abuts residences and an elementary school in one of the most environmentally burdened areas in the state. Local community members and environmental advocates strongly insist that had it not been for the concerted pressure they have placed on the DTSC — the state agency that signs off on the building permit — the project would have already broken ground.

The DTSC is also coming under pressure from local politicians. In a letter Thursday to the agency, L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis, in whose district Lincoln Heights sits, expressed “deep concerns” over the adequacy of the draft work plan, writing that “insufficient consideration” has been paid to the potential migration of pollution underneath surrounding homes, schools and businesses.

“These developers lied about the contamination for more than a year and were prepared to build hundreds of homes on top of a toxic waste dump without addressing this history,” wrote local resident Michael Hayden in a statement. He pointed to an FAQ on the project’s website as recently as October of last year stating that the site is “not” contaminated. “Anyone who helped cover up this history must be held accountable.”

 
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