Lockheed Plan to Cut Groundwater Toxics OKd

State water officials Wednesday gave the go-ahead to Lockheed-California Co.’s plan to reduce groundwater contamination beneath the company’s Burbank plant.

The state Regional Water Quality Control Board said the aerospace firm must also quickly take steps to prevent further pollution of municipal water wells in Burbank.

One of Burbank’s wells, near Lockheed, was shut by the state Department of Health this month, bringing the number of Burbank wells showing high concentrations of pollutants to seven. The city has 10 municipal wells capable of producing water, officials said.

None of the Burbank municipal wells provides water to Burbank residents, said Fred Lantz, the water systems manager of Burbank’s Public Service Department. All of Burbank’s water in the last year has been bought from the Metropolitan Water District.

“We started purchasing water because of the uncertainties in the groundwater,” Lantz said. The city’s wells are used only for monitoring water.

Called ‘Valuable Resource’

“But, if we’re forced to lose all our wells, we will lose a valuable resource, and it will be a financial loss to the city,” he said.

A study recently conducted by the water quality board and Lockheed provided strong evidence that Lockheed had contributed to the contamination that forced more than 30 municipal water wells in Burbank and North Hollywood to close because of pollution by two chemicals believed to cause cancer.

A body of contaminated water coming from Lockheed may be moving toward the remaining three operating Burbank wells, said Hank Yacoub, supervising engineer for the board.

Since 1980, high concentrations of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, also known as TCE and PCE, have been detected in water drawn from DWP wells in North Hollywood and Burbank.

Limit Exceeded

Most of the wells in the two communities contained 100 to 400 parts of contaminant per 1 billion parts of water. The state has set the limit for PCE at 4 ppb, and for TCE at 5 ppb.

The contaminated Burbank wells contained 15 to 35 ppb of PCE and TCE, Yacoub said.

Lockheed’s cleanup outline, submitted last Friday, described a 24-week program for removing the most serious contamination found beneath Lockheed’s oldest plant.

The water control board stipulated that Lockheed include the seven contaminated Burbank wells in its cleanup plan, Yacoub said.

“We want Lockheed to feel an urgent need to contain and prevent further migration, which may contaminate additional water wells,” Yacoub said.

The board also said Lockheed must install an unspecified number of additional water-monitoring wells to further define the extent of the contamination along Lockheed’s westerly boundary, Yacoub said. He said the agency wants to find any links between the source of contamination and the wells that are polluted.

“It’s premature to jump to the conclusion that all the wells in the San Fernando Valley are contaminated by Lockheed,” he said, “but the possibility is there.”

Yacoub added that the agency does not want Lockheed to waste time implementing its cleanup. “We don’t want them to test cleanup systems that have already been tested,” Yacoub said. The company should concentrate on reducing the contaminants by carbon filtration or other direct means, he said.

Lockheed officials said they will comment on the agency’s recommendations later this week.