Residents Near Dump Cautioned : Environment: Low levels of a cancer-causing gas are detected at the closed Montebello landfill, EPA officials say. Further tests are planned.

They told Phyllis Lee when she and her husband bought their Montebello home in 1976 that the landfill across the street would be a golf course one day. Sixteen years later, it’s still a dump, and now there is some fear it is leaking cancer-causing gas.

“It’s three times taller than it was when we moved here. It smelled for a long time,” Lee said of the brown heap that fills up the view from her living room window. “They keep saying that millions of dollars are going into it and they still can’t clean this thing up.”

The once-gaping pit that began accepting Los Angeles’ commercial, industrial and residential waste in 1948 was a literal mountain of refuse by the time it was shut down in 1984 amid protests from neighbors tired of the smell of things rotting. But like the villain in a formula horror movie, the Operating Industries Inc. landfill refuses to die.

The neighbors complain that “something white” occasionally appears in their gardens, that their children used to describe “black stuff” oozing up from the landfill now corralled by chain-link fences. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already cleaned up the ooze that appeared in a nearby park. A chemical smell still wafts through the air.

Now the EPA is preparing to test next month for possible leaks of methane--a potential explosive--and vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen. Friday they began informing residents in about 200 homes that border the southern half of the dump that “very low levels” of vinyl chloride have already been detected over the site, causing concern that the gas is seeping underground into the foundations of their houses.

For the families who bought sprawling two-story homes near the landfill, the tests are yet another episode in a long history of annoyances and health scares at a site once considered one of the worst toxic hazards in the nation.

“That’s why those things don’t grow over here,” Wayne Dea said Friday, pointing toward a sad looking garden along the side of his property on Rio Blanco Avenue. His back yard has a view of the towering mound built from nearly four decades of refuse, as well as liquid hazardous wastes dumped there from 1976 until 1983.

For a family looking to flee Los Angeles in the mid-1970s for a new three-bedroom home under $60,000, living near a landfill seemed a minor inconvenience.

But when the wind blew or the sun came out after a rain, the sickly smell was at times unbearable. Lee said guests who arrived at her house for parties would race inside to escape the stench. The family rarely used the back yard pool. One day the dog’s stomach turned hard and he died; now she wonders why.

“We could never open the windows,” she said.

A new town square with a movie theater complex, a Spanish-style shopping center and freshly planted daisies is promising to breathe new life into Montebello. But poisons still lingering from the dump one-half mile away are likely to tug at the small city for years to come, federal officials said.

The site is on the national priority list for cleanup under the federal Superfund program that requires companies and agencies that generated the toxic waste to pay for the damage. An estimated $500 million will be spent before the job is done.

In addition to possible gas leaks, federal officials are working to control liquid seepage in and out of the dump and possible ground water contamination. Once the cleanup is complete, the site will require years of security, officials said.

“I doubt there is ever going to be any golf course there,” said Nathan Lau, chief of the enforcement response section at the EPA in San Francisco.

Some of the neighbors have grown complacent now that the smell is under control. They did not seem alarmed by the notion of more gas tests, set to begin Nov. 9.

“I’ve already had two strokes. If it’s my time, it’s my time,” Ana Richards said, noting that her 14-month-old grandson plays in the back yard with no apparent side effects.

The EPA calls this round of tests “precautionary” and says there is no need for concern.

Lee wonders.

“They’ll probably lie about the test results and never do anything about it,” she complained. “If I had it to do over, I would never have moved here.”