Tests of Buried Tanks Lag; Leaks Into Water Feared

More than three years after the state’s original deadline, only about half of an estimated 142,000 underground storage tanks in California have been tested, a Times survey of local agencies has found.

As a result, thousands of tanks that leak toxic chemicals into ground water remain undetected because local governments--notably the City of Los Angeles--have failed to act promptly.

Even when leaks have been discovered, the cleanup of fuels and industrial solvents has been paralyzed by philosophical squabbles between the Legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian over whether state or local agencies should oversee the effort.

The failures in detection and cleanup have put poisonous chemicals into the drinking water of people who had no reason to believe their water was not pure. At least 50 municipal and public system wells and 160 private wells have been tainted by leaks from buried tanks, the Times survey found.

Delays in purging leaked contaminants have allowed them to spread--sometimes from shallow ground water into deeper drinking water aquifers--while driving up cleanup costs already conservatively estimated at $1 billion.

“As far as cleaning up the leaks out there, I think it’s a shameful performance by the state,” said Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto), author of the landmark 1983 tank-testing law.

Sher had pressed for statewide testing after a tank at Fairchild Camera & Instrument Co. in San Jose leaked about 50,000 gallons of a highly toxic solvent into the drinking water of thousands of residents in 1981 and tanks at nearby IBM spawned a three-mile plume of contamination.

At about the same time, Burbank found solvent concentrations up to 3,000 times above the state safety level in its eastern San Fernando Valley wells--contamination eventually traced, in part, to dozens of buried tanks at Lockheed Aeronautical Systems. When severely contaminated wells are discovered, they are closed or their water is diluted to reduce pollutants to recommended levels.

But leaking tanks--along with toxics from landfills, sumps and septic tanks--prompt widespread concern among water officials in Southern California.

They fear pollution could one day limit the region’s “banking” of water in enormous subterranean basins for dry years, or drive up the price of imported water stored underground by 50%, since it will have to be cleaned before use.

“We can dance around and say this and say that, but if treatment waits another five years it’s going to double or triple the cost, and I’m afraid the majority of the (Los Angeles) basin will be lost,” said Hank Yacoub, supervising toxics engineer for the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles.

Underground tanks are found in every neighborhood of every community--at dry cleaners and car washes, mini-markets and service stations, movie studios and publishing firms, at City Hall and the state Capitol.

“This was all supposed to be cleaned up years ago and, hell, we’re just getting started,” said Gordon Boggs, tank program director for the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, whose jurisdiction stretches through 38 counties from Bakersfield to the Oregon border.

A few large cities and counties and two dozen rural counties, citing cost constraints or a dislike for mandates from Sacramento, are just beginning to require owners of buried tanks to inspect and monitor them.

In Los Angeles County, where about 36,000 tanks are underground, only about 30% have been tested for leaks and are electronically monitored as required by city and county regulations, officials said.

However, tank-law enforcement in Los Angeles city and county and in late-starting Fresno and Alameda counties and San Jose has picked up within the last year, state and local officials said.

The greater concern, therefore, has been the lack of action once leaks are discovered, they said.

In the nearly 7,900 cases where local agencies have reported leaks to the state, critically short staffing at the state’s nine regional water-quality agencies has often blocked cleanup for months or even years.

By April 1, only 216 of the 3,326 cases referred to the regional water quality boards, which have jurisdiction when ground water is jeopardized, had been cleaned up. Cleanups were in progress on only 412 of the 3,110 remaining cases. No action had been taken on 1,475.

State water officials who have spent years trying to make the tank program work now say it is at least a partial failure. They say it has moved too slowly, especially in repairing environmental damage.

“There was enough of a logjam a year ago that companies stopped coming to us with cleanup plans. They knew we weren’t able to move on them,” said veteran engineer Peter Johnson, chief of the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board’s fuel tank program.

“It became my conclusion,” Johnson said, “that our bureaucracy was as much of the problem as the leaking tanks. We had people willing to clean up, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t get guidance from us.”

W. Donald Maughn, chairman of the California Water Resources Control Board, which coordinates the regional tank programs, said, “There are long delays . . . and the end result is more pollution. I’m anxious to see the law enforced.”

Although blame for slow testing can be placed on some local governments, Deukmejian and the Legislature must bear the responsibility for tardy cleanups, numerous state and local officials said.

Since 1984, the Legislature, usually led by Sher, has repeatedly passed bills that would have spent up to $7.6 million to hire 167 new engineers for state water boards to oversee tank cleanups. But the governor has vetoed the measures, and staffing has remained close to the current 56 positions for three years.

The Legislature, in turn, killed a Deukmejian bond measure in 1986 that would have provided $50 million for administration of cleanups by local agencies.

Deukmejian argued that for efficiency a local agency should administer a tank case from start to finish, rather than sharing responsibility with the state water boards.

The Legislature supported a split of responsibilities--local handling of tank testing and simple soil cleanups; state direction of cleanups when ground water is threatened.

State law gives the regional boards authority over water-contamination problems, but it does not preclude local governments from cleaning up such nuisances.

Although a Deukmejian appointee, water board chairman Maughn philosophically joins many other state and local officials in favoring the Legislature’s position. An engineer himself, Maughn says it makes sense to leave cleanups of water pollution, which often crosses local borders, with experienced state engineers.

But, faced with a political stalemate, Maughn and a frustrated Sher endorsed last year a Deukmejian-conceived “pilot program” that will bring state and federal money for tank cleanups to local agencies, but provide little to regional water boards.

The new program will funnel $9.1 million to 10 of the 100 cities and counties involved in tank inspections by July, 1989. An additional $12.2 million for a second year was approved in June, but not before the issue was debated anew in the Legislature.

Sher argued that “woefully inadequate” staffing was forcing the state’s regional water agencies to ignore or abandon major contamination cases. He contended that $4.7 million of the $12.2 million should be spent to hire more state engineers.

But the Legislature shifted only $430,000 into the state water board’s budget, where it may be used to hire six more engineers in the San Francisco region. Another $260,000 would go to the Los Angeles regional board if a federal grant for finding polluters in the San Gabriel Valley falls through.

Speaking for Deukmejian, David Willis, chief of the state Department of Health Services toxics program, said in an interview, “The closer to the problem you can put the money, the better off you are.

“I think we have worked out an adequate process, given all the demand for funds,” Willis said. “Government doesn’t have unlimited resources.”

Under the new pilot program, local agencies will be able to hire at least 100 new inspectors or engineers within the next year.

The 10 involved agencies--including Ventura, Orange and San Diego counties--see the program as an opportunity to double their small tank staffs and whittle down a mountain of backlogged cases.

But others, including Los Angeles city and county, have balked at the program’s extensive paper work and at short-term funding they say could leave them with long-term commitments to new employees and for cleanups that often take years.

Also, the pilot program will reach only a fraction of the 42 cities and 58 counties responsible for underground tanks, Sher noted. The others will continue to forward every ground water case--and many soil cases--to regional water agencies.

Already, hundreds of water cases in Los Angeles and San Francisco get little or no attention. And large backlogs are building at regional boards in Santa Ana, Santa Rosa, San Luis Obispo and Sacramento.

Some local agencies, San Diego County included, long ago stopped referring cases that they say should have gone to the water boards because of their inadequate staffing. That deficiency will only worsen as many reluctant owners are finally forced to test their tanks and new leaks are found.

Although no urban region has been slower to force tank inspection, the Los Angeles regional water board already has a caseload of 800, four times larger than its seven engineers can adequately handle, administrators say.

L.A. Situation

And work is expected to snowball this year as the city of Los Angeles, which has about 15,000 tanks, begins to mandate testing. About 2,000 new leaks are expected in Los Angeles alone.

“We won’t certify cleanups in a timely manner. It will be chaos,” Yacoub said.

Statewide, 700 new leaking tank cases, or about eight a day, were reported in the first three months of 1988. The state estimates that up to 31,000 leaking tanks may be found when all tanks are tested.

“Take an arrow and shoot it at the map. It’s all over the region,” water board official Susan Warner said, referring to the state’s northern coast, where nearly every leak has the potential of contaminating a high water table. “The problem is very large.”

“If you talk to any of the regions or any of the counties, we all have a common problem,” the Central Valley’s Boggs said. “Too many tank problems and too few people.”

For decades, underground tanks have been favored by fire departments and city planners because explosive liquids are stored safely out of sight.

And if tanks leaked, engineers theorized, soil would filter out the pollution or it would be broken down by bacteria in the ground water.

For the last decade, however, California has discovered the hidden costs of underground tanks. The lessons were driven home in areas of high ground water and sandy soil such as the Santa Clara, San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

Alerted by dozens of major leaks in the Santa Clara Valley, the Legislature ordered that tanks be found and tested. The 1983 law required that new tanks have double walls, corrosion-resistant coatings and electronic sensors to detect lost fluid. Old, sound tanks had to be permanently monitored for new leaks.

Early Problems

There were problems from the first. The state tank inventory listed 134,000. But thousands were listed twice, and many tanks, including at least 20,000 in Los Angeles County, were not listed at all.

As problems developed, the state’s mid-1985 deadline for tank testing and monitoring was extended to September, 1986. Since then only deadlines imposed by cities and counties have been pressed. Stiff penalties are allowed, but few cases have been filed against tank owners.

The cities and counties, already struggling with tight budgets, recognized immediately that the cost of enforcing tank inspection and of testing their own tanks would be enormous.

Tank fees were supposed to pay for the local enforcement programs, but never completely did. And state money that offset part of the expense of testing and replacing government-owned tanks has been cut off.

Agencies Leery

Local enforcement agencies--usually city fire departments or county health departments--were also leery because they knew little about the complicated and unproven technology of tank testing and monitoring. Nor were they eager to become experts on geology.

Rural counties have been especially reticent to start tank programs. Thirty small counties with about 20,000 underground tanks had reported just 368 leaks to the state by April, about a 10th the number expected after all tanks are tested.

“It’s a very unpopular program up here. It was designed for Southern California and should have been kept in Southern California,” said Bill Coates, a Plumas County supervisor and first vice president of the County Supervisors Assn. of California.

Los Angeles, which did not begin to force tank tests until July, was the last of the large cities and counties to act. About 2,000 to 3,000 of the city’s 15,000 tanks are fully tested and monitored, say officials, who require compliance by mid-1990.

Of the 725 tanks Los Angeles owns itself, just 199 have been tested for leaks, and 62 monitored, officials said. They project costs of $20 million to $30 million to test, monitor and replace city tanks.

And that does not include $460,000 the Department of Water and Power has spent since 1984 to pump 1,900 gallons of fuel leaked from its downtown motor pool out of ground water on Bunker Hill.

Los Angeles County, which oversees about 18,500 tanks in 80 cities and the unincorporated area, says about 5,100 tanks meet its regulations for testing and monitoring. All should comply by mid-1989.

All 644 county-owned tanks have been tested, though only a small fraction are monitored, officials said. Seventy leaks have been found, including several beneath the Hall of Administration, the Ahmanson Theater and County-USC Medical Center.

Short of People

The City of Los Angeles’ tank unit is budgeted for nine firefighters, but 21 are needed to do the job, according to Assistant Fire Chief James W. Young.

Field inspections have simply been added to the duties of 43 industrial and high-rise building inspectors, Young said. Even without tank duties, those inspectors cannot meet the city’s policy of annual inspections, the Fire Department confirmed in July after news accounts about missed inspections.

“This will essentially double their workload,” tank unit inspector John Kitchens said of the field inspectors. “There’s no way we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do. It’ll be strictly hit and miss.”

The county’s small tank staff, depleted by recruiting wars for engineers among government agencies and private industry, has a vacancy rate of 20%.

The result is a situation where tank monitoring is required “but we don’t really know if it’s happening,” said Carl Sjoberg, the county’s tank-program supervisor. “We haven’t gone out to follow up.”

LEAKING TANKS & DRINKING WATER: SOME MAJOR CASES

Statewide, contamination of about 160 private and 50 city or community wells has been linked to leaking underground tanks. Of nearly 7,900 tank-leak cases reported to the state by April, 2,000 involve ground - water contamination. In another 4,200 cases, it had not been determined whether water was polluted. Listed below are some of the worst contamination sites , their probable causes and steps being taken to correct them. LOCKHEED AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS

Burbank

Underground tanks, pipes and sumps leaked industrial solvents up to 3,000 times the state safety limit into ground water as deep as 900 feet, closing all 10 Burbank city wells. Also one of many possible sources in closure of 30 Los Angeles wells nearby. On EPA Superfund list. Cleanup may take decades and cost $100 million. IBM-FAIRCHILD Santa Clara Valley

Twenty-eight of Santa Clara Valley’s 29 EPA Superfund cases involve ground-water contamination. More than 100 private wells and at least 25 municipal wells have been tainted, nearly all by solvents from tanks or pipes athigh-tech businesses. In San Jose, IBM estimates it will spend $80 million analyzing and treating a 3-mile-long solvent plume. Neighbors of Fairchild Camera had high rates of miscarriage and birth defects, but state study found no link to Fairchild chemicals. ARROWHEAD VILLAS San Bernardino County

Two community-owned tanks leaked at least 500 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel into wells serving 720 homes and 2,000 people on a ridge overlooking Lake Arrowhead. Discovered in April after leaking for at least two months, contamination caused headaches and forced the filtration or importation of water. Costs begin at $70,000. MODESTO CONVENTION CENTER Modesto

Four tanks at old laundry leaked solvent into soil and ground water at new Modesto Civic Center, delaying for three years construction of convention hotel and prompting a $1-million municipal cleanup. Widespread contamination of downtown water wells has not been tied to leaks. A state Superfund site. ARMCO PETROLEUM Davis

A service station leak of 35,000 gallons of gasoline contaminated city well 100 yards away. Although owner went bankrupt, insurance has paid $1 million for analysis, water extraction and soil venting since 1984. Another $9 million from insurance is in a trust fund. Full extent of problem is still unknown. XEROX CORP. Pomona

The state says tanks at Xerox are one of two major sources of solvents that have contaminated one municipal well in Pomona. Cleanup is imminent on toxic plume that has traveled about 1,000 feet off site. The 1984 case is one of only a few in the San Gabriel Valley in which pollution sources have been identified.Storage tanks, sumps, septic tanks and landfills are thought to be main contaminants in the valley, where 120 wells are tainted and a 50-year, $800-million cleanup is projected. MERCED LAUNDRY Merced County

Merced last year spent $800,000 to drill new wells to replace three in downtown area that had provided 17% of city’s water. A tank at a 50-year-old laundry is probable source of solvent that closed two wells. Two dry cleaners are suspected sources in second case. Extent of plume not identified. No cleanup begun. Tank leak at school bus shop also threatens city well in nearby Atwater. AMBASSADOR LAUNDRY Santa Barbara

A city well was contaminated when solvents from dry cleaner’s tank leaked down an abandoned well to a regional aquifer. Owner Mission Industries was fined $100,000 in 1985. Extent of problem still being determined. Nearby, along Highway 101, Caltrans is cleaning up after several leaking tanks found in right-of-way after purchase. GLENNVILLE Kern County

Gasoline contamination of seven wells, including one at shopping center, was discovered along a quarter-mile swath in mountain community near Lake Isabella in 1985. Attorney general’s office has filed suit to force owner of leaking service station tank to reimburse county and state $400,000. Cleanup continues. PETALUMA-SANTA ROSA Sonoma County

Buried tanks are the source or probable source of leaks that have contaminated 14 wells--six of them municipal or community--in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Sebastopol and Windsor. In a Santa Rosa case, gasoline and solvents from 60 buried tanks at several businesses tainted a public well and seven private ones.Solvent leaks at Sola Optical in Petaluma, an EPA Superfund site, have polluted a major city well. DESERT SITES Southern California

Six wells, including two at public facilities, have been contaminated by leakinggas tanks in eastern San Diego County communities of Santa Ysabel, Ocotillo Wells and Borrego Springs. Municipal wells in Winterhaven in Imperial County, and in the Lucerne Valley and near Barstow in San Bernardino County are also contaminated. Sources were service stations, a resort and a truck stop that was abandoned after leaks were discovered.

Underground storage tanks have also contaminated at least 37 other drinking-water wells in the counties of San Joaquin (15), Tulare (12), Santa Barbara (2), Madera (2), San Mateo (2), El Dorado (1), San Diego (1), Merced (1) and Sierra (1). UNDERGROUND TANK TESTING

Only about half the 142,000 tanks covered by state law have been tested for leaks three years after the original deadline. At most, 42% of the state’s buried tanks meet state or local laws for permanent leak monitoring. Chart shows data from most populous counties.

TOTAL TESTED/ TOTAL LEAKS CLEANUPS COUNTIES TANKS MONITORED FOUND COMPLETED Alameda 6,043 -- 733 2 Contra Costa 2,561 2,305 260 0 Los Angeles 36,300 11,000 2,750 500 Fresno 9,800 300 50 25 Orange County 8,110 2,951 777 353 Riverside 4,000 700 850 765 Sacramento 3,900 2,160 1,245 483 San Bernardino 8,000 4,800 270 90 San Diego 7,500 5,000 859 236 San Mateo 3,000 2,550 128 0 Santa Clara 6,000 4,500 925 15 San Francisco 1,700 1,190 130 0 Ventura 4,093 3,070 357 40 State Total 142,000 59,000 12,600 2,750

Note: State totals are estimates based on a Times survey of cities and counties where 90% of underground tanks are located and on state data for counties not surveyed. County figures are estimates from local agencies, except for Alameda, where state information is shown.