Uneasy Neighbors : For 4 Families, Life Next Door to Industry Means Conflict, Frustration, Often Fear

One woman awoke to layers of flour coating her van; another became afraid to walk to her neighborhood market because of the hordes of day laborers loitering on her corner. A son’s pet rabbit died, and a father lost faith in city officials.

What these four people from the San Fernando and Simi valleys have in common is that they live next door to industry. Ask them and their families what that means and they talk of irritation, frustration and fear.

They share interrupted sleep, hot summers with windows closed and back yards they say are useless. They log daily diaries of annoyances that they think may violate city, regional or state laws. They worry about the health of their children and their pets.

All four thought they were alone in their troubles until they started talking with neighbors.

They say they are living proof that housing and industry make poor neighbors, prompting conflicts that far outweigh typical neighborhood gripes about traffic or ruined views. In fact, residential areas next door to industrial zones may be the most graphic examples of poor community planning, some Los Angeles and Simi Valley city officials say.

“The simple fact is that most of these planning-department and zoning-department folks who make land-use decisions don’t take into consideration how the use might affect the general area,” said Richard Baldwin, district director for the Ventura County Air Pollution Control District.

Months or Years of Complaining

Once problems begin to occur, people who live next to industries find it takes months or years of complaining to municipal and regional officials to gain even partial satisfaction.

“We assumed that someone, that the city, was watching out for us, but it’s not true,” said Margaret Whittington, whose Sylmar farmhouse now backs onto a construction supply lot. “It took us six years to find out the truth.”

Ideally, Los Angeles and Simi city planning officials said, heavy industry should be separated from residential areas by buffer zones of lighter industrial and commercial zones. They said many of the incompatible uses began long before city zoning and planning laws included safeguards to prevent pairings between people and industry.

“Most of the land-use conflicts arise historically,” said Emily Gabel, a Los Angeles city planner. “They’ve been used for a long time, and no one knows the history of why any longer.”

But all four of the residential areas included in this story predated the industrial areas next door, and all but one of the families--the Haggarts, who moved into a World War II-era trailer court three years ago--remember when fields were their neighbors instead of factories.

In three of the cases, the industries were allowed to locate near residences under city zoning. Only Apache Building Materials in Sylmar started up without full city approval.

The simplest solution to the conflicts, suggested by some city officials, is for either the residents or the industries to move. In hindsight, Simi Mayor Greg Stratton said he wished that a spa manufacturer, which subjected a neighborhood to almost daily chemical odors for more than a year, could have been directed to a heavier industrial area.

“If this thing had located near the sewer plant, no one would have noticed,” Stratton said.

However, Penny Newmark, who heads a group called Residents Against Pollution, thinks that separating industrial and residential areas is a Band-Aid approach, particularly where air pollution is involved. Instead, she said, companies should be forced to be more responsible neighbors.

“Moving industries from residential areas does not take care of the problem,” Newmark said. “It will just give these companies an opportunity to do the bad things they’re doing, to put more pollutants out into the air, because no one’s there to monitor it.”

The four families either do not want to move or cannot afford to move, or both. Here are their stories:

The day Chomper the rabbit died, his owner, Adam Haggart, 9, was the first to find him.

“It was a good day until that happened,” Adam said.

Although the cause of death was never determined, Adam blamed the metal-casting company next door, which had allowed odors to escape near Birmingham Trailer Village earlier in the day.

The brown and white rabbit was buried next door to the double-wide mobile home in Van Nuys, where Adam lives with his parents, Bruce and Diane Haggart.

On a piece of weathered plywood, Adam scrawled Chomper’s epitaph:

“R.I.P.

“Here lies Chomper ‘Ruby’

“1986-1989

“Murdered by Coastcast Co.”

Coastcast Co. has since been cited twice by the South Coast Air Quality Management District for emitting odors and smoke. However, officials with the air quality management district and Coastcast think the odors were caused by burning wax in an overheated furnace, not by toxic chemicals.

But Adam’s immediate assumption underscores one of the realities of living next door to industry: fear.

Growing Fear

Fear creeps into the Haggarts’ lives when the flowers they plant outdoors die. Fear returned when Diane started having chronic headaches, when Bruce had frequent nosebleeds, when Adam was put in a special physical education class because his motor skills were impaired.

“All we know is we have problems,” Diane said. “It could be related; it might not be.”

Coastcast plant manager Ted Rauch said the company shares the neighbors’ concerns about health effects, especially since their workers also are exposed to any chemicals in even greater concentrations.

“We’ve had the health board in here, and they haven’t cited us; we’re not in any violation that we’re aware of,” Rauch said.

The Haggarts thought they knew what they were getting into when they moved into the Balboa Boulevard trailer court four years ago. They had lived in another park on Woodley Avenue that also was surrounded by industry. As Bruce Haggart put it, “There should be no reason people and companies can’t get along.”

Noise Problems

At their old home, their major complaint was noise, which the company reduced whenever they protested. When the Haggarts first moved to the Birmingham trailer court, noise was the only problem there, too.

But after about a year, Diane Haggart said, she saw workers from the factory next door--then owned by Rex Precision Products--pour something she thought was chemicals into Bull Creek. When she walked over to investigate, she said, she stepped into a white puddle that splashed onto her right leg and caused blisters. She said she did not know whether it was the same substance she saw being poured into the creek.

Rex Precision Products was taken over by Coastcast in 1987 and could not be reached for comment.

The Haggarts said that they started to see a sticky film on their car, and that during the rainy season, silt that had accumulated on their roof would trickle down the side of the trailer and erode its finish.

Awhile later, they started noticing a cloying, metallic odor from time to time that prompted them to close all their windows and doors, even in the hot summer. In January, the odor became suffocating, Diane Haggart said.

“You’d close everything up, and it would still seep in,” she said.

One night, Diane Haggart walked over to try to talk with Coastcast employees about the stench. She said they threatened to call police and charge her with trespassing, although company officials deny the accusation.

Since January, the Haggarts’ emergency phone list has included numbers for the air quality management district, the Los Angeles Fire Department’s hazardous materials team and Residents Against Pollution. They have been frequent callers to all three numbers.

They are frustrated with the slow pace of the enforcement process and feel stuck because they can’t afford to move. At least six of their neighbors have posted “For Sale” signs in their windows.

People said Valerie Hofmann treated her red Ford van like a child. She bought it personalized license plates imprinted with its name, Mad Max. On Sundays, she spent two hours outside her Canoga Park home, scrubbing the van inside and out.

Then, nearly every Monday morning, Hofmann said she awoke to find Mad Max covered with flour that had drifted across her back fence from the Mission Foods Corp. tortilla factory.

“I would just want to weep,” Hofmann said.

Hofmann stopped washing her van, and she stopped using her back yard, too, because the noise from the processing plant drowned out conversation and the air was filled with a heavy tortilla odor.

But these days, flour clouds and loud noises are rare and only a slight odor of masa, the corn mash used to make tortillas, lingers. She has an air-filtration system in her house, compliments of Mission Foods, and neighbors meet monthly with company executives to discuss any remaining problems. A company complaint hot line is staffed 24 hours a day.

‘Unfailingly Polite’

“We had to beat them over the head to get their attention,” Hofmann said. “But once we did, they’ve been unfailingly polite and responsive.”

Mission Foods Vice President Raymond Hansen said the relationship changed from confrontational to constructive after a new management team in 1987 came in with orders to solve the problems.

But Hofmann said the Variel Avenue residents succeeded in forging a working relationship with Mission Foods by banding together and persevering. They started what they call a “telephone tree”--one neighbor calling several others who in turn called others--to make sure that the air quality management district and other agencies received plenty of complaints when there was an odor, noise or flour problem.

Soon, the air quality management district inspector was being sent out to the area so often to investigate complaints that Hofmann and her neighbors knew him on a first-name basis.

13 Citations

By November, 1986, Mission Foods had received 13 air quality management district citations for noise and emissions. Within a year, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office also filed charges against the company, which ended in a $3,400 fine and the agreement to meet monthly with neighbors.

When Hofmann moved into her home 15 years ago, the land that now is Mission Foods was an open field where, she believed, more houses would be built. The first indication she had that plans had changed was construction of a small tortilla factory.

Even after Mission Foods bought the company and more than tripled its size, Hofmann said she never thought of moving because she loves her house. But at the peak of the problems, she did boycott Mission Foods products.

“I was buying chips and dips one day with my sister and she picked up Mission Foods chips,” Hofmann said. “I told her, ‘I can’t believe you would buy them, especially in front of me.’ ”

Now Mission Foods hands out free chips at their monthly neighborhood meetings, and Hofmann said she has become quite fond of them.

“They do make the best chips, you know,” she said.

The changes in the neighborhood crept up slowly on Margaret Whittington, whose Sylmar farmhouse now backs onto a construction supply lot.

When she and her husband first rented the house on Paddock Street in 1978, the lot behind them was fields all the way to San Fernando Road, with a one-story plumbing business at the far end. Over the years, it became a storage yard that just “grew and grew and grew,” she said.

The burgeoning construction supply business created troubling problems, Whittington said: diesel fuel fumes wafting into her bedroom at 4 a.m., heavy trucks barreling down her street that have squished neighborhood pets, and cement mixers grinding all day.

But those irritations proved less intrusive than the day laborers.

Scores of men--up to 200 some days--line up hoping to get hired by one of the contractors who buy supplies from Apache Building Materials.

“Imagine hundreds of men loitering in a location where we’ve not had that before,” Whittington said. “They’re eating, drinking coffee, reading newspapers and leaving trash in our yards.” Because there are no bathroom facilities nearby, “our yards became their toilets,” she said.

Crime Followed

Worse than that, Whittington said, is the array of crime that followed the laborers. There are prostitutes and drug dealers on the corner, trying to interest the workers in their wares. There has been a rash of petty theft in the area.

“It has really changed the tone of the area,” she said. “Women used to be very comfortable walking anywhere. I used to walk to the store on the corner all the time. But I don’t do it anymore.”

Repeated calls to Apache Building Materials were not returned.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has staged several raids in the area, Whittington said. After a raid, only 50 to 75 men will show up at first, she said, “then it’ll take a couple of months to build back up again.”

Because Whittington and her husband, Edward Wagner, are renters, moving would have been easier for them than for homeowners on their street. But they have invested time and money in fixing up the house, and they have forged solid relationships with their neighbors.

Decided to Fight

So Whittington decided to fight. For a long time no one from the city seemed interested in her story, she said. But finally last year, after Councilman Ernani Bernardi got involved, the city Building and Safety Department forced the construction company to pare down its storage of supplies and move its cement-mixing business to a nearby area zoned for heavier industry.

When it looked as though the city would go no further, Whittington joined with several neighbors to file a public-nuisance lawsuit. They have postponed further action on that suit, awaiting word from the Los Angeles city attorney’s office on what action the city will take.

“People say, ‘You’ve gotten so much already, why not just be satisfied?”’ she said. “But that’s not my way.”

Disillusionment with city government has been the hardest thing for Chas Hill to accept.

He never thought twice when a spa manufacturer took over a tire warehouse about 300 yards from his Simi Valley home in late 1987.

“We pay our taxes to get the city to protect us,” Hill said. “You would think you could rely on your city to clump any problem industries all together, away from houses.”

When he and his neighbors started noticing a pungent, glue-like odor in the late afternoons, they assumed someone around the corner was working on a boat.

But the odor didn’t go away.

Styrene Fumes

When one of the neighbors traced it to fumes from styrene, a liquid resin used to make fiberglass spas at Hydro Systems, Hill turned to Simi Valley City Hall. He expected immediate results.

“I thought we should have just been able to say, ‘We’ve got a smell over here,’ and they would solve it,” Hill said.

Instead, what came next were public hearings, numerous neighborhood petitions, protests and testimony in court.

Stratton, the mayor, said the city tried to address the problem as quickly as it could but found it lacked the specialists to determine the best solution.

In Hydro Systems’ defense, Vice President Larry Burroughs said the firm “spent a lot of time and a lot of money” researching taller smokestacks, which is a common solution to styrene odors. But he said the city rejected that proposal.

Another solution that failed was an attempt to chemically mask the fumes with less offensive scents. For a while, the afternoons smelled like bubble gum. Then they smelled like baking bread.

But, Hill said, the alternative scents just made him more aware that the problem persisted. And his wife, Grace, said all of the scents--including the styrene--ruined the taste of food, “like when you put an onion under your nose and eat chocolate.”

Talked of Moving

For several months last year, the Hills talked about moving from the home they bought in 1972. They even sat down and penciled it out financially. But Chas Hill said his two sons--ages 11 and 14--have established friendships in the neighborhood and that he hated to make them leave.

Under an order from the city, Hydro Systems in October installed charcoal filters that were supposed to remove all the fumes. The Hills acknowledge that the styrene odor comes less often now and is not as strong, but at least once a week Grace Hill notices--and reports--it.

Burroughs said the lingering odors are unrelated to the filter system, which he thinks is working. Instead, he said, the company has traced complaints to such things as outdoor garbage cans, doors left open and trucks hauling styrene waste.

But the continuing odors make Chas Hill throw up his hands in dismay.

“You just start to feel that the system overlooks the big guy,” he said. “This probably makes me less of a good citizen, because of the frustration of this.”