Water-Cleansing Debate : Robbins Gives, Takes Lumps at Tower Hearing

Minutes before he began working over the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the South Coast Air Quality Management District at a state Senate hearing Friday, Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) quipped, “I want to give them a fair chance to explain themselves before I kill them.”

No one got killed, but the two agencies took some lumps at the hearing in North Hollywood, called by Robbins to examine why they had approved construction of an aeration tower in a residential area of the community to purge well water of solvents suspected of causing cancer.

And Robbins also took a few lumps, finding himself accused by another politician of using the issue to promote himself.

Ten days ago, after a news report that the DWP had chosen and then, on its own, scrapped the original tower site at 11850 Vanowen St., Robbins introduced a bill to bar the air-quality district from permitting aeration towers within 100 meters of residential property.

Robbins Takes Credit

Even though the DWP has decided not to use the Vanowen Street site, the bill also would revoke the permit the air-quality district issued last fall allowing the department to build the tower there.

Although the site was abandoned without Robbins’ intervention, the press release announcing his bill boasted: “Robbins Terminates Toxic Tower Proposal.”

At the hearing at North Hollywood High School, district officials said the aeration tower, which will use evaporation to remove trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene from water, poses no health threat even in a residential neighborhood.

They said they issued the permit for the Vanowen Street site because their calculations showed that airborne solvent levels would be so low that people living their entire lives near the tower would have less than one additional chance in a million of contracting cancer. Statistics show that people already have about one chance in four of contracting cancer sometime in their lives.

DWP officials said their decision to put the tower in a more industrial area--the DWP maintenance yard at 11875 Vose St. in North Hollywood--had nothing to do with health concerns.

Tower Not ‘Aesthetic’

They said their decision was based on “aesthetic considerations” because the 40-foot tower will not be pretty and the noise might bother people in the homes and apartments that ring the original site.

But Robbins, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Governmental Efficiency, the host of the hearing, said he is concerned about cleaning up water “at the expense of putting toxic chemicals into the air.”

He also said after the hearing that he is not convinced that aeration towers pose no health risk. He questioned whether health officials really know enough “to be able to assure the people of North Hollywood that they have nothing to worry about.”

Robbins also criticized the failure of the air-quality district, DWP and city zoning officials to call public hearings to explain the tower project to North Hollywood residents.

Three North Hollywood residents who came to the microphone strongly criticized the DWP and thanked Robbins for calling attention to the issue.

But Robbins’ motives were called into question by Glendale City Councilwoman Ginger Bremberg, who has served on a committee of Glendale, Los Angeles, and Burbank officials that is trying to solve ground-water problems.

Bremberg accused Robbins of being “overreactive,” telling him that the bill “certainly has given you a lot of headlines, which is probably always good for a politician . . . “

“I certainly do understand the glory of television coverage and front-page headlines,” she said.

“It’s quite easy to use catch phrases and get the media’s attention, and I find it quite reprehensible that ‘toxic tower’ has become a new bogeyman,” Bremberg said.

Bremberg contended that anyone who has cleaned an oven “inhaled more toxic fumes in a millisecond” than a person would breathe near an aeration tower “in a million years.”

She said that the aeration tower would emit less solvent vapor than the average dry-cleaning establishment that uses perchloroethylene. “Do you plan to shut down those businesses?” she asked Robbins.

Bremberg also challenged Robbins to focus on the improper waste-disposal practices that create ground-water pollution in the first place. “That’s what’s scary,” she said, “not the aeration tower.”

Responding to Bremberg’s testimony, Robbins said that “if being overreactive to the concerns of the community is a crime, then I plead guilty.”

The two-hour hearing, held in the high school’s auditorium, was attended by students from government and history classes who filed in and out as school period bells rang. Of the approximately 60 other people who attended, all but a handful were public officials or reporters and television camera operators.

The Robbins bill, which is being co-sponsored by state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblyman Tom Bane (D-Tarzana), is also scheduled to be the subject of a hearing Wednesday in Sacramento before the Senate Committee on Toxics and Public Safety Management.

Passage of the bill apparently would not prevent the DWP from building the $1-million aeration project at the Vose Street location, which DWP officials said is more than 200 yards from the nearest residence. However, the DWP would have to apply for a new permit from the air-quality district before building the tower on the new site.

Aeration, or air-stripping towers, are a proven way to remove volatile chemicals from ground water, but they transfer a small amount of pollution into the air. Water is continuously pumped from underground to the top of the tower and air is blown over it, causing solvents to evaporate.

Trichloroethylene, known as TCE, and perchloroethylene, known as PCE, have been widely used as industrial degreasers and dry-cleaning agents. Dozens of public water supply wells in North Hollywood, Burbank and Glendale contain TCE and PCE concentrations in the “parts-per-billion” range. (A substance is said to be in a one-part-per-billion concentration if there is one part of it for every billion equal parts of water.)

According to air-quality district officials, solvent emissions from an aeration tower would cause airborne concentrations in the parts-per-trillion range.

Although there is no legal restriction on the amount of TCE or PCE allowed in water, the state advises that TCE in water not go above five parts per billion and PCE not above four parts per billion. Health officials say that people drinking water contaminated at these levels for a lifetime may increase their risk of getting cancer by one in a million.

A dozen DWP wells in the eastern San Fernando Valley have been closed because of solvent concentrations considerably above the state advisory level. Water from less polluted wells is being blended with clean supplies to assure that tap water is below the state’s safety level. Several Burbank and Glendale wells also have been closed because of unacceptable solvent concentrations.

Officials with the DWP, which draws 15% of its water from wells in the eastern San Fernando Valley, have said the quick action was needed to clean up the water. Over time, they said, the water will be drawn from the dirty wells that are closed to the clean wells still being pumped.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has earmarked $1 million from the Superfund toxic cleanup program to launch a study later this year of four polluted well fields in the North Hollywood-Burbank-Glendale area. But no actual cleanup will come from the study for at least two years, and DWP officials say they would rather not wait.

DWP officials have said that, if the first aeration tower is a success, they might seek to build others to reclaim a greater portion of the polluted water. They said it will cost about $1 million to build the proposed Vose Street tower and collector lines, and that the system could be operating in about two years.

According to a written statement by Duane Georgeson, who manages the water system for the DWP, the agency put the tower project on hold over the winter while experimenting with a process for treating water with ozone and ultraviolet light. The experimental process does not cause toxic emissions, Georgeson said.

Unfortunately, he said, test results were disappointing. But Georgeson said the DWP has contracted with a scientist at UCLA to try to perfect the process.