DIRTY WORK CREWS CLEAN UP ILLEGAL DUMP DATING TO '70S.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

LAKE LOS ANGELES - Bulldozers and fire-camp inmates worked Tuesday cleaning up more than 300 tons of trash dumped six to eight feet deep in a pit next to an old desert homestead and scattered over four or five acres of sagebrush.

From the pit emerged piles of splintered wood, old bedsprings, car seats, plastic buckets, sheet metal, metal fencing and other trash, as workers raked smaller piles of trash from among the desert vegetation.

``I love doing this. I can already see the change,'' said Los Angeles County environmental health official Chris Mastro, with a view of bulldozers scooping up the trash over one shoulder and the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains in the other direction. ``This looks disgusting. You look away and you can see what it's going to look like.''

The cleanup is going on about six miles east of Lake Los Angeles, in sparsely populated desert just inside the county line between El Mirage Dry Lake and Black Buttee.

``This was a community disposal site. People in this area have used this place for decades,'' Mastro said.

The illegal dump easily dates back into the 1970s, Mastro said. It also includes more recent trash.

Two prescription medicine bottles found on the site bore the name of Donald Kueck, the anti-government desert dweller who shot to death Lake Los Angeles Deputy Steve Sorensen in August 2003 and who died himself six days later in a fiery gunbattle with deputies. Kueck's trailer was about 12 miles from the illegal dump.

The cleanup is expected to cost about $100,000, which includes the expense of disposing of ash that could contain toxic metals and of pipes and other material containing asbestos. The ash came from fires in the trash pile or from the formerly accepted practice of burning household trash at homes.

An uncapped well was discovered beneath the trash, not far from the main pit, Mastro said.

Started Monday, the cleanup is expected to be finished ahead of its planned conclusion Friday. Guinn Construction of Bakersfield provided the heavy equipment and operators under contract to the county.

``These guys are very good at what they do,'' Mastro said. ``We'll be out of here ahead of schedule.''

The pit will be filled in with dirt. Dirt will be plowed up into a berm to try to keep out vehicles bringing in new trash.

Cleanup money is coming from the California Integrated Waste Management Board, which has paid to clean up 11 other sizable illegal dumps around the Antelope Valley since 1998. The county has cleaned up dozens of smaller trash sites as well.

The largest illegal dump was 1,800 tons cleaned up near Avenue H and 155th Street East in 1998, Mastro said. The smallest were about two tons.

Mastro said he is unaware of any remaining illegal dump sites as large as the one now being cleaned up.

But smaller trash sites, ranging down to a few pickup truck loads dumped in the desert, could keep him busy for years, he said.

``There's thousands of small ones,'' he said.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Workers clean up some of the 300 tons of trash dumped in a pit next to an old desert homestead east of Lake Los Angeles.

(2 -- color) A bulldozer Tuesday moves trash out of a pit that had been filled six to eight feet deep.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer