SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA’S ENVIRONMENT At the Crossroads : Ground Water: <i> THE PERILS TO ITS PURITY</i> : Decades of pollution are taking their toll. Drinking supplies are sinking fast. : Choking Off the Lifeline

Southern California once had so much clean underground water that sailors were said to have dipped their buckets into San Pedro Bay 200 years ago and captured fresh water bubbling up from the ocean floor. Only a century ago, Ventura County ranchers were still driving their cattle into the surf to drink from springs. The water pressure was so great that wells more than 100 feet deep could deliver water to the second floor of homes--without pumping. But the gush that past generations thought would last forever is gone. Overpumping has sucked brine from the sea into the same ocean-floor vents that once spouted crystal-clear springs, polluting onshore wells with salt. Farther inland, countless other wells have been ruined by industrial chemicals and human and animal wastes.

The toll from pollution is being exacted in the water supply rather than its safety, and the dwindling supply is certain to bring more rigid conservation and higher prices in the future. Strict water quality standards, if properly enforced, largely protect consumers from drinking polluted water. Contaminants now can be measured in the billionths, and many pollutants must be limited to levels equivalent to a couple of drops in a swimming pool. But to meet these increasingly tough standards, water providers must either abandon polluted wells or blend their water with a cleaner supply from elsewhere. The underground reservoirs that feed these wells also become useless for storage. Once polluted, the sponge-like basins of porous soil and gravel can no longer be used to bank excess water during rainy years.

Priceless Wells

Southern California now depends on underground water to meet more than 40% of its needs, and for some communities, wells are a lifeline. Orange County, for example, gets 70% of its water from the ground, and the cities of Riverside and San Bernardino rely almost exclusively on wells. “These (wells) are not replaceable in any thinkable way,” said David N. Kennedy, state director of water resources. “They are worth billions of dollars compared to anything you would have to do as an alternative. They are of incalculable value.”

Exactly how much water has been lost to pollution is unknown, but studies indicate that the losses are considerable and growing. A 1986 state survey found 17% of the Southern California wells tested had industrial contaminants at levels that exceeded health standards. In the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, water basins serving 1.6 million people are so polluted they are considered federal Superfund hazardous waste sites. Nearly 70 of the San Gabriel Valley’s 325 wells have been closed.

Such losses can be painful, particularly in drought years. In southern Orange County, for instance, a polluted underground water basin capable of serving 20,000 people a year stood idle over the summer while people in San Clemente and nearby communities saw their water rationed. The pollution also can be financially draining, requiring decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up. The job is so big, in fact, that some communities, including Beverly Hills, have simply abandoned their wells and now spend up to five times more money to purchase water from outside the region. Federal officials recently conceded that San Gabriel Valley underground basins may never be completely cleaned. Instead, the officials are talking about stemming the contamination.

Aside from the hefty financial costs of cleaning up, the pollution has spawned troubling health concerns in some Southern California communities. Although water officials unanimously insist drinking water is safe, the experiences in some places have been unsettling. In 1982, the state required three tiny water companies in the San Gabriel Valley community of El Monte to notify their 750 customers that they should either drink bottled water or boil their tap water. It was so polluted that they were warned not to breathe the vapors when they boiled it, and eventually some of residents were admonished not to even bathe in the water. Treatment systems had to be built.

Two years later in Riverside County, about 450 homes in the semirural community of Glen Avon were put on bottled water because of contamination traced to a nearby toxic waste dump. Sally and Alan Merha, Glen Avon residents since 1969, had just had their third child, Annette, when the notice to shift to bottled water arrived. They were determined to protect the infant from the pollution. “I bathed her in bottled water, took her clothes out of the area to wash them, got a diaper service and made sure to sterilize her bottles and cook her food in bottled water,” recalled Sally Merha, 43, a homemaker. “It was really tough, but I was terrified of exposing her.” The rest of the family drank bottled water but continued to bathe in the polluted water. “You can’t very well take a shower with bottled water,” Merha said. She suspects, but cannot be certain, that the polluted water was responsible for what seemed to be an unusual number of illnesses in her family before 1984. Eventually, the state spent $5 million to provide Glen Avon residents with clean water.

Not surprisingly, such episodes have made many people wary of using tap water, even in communities where there has been no suggestion of contamination. A 1986 Times poll found that a third of the residents surveyed drink bottled water because they think it is purer, despite assurances by health and water officials that the tap water is safe. “It just astounds me to see these people lugging giant bottles out of the grocery store when the tap water is so good and costs 10 times less,” said Ron Baetz, spokesman for the Desert Water Agency in Palm Springs, where the underground water is so clean it is not even treated.

Southern Californians first began confronting pollution of their underground water in the 1920s, when seawater seeped into onshore wells. During the early 1940s, the lawn at Redondo Beach High School turned brown and died--seawater had been sucked into the school well. Agricultural fertilizers and septic tanks later were discovered to have contaminated other water basins, and industries that for decades dumped their wastes into cesspools polluted many of the region’s most productive wells.

Efforts to combat the various pollutants are getting mixed results. Seawater intrusion is being successfully stopped in some places by injecting clean water underground to form a barrier between the invading brine and the wells farther inland. Strict rules limiting pumping also have helped stem the salt contamination, and efforts are expanding to replenish underground basins with imported water. Man-made basins are now used to store water from outside the region during rainy years. In the windy Coachella Valley, just northwest of Palm Springs, these so-called replenishment ponds became such a favorite with windsurfers a few years ago that the water district considered creating a “windsurfing resort” on the site. The plan has been on hold since the drought hit three years ago.

Research into removing agricultural pollutants or nitrates from ground water is making progress as well, with a method developed in Orange County proving 95% successful in the laboratory and in a small pilot project. Some communities have even managed to remove industrial chemicals from wells at a relatively low cost. For example, one of the small, El Monte water companies where the wells were severely polluted managed to clean them up with a $40,000 filter system.

Although these success stories offer hope, water officials have lots of reasons to worry. Landfills and underground storage tanks continue to leak, and many homes and businesses still use septic tanks. Plumes of contamination are traveling in water basins and undoubtedly will pollute more wells. Moreover, it takes only a small amount of contamination to ruin an entire water supply. One 20-gallon chemical spill at a construction site, for example, can destroy a small town’s well. “The (pollution) situation is only going to get worse in the future,” a Metropolitan Water District spokesman predicts.

As officials in San Diego have learned, contamination can pose entirely unexpected problems. An underground pool of polluted water there has stalled a redevelopment project near the ocean. To build high-rises on the coastal land, it first must be drained and shored up to support the buildings’ weight. But no one wants to drain the land and get stuck with the contaminated water. Despite this grim picture, health and water officials maintain that water safety standards and routine monitoring adequately protect public health. Indeed, some water officials, and even an environmentalist or two, argue that ground water may be safer than surface water, such as rivers or lakes. The big question is whether there will be enough water in the future. Environmental concerns over wildlife and fisheries in waterways outside Southern California will make it increasingly difficult for the region to draw from them, and as drinking water standards become more stringent, more wells will be abandoned. State and local water officials predict water rates eventually will run as high as telephone bills and more consumers will be required--and not merely asked--to install conservation devices on shower heads and toilets.

“You can have lawns,” said W. Don Maughan, chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board. “It won’t go that far. But you’re going to have to pay more for water and you’re going to be very careful with it.”

REPORT CARD

Average score: 5

Three views on our progress, rated on a one to 10 scale

* W. Don Maughan, chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board: “The ground water quality problem unfortunately was not recognized until very recently, and ground water is very costly to clean up. It requires even tighter management at the local level, and the local entities need the authority to clean up the water basins and to keep them clean,” Score: 5

* Thomas Graff, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund: “Industries and government were careless in times past about management of potential contaminants that have reached the ground water and will continue to (be) over a substantial period of years. I think we have improved our practices . . . but I think there are still major problems.” Score: 5

* Peter A. Rogers, chief of the public water supply branch for the State Department of Health Services: “I am looking at it from a drinking water perspective. As a whole, drinking water quality is fairly good, certainly not pristine and certainly not ideal, but it meets the standards.” Score: 5

TURNING POINTS

* 1990--Lawsuits by Southern California water suppliers and an environmental group to stop the planned expansion of the Azusa landfill in the San Gabriel Valley are expected to go to trial. The expansion, approved by the state Water Resources Control Board, may threaten a vulnerable and extremely valuable underground aquifer.

* 1995--The Orange County Water District and the Metropolitan Water District hope to be able to clean $50-million worth of nitrate-polluted ground water with a new technology now proving effective in laboratories.

* 1999--The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 to 50 San Gabriel Valley wells that now produce safe water will become too polluted to meet water quality standards.

* 2014--The earliest possible date at which ground water contaminated by toxic waste from Riverside County’s Stringfellow Acids Pits dump can be cleaned up under a plan preferred by the state Department of Health Services.

VOICES

“My family has been drinking bottled water for about eight years . . . When you see the sediment in the water, the little particles in the faucet strainer, you think the tap water can’t be good for you . . . I also worry about corroded pipes causing contamination.

I always tell my daughter Amanda, who is nine, never to drink water at school. I send bottled water with her or juice or punch.”

--Vivian Stevens, La Canada resident and mother of three

“In some cases, I think the public expects to wipe out the (public health) risk entirely and I don’t think that’s going to be possible, but I think we are going to get it within acceptable ranges--where the public health people say the risks are so slight that you don’t need to worry about it.”

--W. Don Maughan, chairman of the State Water Resources Control Board

SOURCES OF GROUND WATER POLLUTION

Southern Californians get 40% of their water from underground wells. Much of the rest is imported by way of aqueducts from the Colorado River, Northern California and the Mono Lake watershed. But many water-bearing aquifers have been contaminated, particularly in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys.

Aquifers

Ground water is fed by surface water from various sources, including rivers, lakes wetlands and rain. The surface water percolates down through soil and geologic formations to water-bearing aquifers which are tapped by wells. The aquifers can be contaminated in a number of ways, including:

1. Polluted surface water in rivers,

2. Leaking septic tanks and underground fuel and storage tanks for solvents and other chemicals,

3. Pesticides on crops,

4. Abandoned and leaky wells,

5. Hazardous and toxic wastes that are dumped,

6. Contaminated lakes and other bodies of water,

7. Surface water moves from various sources into aquifers,

8. Ground water slowly moves through aquifers, sometimes for great distances.

CONTAMINATED WELLS

Ground water wells tested and found to be contaminated in Southern California areas.

WELLS NUMBER PERCENTAGE COUNTY TESTED CONTAMINATED CONTAMINATED Los Angeles 557 221 40% San Bernardino 254 43 17% Riverside 154 20 13% Orange 62 4 6% Ventura 44 2 5% Santa Barbara 41 3 7% San Diego 30 1 3% Imperial 2 0 0%

NOTE: Figures from 1986 report by the state Department of Health Services are most current data available.