City crews were on the verge of welding a manhole cover shut in South Los Angeles Wednesday morning when a surprise discovery stopped them in their tracks.
“Hey, there’s someone down there,” one of the workers wearing an orange vest said, pointing into the sewer at West 88th Street and South Grand Avenue.
Seconds later, a man in his late 20s climbed out of the darkness, carrying with him a pink polka dot roller suitcase. He walked away and, minutes later, the bright light of a welding gun sealed the manhole shut.
It was a startling scene, even for residents like Denise Evans, who has seen it all over the years.
Evans, who lives a few houses down from the intersection where city crews, firefighters and police had gathered around 9 a.m., said she called 311 repeatedly for years about a raft of problems stemming from the homeless camps near her house. She’d reported fires, trash, homeless camps and, last year, people living in the sewer, she said.
This week, something was finally being done about it. But it did little to cool her consternation.
“I don’t understand, why did it take a year?” Evans said.
Evans’s home is on the east side of the 110 freeway just south of the Manchester Avenue exit facing a soundwall, with a residential street and a strip of dirt separating the neighborhood from the highway. That strip of land is where unhoused people congregated until Evans said she and others complained and the city put up fencing and placed boulders to keep them out. But the people living there did not go away, she said, they just moved their tents elsewhere in the neighborhood — or went underground.
“It’s disturbing, because these people are human,” she said.
Mayor Karen Bass’s office said it had “mobilized a response” to two locations on Grand Avenue Tuesday, including at West 88th Street, and that “both sites were cleaned and people were offered resources.”
“This is so tragic, and is emblematic of the tough challenges that Mayor Bass is taking on that were ignored for decades,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.
It’s unclear what precisely prompted the city to respond. But Juan Naula, who runs a nonprofit dedicated to cleaning up the city, said he believes videos he posted on social media Monday about people living in the sewers were the trigger.
Naula said he was cleaning trash near the corner of 88th and Grand that day when he saw as many as 10 people go in and out of the sewer. He posted a video online about people living in Los Angeles sewers that same day, then got a call from a Fox 11 reporter, Naula said. The station’s story ran online Tuesday morning — the same day city crews responded to the scene.
City crews placed a boulder over the manhole cover, a spokesperson who was at the scene Wednesday said but, by the following morning, the boulder had been moved. The city then moved to weld the manhole cover shut.
Around 9 a.m., sanitation workers were maneuvering what appeared to be a massive vacuum hose inside the drain, hoovering up debris before the manhole cover could be sealed.
By around 10:20 a.m., workers were on the cusp of sealing the hole when one of them noticed a man inside, Luis Jimenez.
Jimenez told The Times that he had been homeless for about 10 years and had stayed in the drain for one or two nights because he felt safer there.
Jimenez told a city employee that nobody else remained inside, Naula said. Asked what the city had done to ensure nobody else remained, Bass’s office said in an email that a crew member “went to the catch basin just south of 88th (at 91st) and walked through to ensure nobody was inside.”
Despite the city’s efforts, Naula’s indignation about the humanitarian situation he had witnessed had hardly subsided.
“Why are we allowing people to live like this, like rats?” he said. “It makes me sad. It makes me mad.”
It wasn’t always like this, Evans said.
When she moved in about 11 years ago, the neighborhood was comfortable, but over the last eight years, it’s gotten worse. Her grandchildren, ages 2, 6, 11, and 12, are “stuck in the house” because she believes it’s too dangerous to play outside, except in her backyard. She once had to fight a woman who had gone on her property and stolen some of her things, Evans said.
Evans is one of two residents who told The Times they have actively been trying to get the city to fix things.
Sitting in her office chair in her house, surrounded by dozens of framed family photos hanging on the walls, Evans scrolled through emails documenting her reports to 311, the city service that receives complaints about livability issues and homelessness. Her email showed dozens of contacts going back at least to 2020. Last year, she emailed her councilman, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, to ask for help with the “trash and feces” in a tunnel near her house, according to an email she provided.
“I trust that you can come see for yourself how dangerous it is for us as well as unsanitary,” Evans wrote.
Harris-Dawson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cheryl Coleman, who also lives on 88th Street, said she had been trying to get the city’s attention about problems in the area for at least two years, and that she has personally pointed out the drain where she saw homeless people go to police officers more than half a dozen times.
“This has been reported so many times, I got tired of calling,” Cheryl Coleman said. “I thank god that they’re doing something finally now.”
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