Terminal Island

A coalition of local fishing industry groups has donated more than 300,000 cans of mackerel to help feed hungry people in Ethiopia and other African nations. Larry Bozanich, president of the San Pedro-based Fisherman's Cooperative Assn., said the fish will be distributed directly to refugee settlements by the Adventist Development Relief Agency, an arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The estimated retail value of the fish is $240,000, he said.

Hundreds came in uniform to Terminal Island on Saturday to say goodbye to the veteran Coast Guardsman killed last week when his boat was rammed by suspected smugglers. His shipmates called him a patriot and gave him the standard salute for a comrade killed in action. But amid the pomp and circumstance of military mourning - the flyovers and rifle salutes - another side emerged to Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34. A doting father known to do push-ups with his two young sons on his back.

A shivering escapee who had spent the night swimming in the Los Angeles Harbor was captured early Saturday, ending a brief freedom from the federal prison on Terminal Island, authorities said. A fellow escapee had been captured 15 minutes after their Friday night flight. Port policeman Kent Hobbs said he spotted Ronald Mendoza, 26, of Westminster, swimming about a quarter of a mile east of the prison shortly after 7 a.m.

Warning that a wave of demolition threatens to engulf Terminal Island, a national preservation group has named the site at the Port of Los Angeles one of America's most endangered historic places. A proposed road realignment would require the demolition of three pioneering tuna fish canneries as well as a shipyard that played a major role in both world wars, the National Trust for Historic Preservation said Wednesday. Additionally, a 61-year-old cannery steam plant and a trio of boat repair buildings that date back to 1903 are due to be razed, the trust said.

The warden of Terminal Island federal prison has been reassigned, but the move is unrelated to eight escapes there in the last five months, Jerry Williford, Bureau of Prisons regional director, said Friday. Warden Rodrick (Dutch) Brewer has been transferred to the federal prison in Bastrop, Tex., and will be replaced by Fred Stock, the warden at Bastrop, said Williford.

Inmates at the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island were confined to their cells Sunday after about 400 prisoners refused to eat their noon meals, officials said. "Basically, it appears to be a reaction to some security measures we imposed last week, limiting inmates' time in the recreation yard and mess hall," said prison spokesman Jim Zangs. He said the institution's 1,200 inmates were returned to their cells as a precautionary measure to prevent further incidents.

Six stuntmen working on the Terminal Island location of the science fiction movie "Glass Shadow--Cyborg II" were hospitalized after their hands and faces were burned by a special effects explosion early Tuesday. Instead of billowing upward as planned, a fireball shot toward the men, Harbor Police Lt. Martin Renteria said. The injured stuntmen were identified as Jeff Habberstad, 31; Merritt Yohnka, 34; Brian Smrz, 32; William Morts, 27; Gregory Sargent, 39, and Anthony Snegoff, 34.

Forced to evacuate his childhood home near San Pedro Bay during World War II, Kenji Yamamoto packed the only valuable possessions he had: his clothing, shoes and a portable radio. "I had a .22-gauge rifle and took it to the Japanese community hall" where it was confiscated by American soldiers, Yamamoto said. "They said they would give it back, but I never saw that (again.)" Yamamoto, 76, now lives in Boyle Heights.

Forced to evacuate his childhood home near San Pedro Bay during World War II, Kenji Yamamoto packed the only valuable possessions he had: his clothing, shoes and a portable radio. "I had a .22-caliber rifle and took it to the Japanese community hall," where it was confiscated by American soldiers, Yamamoto said. "They said they would give it back, but I never saw that (again)." Yamamoto, 76, now lives in Boyle Heights.

Forced to evacuate his childhood home near San Pedro Bay during World War II, Kenji Yamamotopacked the only valuable possessions he had--his clothing, shoes and a portable radio. "I had a .22-gauge rifle and took it to the Japanese community hall," where it was confiscated by American soldiers, Yamamoto said. "They said they would give it back, but I never saw that (again.)" Yamamoto, 76, now lives in Boyle Heights.

"Big Willie" Robinson was a 6-foot-6, 300-pound former Los Angeles street racer, a gentle giant who promoted organized drag racing as a way to unite people of all races and classes and ease racial tensions. "When you get around cars, man, there ain't no colors, just engines," he told The Times in 1981. Willie Andrew Robinson III, 69, the founding president of the National and International Brotherhood of Street Racers that ran a drag strip on Terminal Island for many years, died Saturday of an infection that led to heart failure at Sharon Care Center in Los Angeles, said Bill Chaffin, a close friend.

This is a tale of Japanese survival in another tsunami, a riptide of social intolerance that took out a San Pedro neighborhood two generations ago. The story begins in the 1860s when the first Japanese settled in Northern California. Relatives and friends followed from Hawaii. At the turn of the century, a Japanese fisherman discovered abalone in L.A. waters. He and his community drove deals with white cannery owners to build a life fishing and living in Santa Monica and San Pedro.

It may not have embodied the majesty of New York's Brooklyn Bridge or the beauty of San Francisco's Golden Gate, but Long Beach's pontoon bridge did rise to great heights of quirkiness. No wonder it played a role in a chase scene in the 1963 comedy "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. " The floating span, which connected downtown Long Beach with Terminal Island, was built by the Navy during World War II as a "6-month temporary emergency structure" to improve access to its big shipyard and base.

Before dawn, in the waters of Long Beach's Back Channel, three tugboats struggle to control the container ship MSC Texas as it approaches the Gerald Desmond Bridge. What happens next represents one of the greatest tests of skill and nerve at the two seaports that form the nation's busiest shipping complex. The bridge is so low that the ship -- one-fifth of a mile long but dwarfed by newer vessels -- can pass below only under optimal conditions. Three pilots are onboard to monitor the ship's position at all times; it squeezes underneath the bridge's deck with just a few feet to spare.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive series "No She Didn't!: Women Exploitation Auteurs" looks at the unlikely intersection of female filmmakers and the grubby titillation of prison flicks, biker pictures and slasher movies. It kicks off tonight at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater with a screening of the 1973 film "Terminal Island" with director Stephanie Rothman scheduled to introduce the movie.

The fishing isn't as good as it used to be for the commercial fishermen working the waters off Southern California. Their landings of squid are barely more than a quarter of what they were in 2000. Seasonal quotas on other seafood are so low that they can be reached in as little as a week. Still, the most problematic catch for what's left of a once-flourishing fleet is sometimes encountered on land. The fishermen's hauls -- mainly squid, sardines and mackerel -- are bound for Asia.

Los Angeles sanitation officials, who face a ban on dumping sludge into the ocean off Santa Monica, soon will begin trucking the condensed sewage to two South Bay sites: the Port of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles International Airport, where it will be converted into compost and a material to cover landfills.

Tugboats and pleasure craft that travel under the Badger Avenue Bridge as a shortcut to Long Beach will have to go around Terminal Island for five months during bridge construction, a Port of Long Beach spokesman said. The bridge, which crosses Cerritos Channel at Henry Ford Avenue, will be torn down or relocated this year to make way for a $30-million vertical-lift bridge.

Ahmed M. Abdel-Ghaffar, a USC professor of engineering whose pioneering work in the design and monitoring of bridges led to the development of more efficient and reliable ways to build them, has died. He was 60. Abdel-Ghaffar died April 17 at Torrance Memorial Medical Center from complications of liver disease, said his son Samy of San Francisco. As a graduate student at Caltech in the early 1970s, Abdel-Ghaffar conducted seminal research on the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which links San Pedro to Terminal Island.

More than two months after the immigration detention center on Terminal Island temporarily closed for preventive maintenance and 408 detainees were transferred to other facilities, immigration officials said they have no date set for its reopening and are still assessing the repairs necessary. Meanwhile, immigration judges have approved the government's requests to move the vast majority of the 299 pending cases from San Pedro to other courts around the nation.