Trouble Underground : Natural Clay Layer Has Protected South Bay Water From Tank Leakage Contamination So Far, But Threat Is Real

Nowhere in the South Bay have problems with leaking underground tanks become more apparent than along an industrialized strip of southern Gardena and eastern Torrance.

Since state law began to require testing of underground tanks in 1984, seven companies whose tanks have leaked pollutants into ground water have been identified along the 3-mile strip of Western Avenue.

On the strip’s northern edge near Artesia Boulevard, a subsidiary of Morton Thiokol has spent three years and $700,000 to find the boundaries of a foot-thick plume of industrial solvent that flows from its property and beneath a neighbor’s.

Nearby, Honeywell Inc. has drilled 20 wells in four years to gauge the movement of solvents and fuels leaked from tanks, and a camper shell manufacturer employs a worker full time to bail leaked solvent, once up to 4 feet thick, from 80 shallow wells.

To the south, leaking tanks at four other companies have added toxic chemicals to a soup of contaminants that underlie east Torrance and parts of Harbor Gateway.

State officials say the tank contamination--along with toxic plumes from the Mobil oil refinery, a former rubber plant on Del Amo Boulevard, Montrose Chemical Corp. and other nearby locations--threatens the South Bay’s drinking-water basins.

No South Bay water well has yet been tainted. But industrial pollution has been found in the region’s upper aquifer, a limited source of drinking water outside the Torrance area, officials say.

And state water officials say the contaminants could sink into two deeper drinking-water aquifers if not cleaned up.

Thick clay layers, a natural blessing, usually block the descent of pollution from shallow water basins into the deeper aquifers. But the so-called “impermeable clay” layers apparently have been penetrated or circumvented a few miles away in Santa Monica, Bellflower and South Gate, so water officials say the threat to the deepest water basins is real.

“There’s no doubt about it--the potential is there to migrate down to drinking water,” said Hank Yacoub, supervising toxics engineer for the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles.

While local officials have known for years that shallow South Bay ground water is polluted, it is only since 1984--with a flurry of testing at oil refineries and recent enforcement of underground tank-testing laws--that they have begun to realize the magnitude of the problem.

Extensive contamination has been found beneath seven South Bay refineries, and underground storage tanks have leaked toxic chemicals at 187 locations from Los Angeles International Airport to the Port of Los Angeles.

“I don’t think anyone anticipated we were going to run into the kinds of problems that we did. We thought we’d come across a couple of hot spots in the soil, but nothing along the lines of what we’ve found in the water,” said Michael Bihn, a Torrance Redevelopment Agency planner.

“From what I’ve heard it’s pretty much everywhere (in the South Bay),” Bihn said. “You get around industrial areas and you find this problem.”

The problem’s outlines will grow steadily clearer over the next two years, as owners of 5,000 to 6,000 South Bay underground tanks are pressed to comply with either a mid-1989 county deadline to test and monitor the containers or a mid-1990 Los Angeles city deadline.

Leaking tanks have already been discovered at 1,300 locations countywide. The tanks range from 500-gallon solvent and fuel tanks at small businesses to 12,000-gallon gasoline tanks at service stations and much larger solvent containers at industrial sites.

“We’ve got (leaks) all over the place. I don’t even keep them in my head anymore. There’s too many of them,” said Carl Sjoberg, director of the county program that oversees tank testing in most South Bay cities.

In a recent interview, Sjoberg culled six South Bay cases from a batch of 1988 leak reports.

In Gardena, he said, layers of gasoline up to 3 feet thick were discovered floating atop ground water under two service stations. In Redondo Beach and Carson, leaks at gas stations had also reached water. And in Hawthorne, Northrop Corp. reported two leaks of solvents that had flowed into shallow pockets of water.

Leaks Reported

Through the end of July, 61 of the 187 leak cases had been reported in South Bay communities that are part of the city of Los Angeles, including San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City and the international airport area.

Thirty-three cases had been reported in Torrance, 24 in Carson, 17 in Gardena and 10 in Hawthorne. Other South Bay cities each had fewer than 10 reported leaks.

Countywide, about 30% of underground tanks have been tested and comply with local ordinances that require electronic monitoring to detect new leaks.

This compares with about 25% compliance in Los Angeles and 80% compliance in Torrance. Long Beach, Vernon and Santa Monica are the only other cities in the county that chose to enforce tank laws themselves. The county runs the tank program in unincorporated areas and in 80 cities.

Ground-water cleanups in Los Angeles and Ventura counties are supervised by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County has been slower to enforce tank laws than some counties and cities, Sjoberg said, partly because its Fire Department, which protects 43 cities, had no inventory of tanks when the state law was passed. A 1984 list supplied by the state did not include about 15,000 of the 33,000 tanks then in the county’s jurisdiction, he said.

“We’re still finding tanks,” he said. “Every time I drive down the street I spot a place that’s not on our list. A (tank owner) came in the other day and said, ‘Hey, I just found nine more.’ ”

Sjoberg said many companies simply dug up their tanks rather than test and monitor them, or removed the tanks when leaks were found instead of replacing them with mandated double-walled containers.

About 10,000 have been removed and not replaced in the county’s jurisdiction, Sjoberg estimated. In Los Angeles, perhaps 3,000 more have been removed.

Los Angeles officials, who only began to force owners to test their tanks on July 1, said it has taken four years to gear up because of a slow-moving political process, a state inventory that included only half of the city’s 15,000 tanks and a manpower shortage that made it impossible to do much more than oversee the removal of tanks.

Quick leak detection and cleanup are important, water officials said, because delays allow contaminants to spread, increasing costs and the chance that chemicals will sink into drinking-water basins.

Though generally slow-starting, South Bay tank testing has revealed clusters of leaks in the industrial zones of Torrance, Gardena, Carson, San Pedro and Hawthorne, where oil, aerospace and a variety of high-tech industries are concentrated.

Leaks have been discovered at fire stations and the Forum, at auto dealerships and a water company, at a bakery and a bottling firm, at a department store and a grocery, at a harbor police station and the San Pedro Municipal Building.

But leaks were also found along quiet residential streets in South Bay cities, many at neighborhood service stations. Eighty-four of the 187 South Bay leaks were at service stations.

Twenty South Bay leaks, nearly all involving solvents at industrial sites or gasoline at service stations, are among the 140 identified as most serious by engineers for the regional water board.

In at least eight of those cases, solvents and gasoline have been found in ground-water plumes that extend beyond tank owners’ properties. Off-site testing has not yet been done in several other major cases.

The plumes have prompted fears that gasoline vapors may seep into homes, as occurred near the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo in 1985, following undetected leaks of up to 6 million barrels of fuel into shallow ground water.

They have also raised legal questions about liability and have sometimes stalled cleanups because of neighbors’ reluctance to allow testing to determine the extent of contamination.

If tests show that adjoining properties are polluted, owners must declare the potential hazard when they sell their real estate. Financial institutions and escrow companies increasingly require assurance from government agencies that environmental problems have been resolved.

“The real estate people call us every day. They’re very much concerned about how clean is clean. They want us to sign off,” said the regional water board’s Yacoub.

To help those property sellers who are willing to pay for immediate cleanups, Yacoub said he has directed board engineers to quickly evaluate such cases. Giving the cases a high priority is significant, because board engineers each have at least four times as many cases as they can adequately supervise, he said.

The board’s backlog has created problems in cases that do not involve the sale of property or are not serious enough to require immediate attention, the county’s Sjoberg said.

“In a few cases, we’ve pursued the cleanup even though it was a (water board) case, because the (owners) had been sitting there with a hole in the ground for a good six months--sitting there waiting for somebody to make up their mind what to do,” Sjoberg said.

While testing in the South Bay has uncovered significant environmental threats at major industries, it has also demonstrated how costly it can be for small businesses to comply with the tank law, especially when a problem is detected.

Rho-Chem Corp., a 45-employee solvent distribution firm in Inglewood, expects to spend $150,000 to remove more than 20 old underground tanks and thousands of dollars more to truck away soil contaminated by chemical spills from drums.

Bonnie O’Meara, part owner of the 37-year-old, family-run company, said she has been trying since 1984 to find a parcel in any nearby city where she can shift part of her business so she can do the cleanup. Removal of the tanks and the tainted soil, located under the company’s main driveways, would otherwise force her to close her business, she said.

“Very few cities will allow this type of business to come in,” O’Meara said. “And you can’t get mortgaged because you’re going to handle hazardous material. So we have to put together the money ourselves, and we haven’t been able to do that. Being a distributor, our markup is very, very small.”

Regional water board authorities say the Rho-Chem case, first reported in 1983, has been put on hold. It is one of many cases that have been deferred because only small amounts of chemicals are involved, ground water is not affected and cleanup is beyond owners’ budgets, they said.

South Bay cities and public utilities have also had to deal with the expense of tank testing and cleanup. Pacific Bell, General Telephone and Southern California Gas Co. all have had leaks: GTE is still recovering 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel leaked into ground water at Hermosa Beach in 1987.

Carson-based Dominguez Water Co. spent $42,000 testing and replacing one 10,000-gallon diesel-fuel tank that was not airtight. No fuel was detected in the underlying soil, however.

The city of Torrance has spent about $300,000 to replace 23 of its 30 municipal tanks with new double-walled containers, city officials said.

The Torrance Redevelopment Agency has also changed the way it approaches real estate deals because of the hidden threat of contamination from tanks and other sources, agency planner Bihn said.

“Concern about hazardous materials storage has become a major issue,” he said.

The agency is recalculating the value of two parcels it is buying through condemnation near Torrance Boulevard along the Western Avenue strip.

After taking possession of the parcels in 1985 as part of a planned $200-million U.S. Honda redevelopment project, the agency discovered several pools of industrial solvent as 19 underground tanks were being removed. It will cost between $250,00 and $500,000 to vent the petroleum-based solvent’s vapor from the soil over the next three years, Bihn said.

Cleaning up the ground water below the property will be addressed separately, he said, because water pollution is a problem throughout the area.

“The issue is whose contamination is where, and that’s hard to identify,” he said.

Placing the Blame

Also within Torrance’s Western Avenue redevelopment zone, where the city is replacing heavy industry with office buildings and industrial parks, are three sites that illustrate the perplexing problem of placing blame for water contamination.

At 223rd Street, where Pacific Smelting Co. operated until recently, two toxic solvents were discovered during tests to determine how far leaked diesel fuel had descended into the ground water. The company said it had never used the solvents--PCE and TCE, both suspected human carcinogens--at that location.

The solvents, apparently descending through sandy soil that had no protective clay layer, sank to a depth of 90 feet into the Gardena Aquifer, a regional drinking-water basin from which only a few South Bay wells draw water. Those wells are not near the Torrance contamination.

“There is a regional PCE and TCE problem in that aquifer,” said J. C. Chen, a water board engineer. The board has ordered Pacific Smelting to drill more test wells to establish that the pollution is moving from another location.

Plant Demolished

A few blocks north at Carson Street, property owners demolished the old Armco steel-fabricating plant to make way for offices and a hotel, but during environmental checks a variety of contaminants were found in the ground water, Bihn said.

Another mile north, at an old gas station east of the Mobil refinery, extremely high levels of hydrocarbons have been found in the ground water. The owner of the parcel, Carson Estates Co., has refused to pump out the contaminated water, arguing that it has migrated from another location.

State investigators say they have traced fuel dissolved in ground water from the refinery about 2,000 feet to the southeast, under the new U.S. Honda headquarters, but not to the Carson Estates parcel directly east of the refinery.

Disagreements over who is responsible for which pollution have also occurred at the nearby Del Amo Boulevard toxic site, an old rubber plant on the state Superfund cleanup list, and the defunct Montrose chemical plant, a federal Superfund location.

“The relationship between Montrose and Del Amo and the refineries is not clearly established,” said Alexis Strauss, chief of enforcement for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Western Region.

“So when you negotiate with the companies about how many decades they’re going to pump” contaminated water out of the ground, “they’re saying, ‘I’m not going to pump one ounce.’ ”

Because ground-water contamination is so widespread in the Western Avenue area, several federal, state and local agencies have informally shared technical information and cleanup strategies, officials said.

“We are hoping to address these problems as a group,” said Strauss, who is overseeing tests and cleanup at Montrose.

Though ordering separate cleanups for each site, the individual agencies cooperate enough that Strauss thinks her Montrose research could form the cornerstone for an areawide understanding of the sources of contamination and its cleanup.

The EPA has ordered companies responsible for the Montrose pollution to test the deep Lynwood and Silverado drinking-water aquifers for contamination. The two aquifers merge about 2 miles west of Montrose, Strauss said, and that is where the EPA has ordered the tests done.

“It’s really important that we know there’s no contamination there, or if there is, that we take action” to keep it from spreading into public water supplies, she said.

City Officials Worried

Torrance officials say they are concerned about the possible threat to their drinking water.

“We’ve done extensive testing this year, because of some of the things happening around us,” Water Supt. Robert O’Cain said.

Torrance’s three wells, two about a mile west of the Western Avenue contamination, are protected by the easterly flow of water in that portion of the West Coast Basin, which underlies all of the South Bay, he said. The flow should move Western Avenue contamination away from his wells, O’Cain said.

But, more than anything, the clay layers between aquifers “have been our salvation,” he said.

In Torrance, and in much of the South Bay, surface contamination settles into confined pools of water “perched” atop a clay layer about 30 to 40 feet below ground level, he said. Though the top clay layer is not solid, it usually stops contamination.

When pollution does slip past that layer it reaches the Gardena Aquifer, about 90 feet below ground, which is separated from the Lynwood Aquifer by clay up to 100 feet thick, O’Cain said. The first opening in the casings of Torrance’s wells is at about 180 feet, just inside the Lynwood Aquifer, he said.

Though a great blessing, the clay layers may also have been a curse, said Thomas A. Salzano, assistant general manager of the Central and West Basin Water Replenishment District.

“The coastal zone was the first to be industrialized, and the chances of contamination were colossal,” Salzano said. “The blessing is that they’ve prevented drinking water from being contaminated, but the curse is that they’ve collected materials so our (shallow) perched water table is not being used.”

Large amounts of collected pollutants constitute a potential threat to the deeper aquifers, because they could flow into the hundreds of agricultural, test and private water wells that have been punched through the clay layers over the years, Salzano said.

The West Coast Basin, south of Ballona Creek and west of the Inglewood-Newport earthquake fault, has 86 active water wells and 113 inactive. Another 670 wells exist for injection or testing, according to the replenishment district.

“I don’t think it’s a major threat, but it’s a potential threat if someone had an old well and did not properly destroy it,” Salzano said.

Another potential threat lies with chemicals that have contaminated more than 100 wells in the adjoining Central Basin, whose major aquifers flow over the Inglewood-Newport fault uplift into the West Coast Basin.

Water officials who once thought the Central Basin’s clay layers impermeable are revising that opinion based on pollution found in wells in Bellflower, Norwalk and South Gate. At least one clay layer overlays the drinking water basins in those three cities.

“It’s leaking around the clay layers,” Salzano said. “We thought we were protected. But now it’s saturated or circumvented them, and we’re losing wells.”

In addition, contamination from the northern half of the Central Basin is flowing slowly through deep water basins generally toward coastal areas, water experts say.

Though most of the contaminated wells are many miles from the South Bay, solvents have been found in two wells in the Compton and Lynwood areas, within 3 miles of the West Coast Basin.

SOUTH BAY LEAKING TANKS: SOME MAJOR CASES

Since 1983, leaking underground storage tanks have been discovered at 187 locations throughout the South Bay, including 61 in communities that are part of the city of Los Angeles, 33 in Torrance, 24 in Carson, 17 in Gardena, 10 in Hawthorne, 9 in El Segundo and Inglewood, 5 in Lomita, 3 each in Hermosa Beach and Lawndale, 2 each in Manhattan Beach and Palos Verdes Estates, and 1 each in Rolling Hills Estates, Lennox and the Rancho Dominguez area. Twenty area leaks, nearly all involving solvents at industrial sites or gasoline at service stations, are among the 140 cases considered most serious by investigators at the state regional water quality board in Los Angeles. More than 1,300 leak cases have been reported countywide.

LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

1 World Way, Los Angeles

Jet fuel up to five feet thick has contaminated ground water beneath the airport. Tests since discovery in 1987 have revealed “gross contamination” of a regional aquifer, apparently from leaks in underground pipes and huge above-ground storage tanks. Leaks from two nearby underground tanks have also reached the aquifer, and several other buried tanks have leaked. Pollution has not reached the area’s drinking-water aquifers, investigators say. The airport says it will force testing of all 288 airport tanks and plans a multimillion-dollar cleanup of water and soil pollution.

BEE CHEMICAL CO.

1500 W. 178th St., Gardena

A subsidiary of Morton Thiokol, Bee has spent $700,000 to find the boundaries of a foot-thick ground water plume of industrial solvents it inherited when it bought the property in 1985. The contaminants, found at a depth of 40 feet, flow about 250 feet under neighboring companies that have given Bee permission to drill test wells. Bee plans to soon begin pumping and treatment of pollution on affected sites. Ten tanks and sumps have been removed, and storage of toxic fluids is being moved above ground to specially constructed areas. No drinking water wells have been affected.

NORTHROP CORP.

1 Northrop Ave., Hawthorne

Leaking tanks have been found on three occasions since 1986 at this 140-acre aerospace facility. The company, which has spent more than $1 million responding to the problem, has removed all 43 of its underground tanks and replaced 17 with containers that are double-walled and electronically monitored. Northrop has drilled 20 wells to assess the extent of ground water contamination and thinks pollution has not migrated off site. Plan for large-scale cleanup is being developed. City water wells are nearby, but they draw water from an aquifer about 300 feet beneath confirmed depth of pollution and separated from it by clay layers.

ELIXIR INDUSTRIES

18037 S. Broadway, Carson

Since 1984, this multi-product manufacturing company has been removing a variety of solvents once up to four feet thick. A worker still bails solvent full-time from the site’s 80 monitoring and recovery wells. Shallow ground water is polluted but contaminants are confined by a thick clay layer about 40 feet beneath site, investigators say. Pollution apparently has not moved off site.

GTE

106 Pacific Coast Highway, Hermosa Beach

About 4,000 gallons leaked from a 6,000-gallon diesel tank for a standby generator. Company began recovery of fuel floating on ground water at depth of 80 feet in 1987, soon after the leak was discovered. Ground water in area is brackish and unsuitable for drinking. Cleanup continues.

ARCO STATION

23510 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance

Thousands of gallons of gasoline were leaked in 1986 when a dipstick was punched through the bottom of a single-walled fiberglass tank, investigators say. Pumping to remove the layer of gas up to three feet thick has gone on ever since. Though found at a depth of 90 feet in an aquifer that provides drinking water in other parts of the South Bay, the pollution apparently has not affected water wells nearby. Cleanup is expected to continue for at least another year.

PACIFIC SMELTING CO.

22219 S. Western Ave., Torrance

Two toxic solvents were discovered in a regional aquifer in 1987 during tests to determine the extent of contamination from a leaking fuel tank. The company, which closed its facility last year, says it has never used the solvents--PCE and TCE, both suspected human carcinogens--at that location. Solvent contamination is an areawide problem, investigators confirm. No water wells have been affected. Analysis continues.

VSI AEROSPACE PRODUCTS

4001 Inglewood Ave., Redondo Beach

Gasoline and solvents have been found in shallow ground water, with the gasoline perhaps coming from another location. While attempting to define the extent of the problem, the company has pumped solvents from ground water, treated them and discharged them into storm drains. An overall cleanup plan is imminent, investigators say.

LOS ANGELES AIR FORCE STATION

2400 El Segundo Blvd., El Segundo

A state Superfund site, the station has been contaminated by a variety of sources during the last 40 years, the Air Force reports. In a 1977 incident, 26,000 gallons of fuel oil leaked from an underground tank. Solvent contamination from a below-ground brick sump was discovered recently. Tests to determine whether ground water has been contaminated are scheduled for this year. Drinking water wells, about a mile away, have not been polluted.

DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT CO.

19503 S. Normandie Ave., Los Angeles

A variety of industrial solvents have been found in five monitoring wells both up-gradient and down-gradient from leaking tanks. Analysis is continuing in this 1987 case, and the company says it is not yet sure of the extent of the problem. No determination has been made on whether contaminants have moved off site. Regional water basins, separated from known contamination by confining clay layers, have not been tested, state investigators say.

UNOCAL STATION

1301 Redondo Beach Blvd., Gardena

A layer of gasoline three feet thick was discovered on ground water 40 feet deep as two 10,000-gallon tanks were removed this spring. Case was referred by county to state water quality control board, where evaluation is pending.