Plan OKd for Plant to Clear Its Pollution From Water Table
San Gabriel Valley water officials have approved a plan that allows a City of Industry manufacturing firm to clean up potentially cancer-causing pollution in the water table.
The board of the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, the agency that oversees water rights in the area, has authorized BDP Co. to pump the polluted water from the ground, treat it and then return it to the water table.
“This agreement allows them to do what they want to do, what we want them to do and what the regional water quality board wants done,” said Robert G. Berlien, assistant secretary of the Watermaster’s office.
The heating and air conditioning company, a subsidiary of Carrier Corp. and United Technologies, began cleaning up the pollution in 1987, but it has taken two years to complete the complicated process of approval from the Watermaster.
The spill of 8,000 gallons of perchloroethylene occurred in 1985 at a waste sump at the plant on Anaheim-Puente Road. The spill has posed no immediate threat to the drinking water supply, according to Hank Yacoub, chief of the toxics division of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, which has overseen the clean-up.
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