Development Agency Regroups : Underground Fuel Continues Its Creep

For almost two years now, the 460,000-gallon underground lake of gasoline and diesel fuel in downtown San Diego has dogged the city’s redevelopment agency, threatening to undo all of its best-laid plans for the area’s revitalization.

As events showed Friday, there is still no solution to the vexing problem--and probably won’t be for several months.

The underground plume, first discovered in late summer of 1986, is continuing to spread. It now encompasses all or parts of nine blocks, from Front Street on the west to near 4th Avenue on the east to just past Island Avenue on the south and nearing G Street to the north.

There’s more bad news for officials of the Centre City Development Corp., the agency in charge of downtown redevelopment. It had been expected that, as the fuel was pumped out of the ground and hauled away, the agency would be allowed to dump ground water extracted in the process into the city sewer system.

But the ground water is so contaminated with fuel that city officials won’t allow the dumping.

So the CCDC board of directors was forced Friday to increase the agency’s contract with International Technology Corp. by $54,000 to $225,000 in hopes of finding a new solution to the ground-water problem.

W. D. Buck Farrington, the ITC official heading the cleanup, said the company has already dug one well at 2nd and Island and will use it over the next eight weeks to test which of several methods can best purify the ground water. The company will then recommend a detailed cleanup system to the CCDC.

How much that will cost and how many wells will be needed is still a mystery, as is the source or sources of the contamination. The final solution may cost millions of dollars and could take two years or more, according to Farrington.

He cited previous findings by the CCDC’s former consultant, who said the spreading of the plume was exacerbated by the massive water-removal system in place at the bayside convention center under construction a few blocks away.

In an ominous note, Farrington said there is no guarantee that whatever solution is finally selected will be sufficient to stop parts of the plume from reaching and entering San Diego Bay.

He also said there is a possibility that new and unidentified sources of the fuel are located north of G Street and went undiscovered during previous tests.