Solution Eludes Agencies, Community : Gas-in-Water Riddle Vexes Santa Ysabel

There used to be a joke going around Santa Ysabel about the county health clinic. If you flushed the toilet while smoking a cigarette, wags would caution, you would blow up the whole place.

“Now, I don’t know for sure that it was true, but the fumes were pretty fierce, they say,” admitted Larry Aker, assistant deputy director of county Environmental Health Services.

It was 1976 or early 1977 when gasoline first showed up in Santa Ysabel water wells, the only local water supply. Only two or three wells have been polluted sufficiently to require users to seek other drinking water sources, but half a dozen others carry the distinctive odor of gasoline, or maybe diesel fuel, to sensitive noses.

Mystery Remains

The health center’s water now runs clear and odorless, because of a switch from the smelly well water to another water source, but the mystery of the gasoline contamination in Santa Ysabel remains.

Briefly last year, the small back-country community made it to the big time--a place on the state Superfund list--until larger and more dangerous pollution problems relegated it to the back burner.

Over the decade, a number of governmental agencies have examined the pollution, sought the source of the problem, then stepped aside to allow others to take up the search. Among the agencies that have looked into and passed on the water contamination problem are the county Department of Health Services, state Department of Health Services and the Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Santa Ysabel, a crossroads hamlet of about 50 residents in northeastern San Diego County, became, for a while in the mid-1980s, a test area for the state’s underground tank program, which is designed to prevent such problems as leakage from gasoline tanks and other underground installations.

Moratorium on Wells

In 1984, about the time that San Diego’s “tank corps” was getting started, Santa Ysabel was receiving negative publicity because of the underground pollution and a moratorium was placed on the drilling of new wells for fear that the deeper drilling would pollute lower water levels.

County health officials “borrowed” a hydrogeologist from the county Planning Department and began drilling test holes around the community to determine the source of the gasoline leak. Eleven test drills and more than $15,000 later, the gasoline smell was still there.

The problem, according to Vicky Gallagher and Kevin Heaton, two of the county’s underground tank regulators, was poorly documented. Evidence was “mostly anecdotal,” recollections of old-timers in the community that “there used to be a hotel or motel on the corner” or that the school bus driver had an underground tank to gas up his vehicle right about the place where the well contamination was the greatest.

Added to the list were a former county road maintenance station, two or three former service station sites and a dozen homesteads where, in the 1940s, farmers stored their agricultural allotments of rationed gasoline underground. There were tales about a county crop duster who flew from a dirt strip in the 1920s (and probably had aviation fuel tanks there) in the first-ever attack against grasshoppers in the inland valleys.

Gas Station Tanks

Chief among the suspects was the still-active Chevron station that stands on the northeastern corner of Highways 79 and 78--the commercial center of Santa Ysabel. But new double-lined gasoline storage tanks containing automatic alarm systems to signal spillage have been installed there.

While well tests, sample drilling and the installation of new tanks have failed to stem the underground flow or to pinpoint the culprit, Mother Nature has eased the problem.

Sandy Jiminez, who has lived with the gasoline smell for most of her 16 years in Santa Ysabel, reports that the contamination has eased in recent years, “Maybe because we have had a couple of dry years.”

Heaton, a hydrogeologist with the county’s underground tank team, admits that the investigation “has gone about as far as we can take it.”

When old tanks were unearthed and removed at the Chevron site, “we thought we might have the answer” to the source of the gasoline pollution, Heaton said. But the old tanks “appeared to be tight” and not the source, he added. Some Santa Ysabel old-timers disputed Heaton’s account that the old Chevron tanks were removed. Tanks at Dudley’s Bakery were taken out, as were some at the site of a former restaurant adjacent to the bakery, but none at the service station site, townsfolk said.

The newest agency on the scene, and one with clout to force cleanup of a pollution source, is the state Department of Health Services. Mark Vest, a regional official with the state agency, said that the Santa Ysabel pollution problem is minor compared to the major sites, such as Riverside County’s Stringfellow acid pits, that the state is seeking to control.

Off the List

The state agency, which manages the state’s Superfund, had Santa Ysabel listed as 142nd on its list of 180 toxic sites until last year. It was taken off the active list after a February, 1987, check found no harmful amounts of toxic substances in the Santa Ysabel area underground water, Vest said.

Gallagher and Heaton stress that the county’s beefed-up underground tank program is meant to be regulatory, not investigatory.

Permits for underground storage are issued at “active” tank sites; inactive underground tanks that are reported are checked and ordered removed or filled with nontoxic material and sealed.

“We can’t be responsible for what went on for the years when underground tanks were not regulated,” Gallagher said. “It is a major task just to register and regulate the hundreds of active underground tank sites we know of.”

Vest, after reviewing the investigations of the several other agencies that have tried to solve the Santa Ysabel problem over the past decade, said that “it’s possible that the source will never be found.”

If the culprit ever does come to justice, the price he will pay is considerable. Under new state laws, a polluter must pay for the cleanup, which, in Santa Ysabel, would require pumping underground water out of the area and filtering it to remove the volatile gasoline pollutants or removing it for disposal at a designated dump site.