Polluted Well Water Poisons Life of Purity in Mountains

A careful mother, Cher Fish refused to serve her infant daughter processed baby food for fear of additives.

But drinking water was another matter.

She had faith in the purity of the fresh water pumped from wells near her home on a ridge overlooking sparkling Lake Arrowhead.

Then, one morning in late February, Fish turned on her kitchen faucet and gasoline came out.

“It smelled like pure gasoline. It smelled so strong that I took a match to it to see if it would burn,” she said. The gas-and-water mixture did not ignite, she said, but she immediately stopped drinking the tap water.

Tiny red bumps broke out on Fish’s neck from a shower earlier that day. And a heavy rash developed on her daughter after washing.

When planning her baby’s first diet two months before, Fish had called the water company. “They said, ‘It’s pure well water,’ ” she recalled.

“I really trusted people, trusted the system, so I let my little girl drink that water. I made her food with it,” the young mother said recently as she packed for her family’s move to a farm in Maine, a decision prompted by the tainted water.

“The first thing we’ll do there,” she said, “is test the well.”

Arrowhead Villas, a cluster of 720 aging cabins and new chalets, is the latest California community to discover poisonous chemicals from underground storage tanks in its drinking water.

Contaminated Wells

At least 50 wells in public water systems throughout the state have been contaminated by leaks from underground tanks. Another 160 private drinking-water wells, serving individual homes, have been polluted.

State health officials say that fuels and solvents from tanks do not usually pose health risks. However, the longer contaminated water is consumed, the greater the potential harm.

At Arrowhead Villas, no one knows for sure how long gasoline has been in the wells. A slick petroleum sheen was found on a creek next to the wells last summer, and some residents say they noticed an obnoxious taste and odor in their water as early as late February.

Although the villas’ wells were not shut down until late April, health officials say that residents were not in danger--that pollution levels were generally too low and exposure too brief for harm.

Before the gasoline-water mixture began to pour from their tap, the Fishes--locksmith husband George, Cher and their baby--had lived happily for two years in Arrowhead Villas, a San Bernardino Mountains community one-half mile from the popular lake.

Once a retreat for silent-movie stars and bootleggers who made whiskey from its pure water, Arrowhead Villas is filled today with refugees from big cities who have moved to its 5,000-foot elevation for towering pine trees, clean air and, in many cases, the drinking water.

“I bought this place because Lake Arrowhead water was sparkling clean--fantastic,” said the Fishes’ neighbor, Nancy Reich, who stopped drinking tap water in early March after she and her 14-year-old daughter had suffered from headaches for three weeks.

“We had the highest-purity water found anywhere in Southern California,” said John Traband, a former USC professor turned restaurateur. But in April, when Traband’s customers “suddenly started complaining about the quality of their drinks,” he detected a “petroleum taste” in the water.

Community Poisoned Itself

The pollution problem does not affect other Lake Arrowhead communities or the famous springs that produce Arrowhead bottled water.

The situation at Arrowhead Villas is even more painful because the community had, in effect, poisoned itself.

The villas’ water company owns the two corroded tanks that leaked gasoline and diesel fuel through 20 small holes into its water supply. The tanks, estimated to be 40 years old, were buried within 50 feet of the two wells that provided all the community’s water except during peak summer and holiday seasons.

Homeowners must pay costs that begin at about $70,000 to analyze the problem and to install a water-filtration system, community leaders say.

Soil must also be cleansed through aeration or vapor pumps, which may take years, or trucked away to a toxic dump, which in similar situations has cost about $100,000. In addition, homeowners have been forced to import water at several times the normal price from wells.

Emotional losses have mounted as well, residents agree. A feeling of security has been lost. And anger has built as residents have tried to find out why their wells were still in service two months after they say they first complained of foul tastes and odors.

“I’d personally like to sue somebody, but I think I’d end up suing myself,” said Reich, who as a property owner is a shareholder in the water company.

Water company officials say perhaps 500 gallons of gas were lost from a 550-gallon tank after it was pressure-tested for leaks March 4. They now suspect that the inconclusive tests only widened existing holes.

The wells were finally closed April 25, after concentrations of highly toxic benzene, a human carcinogen, were detected at one well at 70 times the state safety level--49 parts per billion, contrasted with a safety level of 0.7 ppb. The highest reading in a home was at the Fishes’, where the water had 8 ppb of benzene.

Other than rashes, the only ailments reported by the villas’ residents were headaches.

But that doesn’t keep community residents from worrying, or from seeking more complete explanations about why two old tanks were installed, apparently after long use elsewhere, next to their wells.

Gene Chiandusse, water company general manager from March until he resigned July 1, said his predecessor did not even tell him that one of the tanks existed.

“This was a one-man operation. Records were kept in his head,” Chiandusse said of a longtime former general manager who retired to Arizona in late April and could not be reached for comment.

Most nagging, however, are questions about why the county and state health departments and the water company failed to detect the leaking tanks and were slow to close the wells.

Answers provided so far should shake the residents’ trust in those agencies, said veteran Lake Arrowhead water engineer Ralph Wagner, a member of the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board that oversees the eastern slope of the San Bernardino Mountains.

“People have no other place to put faith and confidence than in government agencies, particularly when it comes to health,” Wagner said. “And sometimes it’s just misplaced confidence.”

Acting on a resident’s complaint last summer, Wagner investigated the oily sheen on Flemming Creek behind the Arrowhead Villas water company headquarters.

Checking Wagner’s complaint, a San Bernardino County investigator reported last August that she looked over a fence from the water company yard at the creek, rather than sampling its soil or water.

Seven months passed before, in late February, Wagner was summoned to the Fishes’ home, where he detected “a slight petroleum odor” in the water. Wagner told Chiandusse that standard tests for taste and odor are not designed to detect petroleum and that other methods should be used.

Chiandusse, a product-distribution manager by profession, followed up with tests that indicated gasoline was in the water. A snowstorm kept him from digging up the gasoline tank on April 15, he said.

Chiandusse said he logged the first of 16 resident complaints on March 12 but remembers none specifically about fuel odors. “I went to the residences and drank the water and smelled the water, and I couldn’t pick up on anything,” he said.

Residents first complained to the state health department March 23, investigators said. Samples taken April 1 were invalid because they were not tested within 24 hours. Also, no test for petroleum was conducted because residents had not mentioned gasoline odors, health officials said.

New samples were taken April 6, but results confirming benzene contamination were not returned until April 19. The wells were closed six days later after an investigator detected the strong smell of gasoline at a wellhead.

Until that day, said health department supervisor Diana Barich, inspectors had not been told that fuel tanks were buried near the wells. Chiandusse said he had assumed the inspectors knew about the gasoline tank. He did not know about the diesel tank until it was dug up later, he said.

Several residents say they are now trying to calmly work out a solution to their water problem. But Traband says “there is still great anger” in the community. And many families continue to drink bottled water.