Azusa Dump, Looking to Expand, Proposes Water Treatment Plants

The operator of an Azusa landfill--hoping to gain support for its expansion plans--has proposed spending up to $20 million to build as many as three water treatment plants to help clean polluted ground water in the San Gabriel Valley.

Azusa Land Reclamation Co. has been engaged in a long battle with state and local water officials to expand the dump. It had proposed installing an elaborate lining and drainage system to block waste pollutants from contaminating the underground water supply. Water officials have argued that all dumps, no matter how well-lined, eventually leak.

The state Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to hold a hearing Oct. 3 on possible expansion of the Azusa dump, which now covers 80 acres of a 302-acre rock quarry. The dump, the least active landfill in Los Angeles County, now receives 1,500 tons of trash a day. Its capacity would quadruple under the proposed expansion.

“This is a very substantial proposal . . . a model of public and private partnership that goes way beyond any environmental concerns” about the dump’s expansion, said landfill spokesman Mark Ryavec.

But water officials in the San Gabriel Valley, which suffers from some of the worst underground water pollution in the state, reacted guardedly to the treatment plant idea.

“We’ll have to consider it, review it, talk to our engineers and see if it’s advisable,” said Linn Magoffin, chairman of the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, an organization of water suppliers.

The proposal was made in a letter written Wednesday by William D. Ruckelshaus, chairman of the board of Browning-Ferris Industries, parent company of Azusa Land Reclamation Co.

Ruckelshaus, former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, sent the letter to Magoffin and to Carl Boronkay, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District.

As part of the proposal, one water treatment plant would be installed at the landfill, which serves 13 cities. Ryavec said the other two plants would be located at sites where they could have the most impact on pollution. The critical pollution problem in the valley results from industrial solvents that have reached down into the water table.

Magoffin questioned the wisdom of installing a treatment plant at the landfill.

“I’m not sure if it would be logical,” he said, “to put in a treatment plant to clean water that we could keep clean in the first place” if the landfill were not expanded.

Ryavec maintained, as company officials have in the past, that the landfill has not polluted water in the San Gabriel Valley, “but we want to be part of the solution.”

Last year, on a 4-3 vote, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board approved plans for the landfill expansion. But local water officials appealed the ruling and in August the state water board asked the two sides to try to reach a compromise.