Hazardous Materials

A safety scare involving the holiday season's hottest toy cooled off Monday after federal safety regulators quickly put to rest claims that one model of the bestselling Zhu Zhu Pets contained toxic levels of the element antimony. "The Consumer Product Safety Commission confirmed today that the popular Zhu Zhu toy is not out of compliance with the antimony or other heavy-metal limits of the new U.S. mandatory toy standard," agency spokesman Scott Wolfson said. "We will still do our own independent testing at CPSC.

State regulators found inadequate environmental safeguards at a Coachella Valley soil recycling company blamed for noxious odors that sickened children at a nearby school but said the mountains of contaminated soil do not pose a serious health threat. Western Environmental Inc., which operates a waste facility on the reservation of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians near Mecca, did not meet California hazardous waste standards "in a number of significant areas," according to a state Department of Toxic Substances Control report released last week.

The operator of a Newhall power plant was fined $10,000 Tuesday for failing to notify authorities last September after several hundred pounds of corrosive lime accidentally spilled from a silo and onto private property near three houses. The company, AES Placerita, pleaded no contest in Newhall Municipal Court to one misdemeanor count of failing to report a hazardous materials spill. The company could have been fined up to $25,000, Deputy Dist. Atty. William Carter said. AES is apparently the first company to be convicted under a 1986 state law that requires industries to report spills of hazardous materials to authorities, Carter said.

Orange County social service staffers who say they work inside a toxic building that has made them sick now contend that the county has tossed out some of their most damning evidence -- 350 tons of potentially contaminated soil. But on Friday, when the employees' union went to court to get a restraining order to prevent any more soil from being disposed of, the judge said it was too late. "Whatever has occurred, has occurred," Orange County Superior Court Judge Steven Perk said.

Four fire engines pulled into the parking lot behind a Van Nuys beauty parlor. It was the first call of the day for the A-Shift of the hazardous-materials task force based at Los Angeles Fire Department Station 39. The beauty parlor's owner had reported that a green liquid reeking of "the smell you get when you peel the back off a Polaroid print" was percolating through the linoleum floor at the rear of the shop.

A controversial, estrogen-like chemical in plastic could be harming the development of children's brains and reproductive organs, a federal health agency concluded in a report released Tuesday. The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, concluded that there was "some concern" that fetuses, babies and children were in danger because bisphenol A, or BPA, harmed animals at low levels found in nearly all human bodies.

The Los Angeles city attorney's office has accused a North Hollywood firm, which tests to determine if companies are violating hazardous-materials laws, with violating hazardous-materials laws. Twelve misdemeanor criminal charges were filed Thursday against Ensotech Inc. and its owner, Inderjit Sabherwal, the city attorney's office reported in a release. The charges include operating a laboratory without a permit and storing volatile chemicals in a residential building.

Los Angeles residents who have hazardous household materials such as paint thinner, motor oil, old batteries and pesticides stored in garages and beneath sinks can safely dispose of them under a new program, city officials said Monday. Residents may drop off such materials on a specified day at eight locations beginning Jan. 21 and ending Nov. 18, and workers will haul the waste to a licensed landfill.

Barring a reprieve, regulations set to take effect next month could force thousands of clothing retailers and thrift stores to throw away trunkloads of children's clothing. The law, aimed at keeping lead-filled merchandise away from children, mandates that all products sold for those age 12 and younger -- including clothing -- be tested for lead and phthalates, which are chemicals used to make plastics more pliable.

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

A toxic waste dump near a San Joaquin Valley community plagued by birth defects has agreed to pay $400,000 in fines and spend $600,000 on laboratory upgrades needed to properly manage hazardous materials at the facility, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday. The penalties were part of a consent decree that capped an 18-month investigation by the EPA and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control into the Chemical Waste Management landfill about 3 1/2 miles southwest of Kettleman City, a community of 1,500 mostly low-income Latino farmworkers.

More than 250 homes in the Antelope Valley were evacuated Wednesday afternoon after a large Union Pacific freight train derailed. No injuries were reported. Union Pacific officials said the 68-car train was heading south to Colton when it derailed near Littlerock, southeast of Palmdale, about 1:25 p.m. At least 21 cars derailed. Officials remained on the scene investigating the cause of the accident late Wednesday. Los Angeles County fire officials said 14 of the derailed cars were tankers that often carry hazardous materials or liquid.

A Van Nuys metal-plating business has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine to settle charges that it mishandled hazardous waste. Inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Los Angeles County Fire Department found that Crown Chrome Plating, a division of TMW Corp., a supplier of transportation services, had multiple hazardous wastes on site without a permit in April 2009, a violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. There...

Target Corp. has agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle a multiyear government investigation into the alleged dumping of hazardous waste by the retail chain, according to court documents filed this week. The settlement, pending final approval by a judge, is part of a bigger push by prosecutors throughout the state to crack down on environmental violations by big-box retailers and follows multimillion-dollar settlements in recent years with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Home Depot. Under the tentative agreement, the Minneapolis-based retail giant admits no wrongdoing but will pay about $3.4 million to the California attorney general's office.

San Diego County officials said Saturday that they had successfully removed all explosives and hazardous materials from the site of the Escondido-area home labeled a "bomb factory," which authorities burned to the ground last week. Using backhoes and other equipment, emergency crews "scoured the site," said Mark McPherson, chief of the county Department of Environmental Health's Land and Water Quality Division. "There is nothing left on the site that we have any concerns about," McPherson said.

A shipment of radioactive rods that went missing Thanksgiving Day was found Friday in Tennessee by the shipping company FedEx. Though the materials, used for medical equipment, posed little threat to the public, the misplaced shipment underscores the need to track low-hazard materials that could be used in small-scale terrorist attacks, experts say. The rods, used to calibrate quality control in CT scans, contain little energy and a low...

At a recycling plant in San Pedro and five other similar operations around California, giant shredding machines annually reduce 1.3 million junk cars, refrigerators and other appliances into fist-sized chunks of metal. Valuable scrap that contains iron is separated so it can be turned back into steel. Hunks of aluminum, copper and other alloys are pulled out for reprocessing.

In his anti-fireworks diatribe "Fireworks: Hazardous Materials" (June 21), Ron Coleman advances the same old burned-out arguments. He thinks there is something wrong with our system. I think there is something wrong with Coleman's brain. As a fire chief he seems rather ignorant about the facts. The apartment house he refers to that burned down last year was caused by the use of illegal fireworks. Why isn't this stated? The label "safe and sane" is an official designation given to certain fireworks that can legally be sold in California.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has agreed to pay $27.6 million to settle charges that it violated California environmental laws in its handling and disposal of hazardous materials, prosecutors involved in the case announced Monday in San Diego. The settlement was signed by San Diego County Superior Court Judge Linda B. Quinn. The San Diego County district attorney's office and the state attorney general's office had filed a civil complaint last month alleging that all of Wal-Mart's 236 stores, Sam's Club stores, distribution centers and storage facilities in the state were in violation of environmental laws.

After years of legal wrangling, the federal government agreed Wednesday to remove a fleet of mothballed military ships that has dropped tons of heavy metal pollution into a waterway northeast of San Francisco. As part of a settlement with environmental groups, the U.S. Maritime Administration said it would remove 52 obsolete and decaying vessels -- nicknamed the Ghost Fleet -- from the estuary between the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Five others have been removed since November.