Bureaucracy and L.A.’s Third World

With its daily assault on health and senses, “The Third World,” a stretch of junkyards and dumps near the harbor, is a reminder of just how ineffective Los Angeles government can be.

The main drag of this section of East Wilmington is an unpaved city street, blocked by huge piles of used tires, auto parts, pieces of concrete and the other refuse of industrial L.A. Dull-eyed prostitutes entertain customers in camper trucks parked on the fringes of scrap yards and on other littered streets. Drug dealers roam the junkyards and make sales on busy Anaheim Street, a couple of blocks away.

This miserable scene isn’t the only reason unhappy Wilmington residents have named the area “The Third World.” Six oil refineries, two sulfur plants and other industries pollute the air. Nearby is a slaughterhouse where a sign advertises the butchering of calves, goats, pigs and lambs. Junkyard dogs of the meanest variety roam amid abandoned autos. In the corner of one junkyard, a few horses are stabled in small metal pens.

The winds from the harbor constantly blow the pollution to Wilmington Park Elementary School, about a mile away. The teachers and the 1,200 students, mostly from working-class and poor Latino families, complain of nausea and nosebleeds.

“The Third World” has been a local scandal for years, mysteriously immune to news reports and attacks by government agencies.

Last week, David Stoll, a local businessman trying to stimulate improvement efforts, showed me the area. After the tour, I wondered why our many elected officials and bureaucrats haven’t been able to accomplish what seems like a relatively simple cleanup task.

I called some of the people in charge. One was Percy Duran, a member of the Board of Public Works, the city commission in charge of streets and sewers. The place is terrible, I said.

Duran knew all about it. “It’s so bad even the gang members won’t hang out there,” he agreed. But the city can’t do much. “The city is not responsible for clearing unimproved streets,” he said. Owners of adjacent property are supposed to pay for such cleanups. “The problem is there are various owners,” he said. The city can’t find them to collect.

Everyone assumes the city actually is one of the biggest property owners in “The Third World,” through its Harbor Department. “We asked them (harbor officials) to go in there and clean up the area and patrol it more often and keep the druggies and the prostitutes out,” said Duran. “But for whatever reason, the harbor hasn’t come through the way we would like.”

I called the Harbor Department. “We do own property out there, but not a tremendous amount,” said Ezunial Burts, the Harbor Department’s executive director. “We spent several hundred thousands of dollars on debris removal, cleanup and fencing for every one of our properties.” But it was clear that Burts felt the harbor had done its part.

Everyone is frustrated by the mess. “You may think it’s bad now, but you should have seen it before we started working on it,” said Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores. A couple of years ago, she said, the city advanced $500,000 for a cleanup and actually found enough property owners willing to repay it. But illegal dumpers soon returned the area to its filthy state. “One night, someone dumped five tons of trash there,” Flores said.

Nowhere is the frustration deeper than at Wilmington Park Elementary School. I visited there late one afternoon. The smell from the adjacent industry hung over the yard and drifted through the open windows of the 80-year-old school.

Principal Patricia McKenna is smart enough to know she’ll never completely stop the pollution in an area that has been industrialized for more than 100 years. She just wants to know how harmful the pollution is. “We’re constantly calling the South Coast Air Quality Management District, complaining,” she said. “The teachers complain every time there is an odor, every time the air is a strange color.”

I called the pollution control district and was surprised to be told by an official that pollution concentrations are “only slightly above average.”

In the end, I couldn’t find any one specific person or agency to blame for the filth and pollution. Power is too divided between various parts of the city government, the air pollution district and several other agencies.

After two years of battle, Principal McKenna summed it up: “Frankly, I have no idea who are the responsible agencies. But you can stand in the middle of the schoolyard and see something should be done.”

I think a better idea is for her to go inside--and close the windows.