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Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 28 - July 15, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................8
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Huber’s Hiccups..................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals................................ 6-7
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Partly
Cloudy
72˚/63˚
Saturday
Mostly
Sunny
74˚/65˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
75˚/67˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
Beaches Close for the Safety of
the South Bay Communities
Dockweiler State Beach and El Segundo Beach are closed to the public. It is recommended staying out of the water. You can check the status of beach closures and conditions on LA County’s recorded information
hotline, available 24 hours a day, at 1-800-525-5662. Information about beach closures and conditions is also available online at: PublicHealth.LACounty.gov/Beach. Photo courtesy Heal the Bay.
Gilda Dyckman Cracks Down
on Catalytic Converter Theft
By Kiersten Vannest
During the pandemic, Los Angeles County
reported a 400% increase in the theft of
catalytic converters. All across Facebook,
Next-door, the Citizen app, and local
reports, stories of catalytic converter theft
remain one of the top stories. So what is a
catalytic converter exactly, why is it stolen,
and how do they steal it? Gilda Dyckman
explains what is happening and how you
can prevent it.
To protect your vehicle from catalytic
converter theft, Dyckman and her shop,
Cars Automotive & Muffler, work with the
El Segundo Police Department and other
police departments in the South Bay to etch
identifiers onto converters, as well as place
protective cages and shields to deter thieves.
Every gas-powered car since 1975 has a
catalytic converter. Located in the exhaust
system, the catalytic converter serves to filter
out the worst pollutants from the car before
they enter into the air out the tailpipe. It
looks like a little metal box on the bottom of
the car, with two pipes coming out of it. In
one pipe, harmful gases like nitrogen oxide
and carbon monoxide from the engine get
oxygen added or removed so that safer gases
like nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide
come out into the air.
“It’s the metal that’s in the catalytic
converter,” she explains, “the rhodium and
the palladium. Rhodium is like $22,000 an
ounce.” As cars become more environmentally
friendly and sustainable, the search for
nonreactive metals to filter out pollutants
has reached an all-time high. Rhodium and
palladium do the job very well.
As we recover from the pandemic, the
market for cars has started to pick up again,
which means the demand for these metals
has skyrocketed, driving up their price
and value. One catalytic converter can cost
around $2000 to replace and can be sold for
scrap on the black market for a few hundred
dollars, depending on the converter and the
metal inside.
Hybrid cars like Priuses are targeted most
frequently, because they contain higher levels
of metal and because these cars also run on
electricity, meaning the converter is used less.
Because there are so many drivers in
California, and especially in LA County, the
state requires correct catalytic converters on
every car to pass smog check inspections.
In some states, any aftermarket catalytic
converter can be used for any engine in case
of a replacement, but in states with high
driving populations like California and New
York, the converter must match the executive
order number or engine family of the car. If
a replaced catalytic converter does not match
or is not on a list of acceptable aftermarket
options, the car will not pass a smog test,
filed under “emissions tamper.”
This means, for some cars like the Prius, the
converter must be replaced by the manufacturer
in the absence of an aftermarket option.
Dyckman cites an example of Hondas from
2005-2007, from which converters were being
stolen faster than the manufacturer could
Gilda Dyckman educates the community about catalytic converter
theft and how to prevent it.
extension on cars that were on a waiting list
for their new part.
El Segundo holds events like the recent
“Etch and Catch,” where residents can get
their catalytic converters engraved for free.
This can also be done any time, free of
cost, at Dyckman’s shop. As she explains,
if someone is pulled over and found to have
a catalytic converter in their trunk, there is
currently no way for police to track if it
belongs to the driver or not. However, if
the converter has a VIN number or other
identification tag etched into it, the police
can more easily track the part.
For a price, shields, and cages can also
be placed over converters to make it more
difficult to steal. According to Dyckman, it
takes about sixty seconds to steal a catalytic
replace them, so California had to grant an See Gilda Dyckman, page 4