Official Calls for Action on Leaking LAX Fuel Tanks

The chairman of the state Regional Water Quality Control Board called Monday for formation of a task force to plan the cleanup of a layer of jet fuel that has contaminated ground water underneath Los Angeles International Airport.

Board Chairman Paul D. Flowers said such a task force, which would include Los Angeles city and county officials, is needed to deal with leaking fuel storage tanks at the airport and tanks elsewhere, most of them under ground, in the Los Angeles area.

Flowers told colleagues that the discovery of a layer of jet fuel up to 5 feet thick in a regional ground water basin about 100 feet below huge fuel tanks at the airport is a “very serious problem” that demands an immediate meeting of all concerned.

“We can study this forever,” he said, “but while we’re studying this, the pollution still occurs.”

Officials have said that the pollution does not pose an immediate threat to drinking water, but that the contamination has penetrated to within 100 feet of the Silverado aquifer, which serves as the major drinking water basin for the coastal area.

Hank Yacoub, supervising engineer in charge of the board’s toxics division, said the airport may be “a major ground water contamination case,” and that he fears similar problems may be found at the other airports in the county.

At Los Angeles International, Yacoub said, the first step in any cleanup is developing a comprehensive plan to inventory all tanks and pipelines, a process that could take three months.

Tests Would Follow

That would be followed by tests to determine the extent of any leaks and the magnitude of ground water contamination. Then, the water board could order the cleanup of the pollution by the businesses responsible for it.

In another ground water pollution case, the board Monday unanimously ordered Mobil Oil Corp. to immediately start a program to clean up allegedly leaking gasoline that state officials believe has contaminated water as far as 1,200 feet from the company’s Torrance refinery.

Mobil, which disputes the state’s contention that the refinery has been polluting ground water outside the refinery grounds, was given until May 1 to present a cleanup plan.

Under the order, Mobil could be subject to fines of as much as $5,000 a day if it fails to produce monitoring reports and begin pumping significant amounts of gasoline out of the regional Gardena aquifer by March 1, 1989.