Long-Ago Gas Plant Sites Pose Modern-Day Hazards : Health: Utilities, state seek out possibly carcinogenic trouble spots. About 150 in California are being studied.

It wasn’t until Nicolas Caracciolo got the letter from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control that he remembered the black soot he had found while digging the foundation for the new living room of his Alhambra home.

Although he had never seen such soot in all his years in the construction business, Caracciolo did not pay it much mind. He just hauled it away with the rest of the debris and set about building the home of his family’s dreams.

But that black soot is on his mind again. Eight years after the first letter, which informed him that his house is on the site of a former manufactured-gas plant, Caracciolo several weeks ago got a second notice. This one said that soil testing all those years ago was inconclusive and that the state and Southern California Gas Co. were working together to ensure that any hazardous materials on the site will be cleaned up.

“I made this house, this is everything I wanted,” said Caracciolo, a native of Italy. “I didn’t know about any problem or any plant.”

Throughout California and nationally, a long-forgotten source of energy for a newly industrialized society is now being remembered for the most unfortunate of reasons: It often left a possibly toxic mess. More than just the chemical residue found at some sites, the turn-of-the-century plants bequeathed future generations a host of questions about what to do when environmental problems from the past revisit a modern and much-changed world.

The state and various utilities now responsible for the old sites agree that some wastes found at former plant locations can be cancer-causing--most notably the chemicals in a dark, sooty substance called lampblack that is apparently similar to the powdery material Caracciolo found.

Health experts say lampblack is only hazardous to humans when high concentrations are touched or ingested over long periods of time. But before those effects can be assessed, the long-gone plant sites have to be found and tested.

And affected homeowners such as Caracciolo and his wife, Norma, have to wait.

In the best-case scenario, no contaminants would be found under what used to be the Alhambra gasworks. Or, in another hopeful instance, the contaminants would be buried so deeply that the state would find them to be of negligible risk and leave them be.

“It really depends on how extensive it is, how deep it is and how widespread it is,” said Don Johnson of the state toxics control department, who oversees cleanup efforts in Southern California. “Best case is nothing happens. Worst case is that some houses have to be razed and the soil removed underneath.”

Over the next few months, the department will oversee the gas company’s investigation of the Alhambra site, which has since been developed into two apartment complexes and 18 single-family homes, including one lovingly rehabilitated by Nicolas Caracciolo. From there, investigations in the San Gabriel Valley will focus on non-residential sites in Pasadena and Monrovia.

Nationwide, in the years before World War II and the wide distribution of natural gas, there were between 1,500 and 2,000 manufactured-gas plants that provided the country’s growing cities with heat, light and power. In California, there were about 150.

And all of those former plant sites--the forgotten ones, the ones beneath building foundations or parks or homes and front lawns--have to be investigated.

“We’re doing everything possible to find out what is the extent of any residues or contamination,” said Jeri Love, a gas company spokeswoman. “The company as a whole didn’t know anything about these sites until 10 years ago.”

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The search for the old plants in California started only after publicity in the 1980s about contamination at a New Jersey site.

Residents near the coastal resort town of Belmar, N.J., spotted a small oil slick on the Shark River that was eventually traced through the storm drain system to a public park.

After checking historical documents, city officials determined that the parkland had once been owned by Jersey Central Power & Light, which had operated a manufactured-gas plant on the site from 1900 to 1952.

When the river slick prompted city officials to examine the soil of Three-Acre Park in 1982, they found brown, viscous sludge that had been carried from the park to the river, the storm system and neighbors’ basements.

Chemical analysis revealed the sludge to have high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs--components of lampblack, including probable carcinogens such as benzo(a)pyrene and chrysene.

As questions about the plants grew, California began looking into its own pre-natural gas past.

Using historical records, internal documents, early city listings, insurance policies and old maps, Southern California Gas Co. and other state utilities began searching for the sites and preliminarily surveying the ones they found.

“We really didn’t have a corporate memory of these sites,” said Robert G. Vogel, Southern California Gas Co.’s environmental mitigation manager. “How things happened is largely speculation because of the passage of time since these plants were operating.”

The companies also had to establish which modern-day utility would be responsible for which site. Often the utilities hold shared responsibility for sites owned at different times by corporate forebears of each partner. In other instances, the arguments continue about which utility is responsible for a given site.

Then, in 1987, Southern California Gas and the toxics control department sent out letters telling property owners such as Caracciolo about the history of their land.

“We moved here on June 20, 1987,” Caracciolo said. “The letter came in July. If I knew about this, I don’t buy the house for sure.”

Under the supervision of the state, Southern California Gas began basic field testing at each of its sites to determine if there was contamination, the level of cleanup urgency and possible cleanup options.

Not all former manufactured-gas sites have detectable levels of contamination from the early public works. Others, deeply buried under layers of concrete that are unlikely to be redeveloped, are left alone.

But now-cleared sites such as Edna Park in Covina, with 6,000 tons of lampblack-laced soil; Centinela Park in Inglewood, which Johnson said had almost pure lampblack two feet beneath the surface, and the Midway Village public housing complex in Daly City--whose residents complain in a lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric Co. of myriad health problems caused by lampblack--provide examples of other sites that will have to be cleaned.

“The chance of repeated exposure is quite low,” said Johnson of the state toxics control department. “But the department wants to remove that exposure.”

So following the exhaustive requirements of the state, Southern California Gas, Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have lurched toward remediation.

Of the 42 sites either jointly or fully owned by Southern California Gas Co., the responsible utilities have so far cleared contamination at sites in Covina, Dinuba, Porterville, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, Inglewood and Venice.

Southern California Edison--which abandoned the gas business entirely before 1920--has helped clean up two sites in conjunction with Southern California Gas Co. It is fully or partly responsible for 18 remaining sites.

For its part, Pacific Gas & Electric has identified 96 old plants, mostly on Northern and Central California sites within its service area. But it maintains that it is only responsible for the 29 sites that it still owns. PG&E; would not elaborate on the progress of its cleanup plan.

Officials from Southern California Gas and Southern California Edison estimate that it could be 10 years before all of their sites are inspected and, if necessary, cleaned.

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Cost of the cleanup efforts is anybody’s guess. So is the question of who ultimately will pay those costs; many utilities have sued their insurance carriers, contending that their policies should cover the remediation bills.

To date, Southern California Gas alone has spent about $25 million investigating sites and cleaning up the first eight. The projected budget for that company to clean up the remainder of the 42 sites it either jointly or wholly owns is $65 million.

On a national level, cost projections are hard to nail down because of the huge variation among sites, said Lori Traweek, an environmental engineer with the American Gas Assn.

To clean up an individual site could run anywhere from a few million dollars or less to $50 million, Traweek said, depending on the level of contamination. Multiply each of those numbers by 1,500 to 2,000 sites and the monetary damage becomes even more difficult to estimate.

But in California, as in most states, gas customers must pay for the cleanups. In a breakdown compiled by the state Public Utilities Commission, gas consumers bear 90% of the investigation and cleanup costs. The remaining 10% is picked up by the companies’ shareholders.

As the cleanups take place in California, the issue of financial responsibility winds through state courtrooms.

And many of the utilities’ insurers, arguing that the cleanup costs ought not to fall on them, raise troubling questions about the utilities’ knowledge of the plants and the harm they could do.

Andrew Gordon, an attorney with the San Francisco firm of Hancock, Rothert & Bunshoft, which is defending Lloyds of London in two cases filed by California utilities, says the utilities knew more about the environmental and health hazards of manufactured gas than they would like to acknowledge.

“There have been studies dating back to the 1800s concerning the effects of the waste produced by manufactured-gas plants,” Gordon said. “We think there is evidence there that the utilities discussed some of the problems they were experiencing in disposing the waste.”

In 1912, the Public Service Corp. of New Jersey, a gas manufacturer in Newark, was held responsible for the contamination of water used by a neighboring brewery. The jury found that the tar from the pits was not adequately contained by a brick and concrete receptacle; the plant was held responsible for the same problem in a 1906 case brought by the brewery, P. Ballantine & Sons.

And in 1919, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the passing of a species of shellfish--killed off in the mid-19th Century, the newspaper said, when the gasworks along Howard Street began pumping its byproducts into the wharf.

”. . . The cockles perished miserably and absolutely--helpless victims of the ocean immolated on the Alter of Light,” the paper wrote.

The utilities maintain that if much of turn-of-the-century industry was careless, it also was ignorant of the ramifications of its carelessness.

“Back then the only thing that was considered was the end result,” said Traweek of the American Gas Assn. “We’re looking at the remnants of a process that happened in a time when no one thought of the environment.”

Gordon holds that argument to be a poor excuse, along with the claim that the sites were unknown to the utilities until the 1980s.

“Once someone knows something, they do not unknow it,” Gordon “To say a corporation forgets something is no legitimate excuse either in fact or in law.”

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In 1906, the year California Coke and Gas Co. built its plant in Alhambra, the incorporated city was just three years old and had a population between 1,000 and 3,000 people.

The gas plant’s owner, Thaddeus Lowe, whose father pioneered the development of coal gas plants and who himself helped find a way to use oil to make the gas, built his works in what was then an unincorporated part of the city known as the Ramona Tract. The plant serviced parts of Pasadena and South Pasadena as well as Alhambra.

It lasted only until 1913, when the Los Angeles Gas & Electric Co., a predecessor of Southern California Gas, bought and dismantled the works. In 1939, the land was bought by Marguerite Ingham, who divided and sold off the site’s parcels.

Today, the 20 lots just south of Front Street between Edith Avenue and Curtis Lane are modest but well-kept single-family homes. Just down the street from the railroad line that probably imported the old plant’s materials, the mostly small bungalows in shades of white and beige tend to sport green lawns, colorful flowers and evidence of children: a slide in one yard, a ball in another, a small bicycle on the sidewalk.

Some of the residents are renters. Others are older people whose children grew up in the area. Many, such as Caracciolo, bought homes in the area to bring up their children.

Like their elected officials, many residents say they will try to temper their concern about what lies under their homes until they have more information.

“You need to know what you’re dealing with for peace of mind,” said 26-year-old Vianey Munoz, who grew up just down the street from Caracciolo’s home.

But for now, Munoz, Caracciolo and the other neighbors wait.

Meanwhile, manufactured gas joins a growing list of revolutionary inventions of days gone by, which have substances or byproducts generally less than lethal but often beyond benign. More directly, the remnants of manufactured gas evoke as many questions as potential problems--not the least of which is when discoveries of the past will cease to plague the present.

“Nobody told me anything, they just came and took my soil,” Caracciolo said. “Now, eight years later, they’re coming again.”

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Manufactured Gas Plant Sites

There are about 150 former manufactured gas plant sites statewide, including 42 in Southern California. To find out if there are former sites in your neighborhood, call the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. Here are the numbers:

* Los Angeles County south of Interstate 10, and Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties: (310) 590-4868

* Los Angeles County north of Interstate 10, and Ventura and Santa Barbara counties: (818) 551-2800

* San Luis Obispo and Kern counties, and inland counties north of the Kern County line: (916) 255-3545

* Coastal counties north of Santa Barbara County: (510) 540-2122

Source: State Department of Toxic Substances Control