Crash Victim’s Family to Get $1.2 Million

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday settled the latest of three wrongful-death lawsuits resulting from traffic accidents on La Tuna Canyon Road by voting to pay $1.2 million to the family of a crash victim.

After the vote, Councilman Joel Wachs, who represents the Sun Valley area where the accidents have occurred, demanded that city engineers repair a section of the roadway that floods in heavy rains.

The Times reported Monday that the city has paid $450,000 to settle two other claims--in 1979 and 1987--in which motorists died in collisions on the rain-slicked road near Elben Avenue, east of the Foothill Freeway.

The $1.2-million payment settles the suit filed by the family of Rafeek Teraberanyans, who was killed on a rainy March 24, 1994, when a trash truck lost traction on a pool of water and slid into the path of Teraberanyans’s car.

Teraberanyans’ wife, Armineh, who was following in another car, witnessed the crash and ran out to her husband’s side. He died in her arms of massive head injuries.

The family sued Browning-Ferris Industries, the landfill firm that owned the truck, and the city, charging that the speed of the truck and the poor drainage on the roadway caused the accident that killed her husband.

Geoffrey Wells, the attorney for Teraberanyans, said it was clear from past lawsuits and accident reports that the city knew about the dangerous conditions on La Tuna Canyon Road.

“It’s unfortunate that it took a lawsuit and the death of an innocent victim to make a change,” he said. “They had prior accidents and they didn’t do anything about it.”

In each case, the families of the victims argued in lawsuits that the city shared in the blame for the accident by failing to install spillways that would keep rain from pooling on the roadway.

The history of the roadway should have put the city on notice about the hazard, they argued. In the past 20 years, four other deaths and 30 accidents--including 17 head-on collisions--have occurred during rainstorms on that stretch of roadway.

Despite the deadly history, a recent report by the city attorney’s office said there is still “substandard drainage throughout the length of La Tuna Canyon Road.”

City engineers have told The Times that two or three spillways have been paved over or washed away in past mudslides and never replaced. But they have insisted that the overall problem on that roadway has been excessive speeding, not flooding.

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In the Teraberanyans’ case, an accident analysis expert hired by the city determined that the Browning-Ferris trash truck was traveling at between 40 and 50 mph in an area with a posted speed limit of 40 mph.

Although the truck may not have exceeded the posted speed limit, the lawsuit charges that the truck was driving too fast for the rainy conditions. Browning-Ferris paid the Teraberanyans family $4.5 million. But in cooperation with the family, Browning-Ferris filed a cross-complaint against the city, alleging that the roadway problems contributed to the accident.

During settlement discussions, a Superior Court judge recommended that the city pay $1.2 million for its share of the damages already paid out by Browning-Ferris.

The city was first sued over the road problems in 1979 when Harry Olsen, 58, a physicist and consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, lost control of his pickup truck on a pool of water on La Tuna Canyon Road. His truck slid head-on into another vehicle and he died at the scene.

Olsen’s family sued and hired a private engineering firm, which concluded that the roadway at the site of the accident was poorly designed to handle the rain and runoff from nearby hillsides. The city settled that case for $400,000.

A similar suit was filed in 1987. Paul Constantine and his wife, Dorcas, were driving east on La Tuna Canyon Road on a rainy afternoon when an oncoming pickup truck lost traction and slammed into the Volkswagen Beetle driven by the couple, killing them instantly.

The couple’s three daughters sued, arguing that the speed of the truck and the poor drainage system on the roadway contributed to the accident. The landscaping firm that owned the truck settled for $505,000. The city paid $50,000.