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Life & Times Transcript
3/22/07 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- There's a vast reservoir of water under the San Gabriel Valley, but why is it going untapped? Gabriel Monares>> If the contamination isn't cleaned here in the San Gabriel Valley, it flows down into southeast Los Angeles and affects the water supply from cities ranging from Montebello all the way down to Long Beach. Val Zavala>> And then, should anyone's murder go unnoticed? One journalist is out to humanize the cold hard facts of homicide in Los Angeles. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> It's hard for us to imagine because we can't see it, but beneath the San Gabriel Valley is a huge underground water supply as big as Lake Tahoe. The only problem? A lot of it is contaminated and that's bad news for water rates or if a disaster should strike. Sam Louie has our story. Sam Louie>> Jennie Tang is a real estate agent in Arcadia. Like most southern Californians, she doesn't think much about the price of water. Jennie Tang>> I don't really measure by the gallon, but I do dishes probably two or three times a day even if I use a dishwasher. I have two boys, four and six, so it's hard to limit their water consumption and they love showers. So they'll sit there and take showers for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes if I'm not on top of them. Sam Louie>> But when water is scarce like it was during the drought a few years ago, things change, including water rates. Jennie Tang>> I would say it was a good twenty percent increase because it was so hot. You still have people that are washing their cars in the summer and, again, not being very aware of how much water they're using. Sam Louie>> What Jennie and most residents of the San Gabriel Valley don't know is that they're sitting on a huge underground water supply, or aquifer. Water from storms slams into the San Gabriel Mountains and seep into the valley's soil, but parts of this enormous aquifer are polluted with industrial solvents and rocket fuel from aerospace facilities during World War II. The EPA has declared the San Gabriel water basin a superfund site. Gabriel Monares>> We are the nation's superfund site and the number one superfund site. Our contamination spreads all the way from the Alhambra area out to Azusa, Baldwin Park, Whittier Narrows, South El Monte, El Monte. It pretty much touches every resident in the San Gabriel Valley. Sam Louie>> Not to worry. The water is treated thoroughly before it's piped into homes and businesses, but the challenge is how to clean up the polluted areas before disaster strikes. What kind of disaster? This kind. If an earthquake should strike along the San Andreas fault, aqueducts carrying water from the Colorado River, the Owens Valley and Sacramento Delta could be disrupted. Gabriel Monares>> We have the water that comes in through these vessels over here. It comes in through the top of the pipes and into these vessels. . . Sam Louie>> Gabriel Monares is Director of the San Gabriel Water Quality Authority. He says that the aquifer has enough water to last six months, but only for residents. Gabriel Monares>> So in case of an earthquake, the San Gabriel Valley would be okay. It's the rest of the basin of Los Angeles County that would be in dire straits after six months when Diamond Valley Lake runs out of water. Where are they going to get their water if there is contamination here? Sam Louie>> Whether it's an earthquake, drought or other disaster, Monares is on a mission to get the polluted sections of the aquifer cleaned up. Gabriel Monares>> We feel that, if we are able to clean the San Gabriel basin which holds as much water as Lake Tahoe, we could use this as an emergency storage facility that would help us meet the needs of the greater Los Angeles area in case of an earthquake. Sam Louie>> But purging toxins from underground water is no simple task. To do it, you need plenty of these. Gabriel Monares>> That water goes through a couple of treatment trains. One is an . . . Sam Louie>> Pollutants have taken nearly fifty years to seep deep into the soil. Gabriel Monares>> The only people who were told to dump it back then is they were told to dig giant pits, dump the chemicals in there and that they would eventually evaporate. Nobody realized that those chemicals actually seep down into the groundwater table over time and contaminate the local drinking supply. Sam Louie>> The biggest challenge is not the technology, but finding the money to pay for more treatment plants. Ron Merry>> All of the facilities that we've had to build are very, very expensive. The facility for the perchlorate alone, capital costs were close to four million dollars. Sam Louie>> Ron Merry is Director of Public Works for the city of Monterey Park. He says that the underground contaminants are always changing and migrating, so it's hard to tell what will turn up where. Ron Merry>> There are more pollutants out there. We don't know if and when they're going to hit us and, if they do, then, of course, those are very expensive plants to build. Sam Louie>> Water officials have succeeded in getting six hundred million dollars mainly from the federal government and the polluters. But to finish the job and maintain the facilities, they'll need another five hundred twenty million dollars. Ron Merry>> People should be aware that this is an ongoing problem and it's going to be with us for twenty to thirty years. It's a very costly venture. Sam Louie>> If the state doesn't pitch in, there's only one other revenue source: rate payers. Gabriel Monares>> If we don't have the funding to treat these facilities, our options are to triple water rates to meet the cost or it's to shut down these facilities and import water. Sam Louie>> So how does Jennie Tang feel about that? Jennie Tang>> As a homeowner, you know, when an item in your household budget triples, it really makes you kind of have to look at areas you need to scale back. Sam Louie>> Back in 1998, water users in Monterey Park were almost hit with a major rate hike. The city discovered rocket fuel known as perchlorate and had to come up with millions to build an emergency treatment facility. Ron Merry>> About the only thing we can do is pass the costs on to the rate payers. There's no place else to go. Sam Louie>> Fortunately for consumers, the San Gabriel Water Quality Authority stepped in with the money. Gabriel Monares>> Our agency came in with fourteen million dollars and built an emergency treatment facility. That facility allowed them to continue to provide water to the residents. If we hadn't done that, their water rates probably would have doubled or tripled. Ron Merry>> If we had to do it on our own, building these treatment plants out of our operating budget would have necessitated a significant rate increase. Sam Louie>> But now water officials say that another deadline is fast approaching. Gabriel Monares>> In two years, we're going to run out of funding to be able to continue the cleanup. It's tantamount to having a brand new car, but having no gas money. Sam Louie>> If the Water Quality Authority can't raise the five hundred twenty million dollars, nearly a million and a half water users in the San Gabriel Valley could be facing bigger water bills. Jennie Tang>> I had no idea that, you know, it was that complicated. I just wonder who's there to advocate for the consumer and what I can do as a homeowner. Ron Merry>> They can let their legislators know that they're concerned about this problem and it needs to be addressed. Sam Louie>> Water officials are working to get the state to establish a special fund to clean up the aquifer's hot spots. They say that the state hasn't contributed anything since 1999. Without the cleanup, San Gabriel Valley's water woes could flow into Los Angeles County. Gabriel Monares>> If the contamination isn't cleaned here in the San Gabriel Valley, it flows down into southeast Los Angeles and affects the water supply from cities ranging from Montebello all the way down to Long Beach. So you're talking about a basin there that provides drinking water for 3.4 million people. Sam Louie>> And that's something that no one would want to swallow. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> There are more than a thousand murders in Los Angeles County every year, but did you realize that ninety percent of them never even get reported in the paper? Well, that bothered one Los Angeles Times reporter who decided to do something about it. Her name is Jill Leovy and she started a Homicide Blog. Vicki Curry talked with Jill outside a police station in Watts. Vicki Curry>> Jill Leovy, you've been a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times for several years. Why did you decide to start this blog about homicide? Jill Leovy>> Well, space in the newspaper is limited by how much paper there is and how much space. Los Angeles County has eleven to twelve hundred homicides a year. There's no way to cover them all in the paper and the paper typically covers maybe ten percent of them, which means that ninety percent of the homicides are not being reported by the newspaper. If you cover ten percent of the homicides, you're almost inevitably going to create a distorted picture of homicide. You certainly aren't going to convey the statistical nature of homicide to the readers. That's one of the purposes of the site. It's not just to be a list of names, but to give people a fuller picture of what homicide looks like on a statistical level. Vicki Curry>> So much of the crimes that we hear about, they get a lot of major media coverage and are actually not typical. They don't represent what's normal in terms of homicides in our area? Jill Leovy>> Yeah. A lot of homicide is a non-story. It's not a traditional news story in that the events are very like each other, at least viewed distantly not in their personal details. In their circumstantial details, they're very similar. But the issue, you know, is a statistical issue. Our problem in America is that our homicide rate is inordinately high for a first-world country. It is the rate per hundred thousand per year that we should all be thinking about in this country. Vicki Curry>> What are those homicide rates? The national average is between five to six homicides a year per one hundred thousand people. In Los Angeles, both the city and the county, the average is between eleven and thirteen deaths a year. Jill Leovy>> If we were in almost any European country, it would be one or even below one per hundred thousand a year. So that gives you a sense of the level. We're in a precinct area right now where I've done a lot of work southeast. This is the Watts area of Los Angeles. It's the poorest in terms of median income of all the nineteen LAPD precincts and there are about seventy homicides a year here. That translates to a homicide rate of about four to five per hundred thousand per year. So that helps you put into perspective. If it's five nationally, you've got seven times the homicide rate here in this small area. So that's something very important to see about homicide and I'm gratified to see that the website seems to show this, the way homicide is highly concentrated. Many, many people live in this country with no experience of homicide whatsoever, and some people are drowning in it. That's something that is, again, hard to convey journalistically. Vicki Curry>> So what kinds of things are you including on the blog? Jill Leovy>> Well, the backbone of it is just a list of names. It's just the people who die, anyone who's killed by the hand of another. In Los Angeles County, that means I put the police shootings on there too. If you died by human means, you make the Homicide Report. I try to include the most basic information that I can get out of the police or the coroner, the where, when it happened, who it was, age, gender, ethnic background. Beyond that, I try to add whatever information I can glean from just gumshoe reporting like what I'm doing here today, which is talking to detectives, going out and meeting families if I can, that adds to sort of the story of what happened. I'm also doing little entries about homicide issues and things like that to the extent that I can. Vicki Curry>> And have the law enforcement agencies been pretty receptive to helping you? Jill Leovy>> Yeah, to varying degrees. But mostly, they've been helpful. There's an understanding certainly for detectives that the press has been ignoring these homicides and there's something wrong with that. I'm gratified that so many sort of see the point in at least mentioning somewhere that these people have been killed. I've gotten actually a couple of nice emails from a trauma doctor in one case and a paramedic in another who said to me, "Finally. I see this all the time. I see it every day. At last, I see that it's represented somewhere in the press." So you do get some of that reaction. Vicki Curry>> You choose to include race in the information that you put out there. Is that because of the statistics involving the groups? Jill Leovy>> Yeah. You know, I've gotten lots and lots of emails on that and it takes a little bit of a steady nerve because I get some very ugly emails about that. The racial differences in a homicide victimization are stark. They're astounding. The degree to which certain people in this society are vulnerable and unprotected when it comes to homicide is something that we should all be thinking about and looking at. The rate particularly for African Americans is vastly higher than for anybody else, even for Latinos in Los Angeles. If rates were the same across the board, I think maybe you could argue for a colorblind approach. Vicki Curry>> The homicide rate for young men of color in Los Angeles County is particularly high. Between 1991 and 2002, Latino men ages twenty to twenty-four were five times more likely to die than white men the same age. And black men were sixteen times more likely. Jill Leovy>> And the rate for young blacks in Los Angeles County was in the two hundreds. Again, think about those numbers I just gave you. Five per hundred thousand overall, thirteen as a mass here in Los Angeles County. So you have one group of people with a rate of in the two hundred deaths per hundred thousand per year, so that's a level of suffering that's off the charts compared to everyone else, and you have to say that as a journalist. It's amazing how non-public these events are even though they're very, very catastrophic. Vicki Curry>> Jill Leovy of the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Jill Leovy>> Thank you. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Ted Chen>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Ted Chen in for Larry Mantle. Our first film is "Reign Over Me" starring Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler as old friends trying to reconnect after 9/11. [Film Clip] Ted Chen>> Joining me this week are critics Andy Klein, film editor of City Beat, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Henry, what did you think of "Reign Over Me"? Henry Sheehan>> Well, to put the most cynical spin on this movie -- and I don't see any reason why not to -- this is Adam Sandler's Oscar bait movie. He plays a traumatized secondary victim of 9/11. His wife and three daughters and even his pet dog -- they go that far -- were on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Since then, he's been withdrawn and living a kind of monkish life in a very comfortable apartment on New York's east side. Don Cheadle is his old college roommate, also a dentist, who driving down the street one day happens to see his old friend and wonders what happened to him and why is he acting so weird. They kind of get this friendship going. They re-ignite their friendship mostly because Don Cheadle's character, the other dentist, really is interested in doing that. The film is very glib. It really has nothing to offer except a very wide streak of misogyny which is somewhat surprising. But it's very hard to take the movie seriously when Liv Tyler plays the psychiatrist who resolves all the problems. Ted Chen>> Andy, what about you? What did you think of "Reign Over Me"? Andy Klein>> I'm a little softer than Henry on this, but not much. I will give them points for at least acknowledging within the film that Liv Tyler is way too young to be doing what she's doing in the film. I mean, she doesn't come across authoritatively enough. Having said that, there are some virtues in this film. I think Don Cheadle is very good in what's kind of a thankless role. I mean, they go through the motions of making it so that it's not just another film where, you know, the function of the black character is to heal the white character, and we've had a lot of those. So they try and make it a two-way street, though not all that successfully. Adam Sandler here is doing the kind of thing, I think, similar to what he did in the Paul Thomas Anderson film -- neither of us can remember it -- where he's playing the real-world version of who his character is. I kind of enjoyed that, but it does have Oscar bait written all over it. Ted Chen>> Our next film stars Mark Wahlberg as a former Army sniper framed for an assassination attempt on the president. "Shooter" is directed by Antoine Fuqua. [Film Clip] Ted Chen>> Andy, how did you like "Shooter"? Andy Klein>> "Shooter" is not real great. It's so down the middle. I mean, the problem is, I've seen this film a million times before and there's nothing new and good here and it falls into all the clichés that this kind of film go into. Mark Wahlberg plays a former government sniper from the Special Forces or something and he's retired because of a trauma. Essentially, he gets set up as the fall guy for an assassination plot. There's a lot of running and chasing and shooting and I actually thought that, for the first third or half, they kept it kind of plausible. You could almost believe that this guy was escaping with eight million cops and traitors looking for him and everything. But as it goes on, it turns into one of those things where he is holding off eight million people simultaneously in unbelievable ways. So it really does kind of fall apart. Ted Chen>> And our third film tells the story of a slick salesman who gets rattled after meeting a fortune teller. Guy Pearce stars in "First Snow". [Film Clip] Ted Chen>> Andy, your thoughts on "First Snow"? Andy Klein>> This film starts out kind of promising. Guy Pearce plays a really shallow, smooth-talking salesman type who, just to kill some time when his car is being fixed, goes to a fortune teller and it's clear to him right away that the fortune teller has foreseen his death. Guy takes it all as a big joke, but then other predictions the guy made come true and he's trying desperately after this to evade his fate. We know where that kind of film is going to go. I mean, there's kind of no way around it. What makes this a little better, partly stylistically, I thought it was interesting. Also, Guy Pearce is really terrific at playing these characters who are very abrasive and yet we end up having some sympathy towards them. Inevitably, parts of this film kind of summon up "Memento", at least for me, and that's generally not a bad thing. Ted Chen>> Henry, what about you? Henry Sheehan>> Well, I thought this movie started off pretty badly because the character played by Guy Pearce, this salesman, was so slick and the idea of getting your fortune told is so contrived. But I thought, as his personality and life kind of disintegrated and he'd pull it back together and it would fall apart again all because of this inside crisis he was having, I thought that was pretty interesting. I thought the film actually handled it very well. I mean, based on this contrivance, things can still become complex and give you an insight into a guy who is very unlikable and appears very shallow, but maybe isn't all that as it turns out. Ted Chen>> And our final film comes from Iran where women are barred from attending sporting events. "Offside" tells the story of a group of women trying to get into a stadium to watch their home team in a World Cup qualifying match. [Film Clip] Ted Chen>> Henry, what did you think of "Offside"? Henry Sheehan>> This is a tremendous film from Jafar Panahi who directed "The White Balloon". I think most people remember that he also did "The Circle", which was about the terrible way women are treated in Iran, a real tragedy. This is like the comedy version of it. It's very strange. It begins with a girl trying to sneak into what turned out to be a huge Iranian soccer game. It's shot on location while the game is going on against Bahrain although they went back to do other shooting too. Women are prohibited from these games and it turns out to be about a whole bunch of young women who tried to sneak in, who are soccer fanatics, but who all got caught and what happens to them when they're in this little pen and how they talk to the guards who are from the country or other parts of Iran. The people just have tremendous personalities. It's so watchable. Really a tremendous movie. Very neo-realistic, but funny and just so involving. Ted Chen>> And that's it for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Ted Chen in for Larry Mantle joined by critics Andy Klein of City Beat, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Larry Mantle will be back next week for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. Val Zavala>> KPCC public radio broadcasts a longer version of FilmWeek on Fridays at eleven a.m. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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