SUNSHINE `LANDFOUL' IF PERMIT OK'D, DON'T DRINK THE WATER.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I'M exhausted.

It was a very busy July, what with the death of Saddam's sons, Uday and E-bay; the 16-word White House Oops-day; the recall of Gov. Gray Davis - call it Gray-bay - and then there was the whole Dock-on-the-Bay thing.

But I think the biggest news was the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board's end-of-the-month hearing about Sunshine Canyon, where Browning Ferris Industries operates a 451-acre landfill in the county outside Los Angeles city limits, even though the entrance, where the diesel trucks spew their black carcinogens into the air, is actually on San Fernando Road inside the city.

You see, BFI wants to reopen the adjacent 194-acre city side of the dump, closed by the city 10 years ago. After some 55 city hearings and meetings over the last decade, BFI now needs only one final permit from the regional water board to build its 55 million-ton-capacity city-side dump, and that's what the hearing was about.

That and the leaks.

You see, once it's buried, trash slowly decomposes into other things.

A lot of other things.

Some of it becomes odorless and flammable methane. In what used to be Mission Canyon, just east of the Sepulveda Pass, the Mountaingate Landfill Gas Recovery Facility is still capturing methane, and that dump closed in 1982.

Trash also produces large quantities of hydrogen sulfide, which is also flammable, but which nobody wants to recover because it reeks of rotten eggs. When it mixes with water it becomes hydrogen sulfate, which corrodes metal and turns the water brown and stinky.

And that's what's leaking from the old city side of Sunshine Canyon.

You see, when Sunshine originally opened in 1958, landfills were not required to have big plastic diapers with drainage and filtration systems, as they are now. Nobody worried about polluting groundwater or damaging wetlands because it was 1958, for crying out loud.

Today, we worry.

Why?

Dr. Sujal Mandavia, the clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at USC, describes the effects of breathing hydrogen sulfide on the Web site eMedicine: ``Chronic low-level exposure results primarily in irritation to mucous membranes and the respiratory system,'' which produces headaches, asthenia, bronchitis, conjunctivitis and wheezing.

And I can say from personal experience that drinking water infused with hydrogen sulfate can have a rather pronounced laxative effect. It's not something you want your baby doing.

Plus, it really, really stinks.

Is this worrisome?

Well, the Van Gogh Street Elementary School is less than one mile from the current landfill. The nearest house is less than half a mile from the proposed dump. And about two miles downhill from the leaking landfill are the basins of the Department of Water and Power's Van Nuys reservoir, where most of the Valley's drinking water rests before heading for your kitchen sink.

Of course, it would take a highly unusual event to wash that stinky water into our drinking water, the kind described by the Army Corps of Engineers as ``a large storm'' - as in ``We are convinced that substantial drainage improvements are necessary to ensure that the landfill closure area does not affect downstream water quality during large storms.''

However, the corps adds, these improvements ``could not be constructed without discharging fill material.'' In other words, they can't fix the old leaking city side of Sunshine Canyon because the new county side of Sunshine Canyon is in the way.

Still the corps wants the expansion to go ahead because the new landfill will have a diaper and plumbing, which will divert the stinky water into Bull Creek.

Bull Creek, by the way, runs right though the middle of the campus of Kennedy High School and under the 118 Freeway before passing through residential areas until it reaches the popular Lake Balboa section of the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, where it empties into the Los Angeles River.

And who would ever notice flammable stinky water in any of those places?

Some folks in Granada Hills can already smell the stinky water.

And the garbage.

And they're breathing the sooty exhaust from the endless stream of trash trucks.

But don't feel left out. With a little luck, should we one day get a cloudburst over Sunshine Canyon like the one that once flooded the Sepulveda Basin in less than an hour, leaving people stranded atop their cars, then we can all smell and taste the stinky water, together.

The water board has yet to make its final decision.