State job safety and air quality officials are investigating allegations of illegal asbestos work at Universal City Studios, where film production crews say they have endured clouds of irritating dust during earthquake repairs to asbestos-containing buildings.
The investigations by the South Coast Air Quality Management District and state Division of Occupational Safety and Health stem from complaints about demolition of sound stage walls that in some cases contain asbestos insulation.
According to witnesses, studio officials for weeks after the Jan. 17 quake deployed construction workers with crowbars and sledgehammers to shatter the stucco walls, creating storms of plaster dust and allowing the crumbly insulation to escape the walls and tumble to the ground.
A spokeswoman for MCA Inc., Universal's parent company, said the firm has taken "every precaution possible." Spokeswoman Christine Hanson said, "In all places that we knew there was asbestos, we handled it properly."
However, after weeks of growing distrust of company safety assurances, film crew members last week hired a private lab to test the insulation and learned it contained asbestos. The film workers, who spoke on the condition that they would not be identified, said they then called both Cal/OSHA, the state job safety agency, and the air district, which have since sent inspectors to the scene.
Film crew members--seven of whom provided The Times with detailed accounts--said they were furious because studio officials previously had issued notices on the location of asbestos, indicating that the company was aware of the asbestos in the sound stage walls.
Nonetheless, the workers contended, no precautions were taken to hold down dust or contain and dispose of the debris during weeks of smashing the walls.
Insulation containing asbestos was "cascading out of the walls, . . . and it was left in huge piles two feet high, and shoveled into open dumpsters," one angry worker said. "This went on for six weeks."
Among those raising concerns was actor Roy Scheider, star of the television show "seaQuest DSV," which is filmed on several of the sound stages. "My fears were the same as the rest of the crew," Scheider said in an interview.
Scheider, who spoke out at a meeting last Friday between studio officials and the "seaQuest" cast and crew, said company representatives told him they were "tripling (their) efforts to see that these sound stages are safe. . . . They don't want anyone saying they don't care."
