L.A.'s Standard Hotel owner charged with chemical dumping

James Peaco, coordinator of the FBI's weapons of mass destruction squad in Los Angeles, received a message on his BlackBerry shortly after the gas cloud was reported downtown. Initially, Peaco didn't think much of it. His team is summoned about a once a week to deal with suspicious packages and all manner of other potential threats. Rarely do they turn out to be the real deal.

But when Peaco saw the words "chlorine" and "subway" in the same sentence, he felt his stomach tighten.

"Chlorine is not naturally occurring," he recalled thinking to himself at the time, "and the subway is a venue we anticipated as a target. So I thought this was actually a terrorist attack."

Peaco said he was so concerned that he called his bosses in L.A. and FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., with a warning to be alert for potential simultaneous attacks across the country.

In addition to Peaco's squad, hazmat teams from the LAPD, the Sheriff's Department and the Fire Department converged on the scene. When they traced the chlorine to the drain outside The Standard, fumes were still rising to the street above, so police shut down the intersection of 6th and Flower streets, snarling traffic for hours.

Meanwhile, an LAPD officer made his way to the roof of the hotel and interviewed employees who acknowledged pouring a small amount of old pool chlorine into the drain, according to the complaint. The officer noticed an empty 50-gallon tank labeled "muriatic acid" under some stairs near the pool, but employees denied dumping any of that into the drain. There was another unmarked 50-gallon tank -- this one nearly empty -- nearby.

In follow-up interviews, Annette O'Donnelly, the FBI agent with the reputation for being tenacious, discovered that the two tanks contained chemicals that were left over from when the pool operated on a different cleaning system.

She interviewed two supervisors and a graveyard-shift maintenance employee who ultimately acknowledged pumping the contents of the two tanks into a drain, according to court documents. Running water from a hose was used in an attempt to dilute the discharge.

The terrorism scare notwithstanding, it is illegal to dump chlorine and acid into the sewer system because such contents can corrode pipes, overcome maintenance workers with fumes and harm the environment.

Mark Rowley, the hotel's chief engineer, allegedly told O'Donnelly he knew the "best way" to get rid of the chemicals would have been to hire a disposal company to truck them away, according to court records.

But he decided "we could deal with it this way," the court documents state.

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scott.glover@latimes.com

Times staff writer Jason Felch contributed to this report