Water Pollution Traveling Faster Than Solutions

Assemblywoman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte) claimed a major victory when she persuaded Assembly and state Senate committees last month to put $900,000 in the state budget to stem the pollution of ground water in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys.

But at the behest of Danny Walsh, a member of the state Water Resources Control Board, whose responsibilities include the protection of ground water, the Senate committee dropped the allocation from its version of the budget, leaving Tanner furious.

Walsh said he opposed Tanner’s proposal because it would have taken federal funds from a pilot program that helps cities and counties clean up leaks from underground tanks. Tanner said the pilot program doesn’t help the San Gabriel Valley because Los Angeles County has refused to participate.

To break the impasse, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has offered to provide $1 million for the investigation into pollution sources.

Officials Disagree

In separate interviews, Tanner and Walsh agreed that ground-water pollution must be stopped in the San Gabriel Valley. But they disagreed on which government agencies should be doing the work and on how the money should be allocated.

Their disagreement mirrors a struggle that has been under way for years in Sacramento between legislators and Gov. George Deukmejian’s Administration over management of toxics programs and whether the state or local governments should enforce environmental regulations.

Partly as a result, no decisions have been made on who should lead the effort to identify the sources of pollution in the San Gabriel Valley or how to pay for the work.

W. Don Maughan, chairman of the state Water Resources Control Board, met last week with Tanner and John Doyle, deputy secretary of environmental affairs, to discuss ways of meeting Tanner’s objectives while also funding the pilot underground-tank program. Tanner said the possible EPA funding was suggested as a way of resolving the problem.

Policy differences between the administration and legislators have delayed toxic cleanups throughout the state, Maughan said.

In addition, the cleanup effort in the San Gabriel Valley was set back when the state changed its mind about leading the effort and turned the job over to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1985.

Extent of Pollution

Authorities learned eight years ago that such suspected carcinogens as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) were seeping into wells in the main San Gabriel basin. Today, the pollution is spread over 40 square miles, and 70 wells have been shut down or can be used only if the water is treated or blended to reduce the contaminants.

EPA, the state Department of Health Services, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and the county all run programs dealing with ground-water pollution in the San Gabriel Valley.

The passage of piecemeal legislation, giving different government agencies overlapping responsibilities for environmental regulations, has led to confusion and inefficiency, Maughan said.

“I don’t know that (all the work) has to be done by a single agency,” he said. But the cleanup effort must be coordinated, he added.

Maughan said he hopes that a June 28 hearing by the state board on San Gabriel Valley ground water will lead regulatory agencies and water officials to develop a coordinated approach.

EPA, the regional water board and the state Department of Health Services already are attempting to develop a coordinated strategy.

Thomas E. Shollenberger, Alhambra city utilities manager and president of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water Assn., said that water officials have been frustrated by the slow progress in shutting down sources of pollution.

Work Not Coordinated

“It is not that no one is doing anything about it,” he said. Several agencies are working on parts of the problem, but “everybody is working at their own speed and direction.” Meanwhile, he said, pollutants continue to leak into ground water.

Thomas Stetson, engineer for the San Gabriel Valley Watermaster, a board that controls pumping by the 46 water companies and municipal water departments that draw water from the basin, said the contamination probably began in the 1940s.

Decades ago, Stetson said, machine shops, dry cleaners and other businesses used PCE, TCE and carbon tetrachloride as cleaning solvents without being aware of their potential danger. When the solvents were thrown away, Stetson said, “I’m sure they just dumped it out the back door, down the alley or took it and dumped it in the first hole they could find. There has probably been stuff dumped all over the place.”

Low Superfund Priority

Although stringent controls are now in effect on the storage and disposal of TCE, PCE and other hazardous materials, solvents may still be entering the ground through illegal dumping, careless handling and delays in enforcing environmental regulations.

EPA put cleanup of San Gabriel Valley ground water on its Superfund list in 1984, but the agency has made only a limited effort to pinpoint sources of pollution, and has declared that its mission under the Superfund program is to clean up contamination, not prevent it from occurring.

In a paper prepared two months ago to outline a proposed strategy in the San Gabriel Valley, EPA said: “It is common sense that in the solution of a problem, you should necessarily concern yourself with the cause of the problem and prevent it from happening again. . . . However this activity is certainly outside of the jurisdiction of EPA Superfund and is, therefore, a state and local responsibility.”

‘Little Coordination’

The EPA strategy paper notes that local, state and federal agencies operate numerous regulatory programs to prevent ground-water pollution, but says they are disjointed and have “little coordination.” Even if the efforts were coordinated, the paper says, the agencies combined lack the money to do an adequate job in the San Gabriel Valley.

Hank Yacoub, chief of the toxics section of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the problem is so complex that even with the additional funding proposed by Tanner, it would take eight years for the regional board to investigate the hundreds of potential sources of contamination.

Pollution Sources Many

Yacoub said the sources include storage tank leaks, abandoned dumps and industrial septic tanks.

Because just a few drops of TCE in enough water to fill a swimming pool could make it undrinkable, even a minor spill, such as from overfilling a tank, can cause problems.

The state passed legislation four years ago to require the testing and monitoring of underground tanks. The regional water board and the county Department of Public Works share responsibility for the tank program, but have never agreed on how to handle tank leaks.

The regional board has asked the county, which conducts the licensing of tanks, to apply for state funds to handle more leak investigations itself so that the regional board can concentrate its efforts on major spills. But the county has been reluctant to expand its efforts because of the paper work involved and the uncertainty of future funding. So nearly all leaks involving ground-water cleanup are referred to the regional board.

Funding Inadequate

In addition to investigating leaking tanks and landfills, the regional board has a separate program to investigate pollution sources near contaminated wells. Because of funding and staff shortages, this program covers just four of the area’s 32 cities: El Monte, Industry, La Puente and Pomona.

EPA has been trying for several years to find out how pollutants contaminated a large area of ground water under Azusa, Irwindale and Baldwin Park, but that effort has bogged down because EPA does not have a contractor available to complete the work. Paula Bisson, who supervises EPA Superfund projects in California, said EPA is trying to arrange for a contractor to take over the project.

In addition, Bisson said EPA is discussing a cooperative agreement with the regional water board that would give the agency $1 million to find sources of ground-water contamination.

Tanner hopes this funding will be used to accomplish everything she wanted done with the $900,000 cut from the Senate version of the state budget.

To Take 50 Years

EPA has yet to formally accuse any company of polluting ground water in the San Gabriel Valley, but EPA officials say they hope to finance part of the cleanup by obtaining payments for damages from polluters. EPA has estimated that the cleanup will cost up to $800 million and take 50 years.

But many, like Robert Ghirelli, executive director of the regional water board, say that stopping pollution must receive priority over cleanup.

“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to clean up a basin if it still has junk leaking into it,” he said.

James L. Easton, executive director of the state water board, said that protection of ground water may require cities and counties to impose tough planning regulations. Perhaps, he said, companies that use and produce toxic chemicals should be prohibited from building plants on soil that would allow pollutants to reach ground water quickly because “even with the best-laid plans to manage those chemicals, you may have spills and things happen.”

Import Hikes Likely

Easton said loss of the San Gabriel basin, which supplies water to a million people, and pollution of the Central basin south of Whittier Narrows, which serves another 2 million, would require the areas to import more water from northern California, creating a statewide water problem.

“What we have here is a very serious potential water supply problem,” Easton said. “We don’t have a current public health problem. People are not being served polluted water, nor will they be.

“But these ground-water basins are very important sources of water supply. We have not done as good a job as we should have done in protecting these basins.”

The state water board has invited local, state and federal regulatory agencies and local water producers to offer their suggestions on dealing with ground water pollution at the hearing from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on June 28, at the El Monte Community Center, 3130 N. Tyler Ave.

Linn E. Magoffin, chairman of the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster; Burton E. Jones and Donald Clark, who are presidents of area water districts, and Shollenberger, acting as president of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water Assn., have submitted recommendations urging that the regional water board be given more money to investigate pollution sources and that the county be encouraged to apply for state funds to investigate leaking underground tanks.

The $900,000 appropriation for the regional board that Tanner succeeded in including in the Assembly version of the state budget would have enabled the board to hire 16 employees to work on ground-water pollution in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys.

Legislation Vetoed

In 1985, Gov. Deukmejian twice vetoed legislation by Tanner that would have provided money to the regional water board to investigate leaking underground tanks in the San Gabriel Valley. Deukmejian explained one veto by saying that the measure would transfer a local responsibility to the state, and added that the funding was “premature” because the administration and the legislature were not yet in agreement on how to handle the problem.

Tanner said she regards the state board’s June 28 hearing as “a waste of time” that will rehash what has been said at many previous meetings, including a legislative hearing that she conducted three years ago.

Instead of another hearing to analyze the problem, Tanner said, “I’d rather see the money spent on action.”