Cleaning Toxic Spill Without Government Prodding : Firm Finds Honesty Best, but Expensive, Policy

A company that blew the whistle on itself is finding that honesty is an expensive policy. But it is a policy that water officials hope other companies will follow.

In 1985, thousands of gallons of the cleaning solvent perchloroethylene (PCE) leaked out of a factory in Industry that makes air conditioning and heating equipment. So far, the company, BDP Co., has spent $5 million to clean up contamination of ground water under the plant.

Now, officials of the company, a division of the Carrier Corp., say it will cost millions of dollars more and take years to remove all the contaminants. An order outlining additional cleanup steps the company must take will be considered Monday by the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles.

Hank Yacoub, water board supervising engineer for toxics, said the order will set a precedent by declaring for the first time that companies that contaminate ground water must clean it up to the point where it meets state and federal drinking water standards.

What makes this cleanup unusual, according to water board officials, is not just the size of the task but the fact that the company discovered and reported the spill itself and has aggressively pursued the cleanup without prodding from government agencies.

Yacoub said the steps BDP has taken should be used as a model for other companies that have allowed chemicals to invade ground water.

After discovering the spill, the company hired water pollution experts to assess the problem, drilled 80 monitoring and extraction wells, constructed a pilot water treatment plant, created a laboratory to run water tests and redesigned its manufacturing process to avoid using PCE and related cleaning solvents.

E. James Norman, BDP’s Western regional manager of governmental affairs, said studies by environmental experts show that most of the contaminated ground water is under the plant property. The nearest producing water well is about a mile away.

Norman said a natural clay barrier, about 45 feet below the surface, is keeping the contaminants from drifting into deeper water.

Must Drill Deeper

But Yacoub said the company will have to install more wells at deeper levels to prove the assumption that the contamination is confined to the shallow aquifer. He said the company has concentrated most of its study on water that is within 100 feet of the surface but needs to test deeper water by drilling down to 400 feet.

Norman said acting promptly was in the interest of both the community and the company.

Delaying the cleanup would have allowed the contamination to spread, increasing the cost and complexity of the work, Norman said.

“Any prudent businessman who has a social conscience would try to clean it up as fast as possible,” he said. Besides, he added, “you’re not going to get out of it.”

The order that the regional board is expected to issue Monday will require the company, which employs 1,000 workers and has operated a plant on 67 acres since 1957, to expand its water treatment system and undertake more work to find out how far the water contamination has spread.

The BDP Co. has agreed to expand its water treatment system so that it can extract contaminants from 800 gallons of water a minute. It has been processing 100 gallons a minute in its pilot plant. Even at that accelerated rate, it will take 10 to 15 years to complete the cleanup, Yacoub said.

The PCE, also known as tetrachloroethylene, is widely used as an industrial and dry cleaning solvent. At BDP, metal parts that required cleaning were carried along a conveyor through tanks of PCE and through a vapor system.

Norman said the company was unaware that PCE was escaping until workers noticed that the process was using an excessive amount of the compound. The company investigated and found a leak in a sump that had been built into the factory floor to collect PCE at the end of the cleaning process.

Norman said it is unclear how long the leak existed. The company initially reported a spill of 15,000 to 20,000 gallons, but Norman said it now seems more probable that the amount was as little as 8,000 gallons, which would still make it the largest PCE spill ever reported to the regional water board, which serves Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Wells Closed

Yacoub said even tiny amounts of PCE spilled through careless handling or overfilling of storage tanks can cause problems by drifting down through soil to ground water.

PCE and other solvents in ground water have forced the closure of dozens of wells in the San Gabriel Valley, which depends on well water for 90% of its supply. The state advises against using any drinking water that contains more than 4 parts per billion of PCE. Ground water underneath the BDP plant has been found to have PCE concentrations as high as 310,000 parts per billion.

The treatment system the company has established on its site at Anaheim-Puente Road and Azusa Avenue extracts water from the ground and carries it to the top of a 40-foot-high tower. The water is dropped down the tower while air is pumped upward.

PCE and other volatile organics are transferred from water to air, and the air is then circulated through a carbon system that traps 90% of the contaminants, releasing the remainder into the air. The water, which has been purified to state standards, is then piped to nearby San Jose Creek for reentry into the ground water basin.

Nelson Wong, the company’s environmental project manager, said seven more aeration towers will be constructed to expand the system, and new wells will be dug as needed.

Complicating the cleanup is the fact that the 1985 spill is not the only source of ground water contamination in the area. Yacoub said that at least two other companies are under investigation for ground water pollution and that BDP may have had other spills before 1985.

Other Pollutants

The BDP Co. says its tests of ground water in the area show that it is polluted by vinyl chloride, benzene, chloroform and other compounds that have never been handled by the plant, and that the ground water is polluted with PCE and a similar compound, trichloroethylene (TCE), before it reaches the BDP property.

The company has asked the water board to recognize that area ground water has 100 parts per billion of PCE from other sources and to allow the company to close its treatment plant after it has removed all the contamination above that level. Norman said his company is willing to clean up its own spill but does not want to take care of everyone else’s problem too.

Yacoub said it is too early to set any limit on the cleanup. It will take years for BDP Co. to remove the PCE for which it is responsible, he said, and he will recommend deferral of any decision on how long the company must operate the water treatment system. Norman said the company, too, is willing to defer that question but does not want to be treating water forever.

Meanwhile, Norman said, the company has stopped using cleaning solvents such as PCE. Both PCE and TCE have been identified as carcinogens in animals and are believed capable of causing cancer in humans if ingested in significant amounts over many years.

Norman said the company has changed its manufacturing processes so that it no longer needs such toxic compounds.