The toxic spill that plunged thousands of Los Angeles County residents into misery late last year was scarcely unique. It was just the latest in a long string of environmental disasters that have plagued the 15-mile Dominguez Channel.
Nyla Olsen’s eyes moisten with rage as she recalls the day in early October when a surge of putrid water rolled out of the Dominguez Channel and turned life in Leeward Bay Marina into “a horror movie.”
Around that same time, air quality officials were being bombarded with thousands of calls from working-class residents upstream in Carson, Gardena, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Long Beach and Wilmington. Many complained of respiratory ailments, nausea and other symptoms due to a foul smell that vexed neighborhoods in the South Bay and Harbor region.
It took officials two months to figure out what caused the overpowering stench: A massive fire that ripped through a Carson warehouse had unleashed a flood of toxic runoff.Ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, benzene and other chemicals were flushed into nearby storm drains by fire hoses and then dumped into the channel, where they triggered a chemical and biological reaction that released large amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas, authorities say.
A similar disaster in a wealthier, whiter community, they say, would have been met with a more urgent response. The toxic spill that plunged thousands of Los Angeles County residents into misery late last year was scarcely unique, however. It was just the latest in a long string of environmental disasters that have plagued the 15-mile Dominguez Channel — an area where effective enforcement has always been muddled by industry recklessness, official neglect, overlapping government jurisdictions, and a hydrology prone to flooding and offensive odors.
A gray heron feeds near the beginning of the Dominguez Channel, where a toxic spill killed many of the fish that lived in the canal.