Drought Prompts Study of Basin Cleanup : Water: Aquifer of the San Gabriel Valley could become a badly needed storage area.

Ever-worsening drought conditions in Southern California have prompted officials to consider a new and unlikely source of water: the vast but terribly polluted aquifer of the San Gabriel Valley.

Regional water officials have launched an extensive study of an ambitious long-term plan to clean up the San Gabriel Valley Basin so it can be used to store water for use in future droughts.

The idea, authorities said, is to create a sort of drought insurance plan--a subterranean reservoir capable of holding 800,000 acre-feet to supplement the region’s water supply. Imagine a lake that is 200 feet deep and 4,000 acres on the surface.

If it works out, the move could boldly turn one of the West’s worst underground water pollution problems into a ballyhooed solution to shortages so severe that Los Angeles officials must consider locking children out of city swimming pools.

Water authorities caution that the plan would be a long-term solution to drought and probably will take years to implement.

“The drought is bringing home the need,” said Kris Helm, an engineer with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Last month the mammoth water district, which serves 15 million people from Oxnard to the Mexican border, signed an agreement to work with San Gabriel Valley water districts to study the storage issue.

For local officials, the plan is a way to ensure that the long-contaminated water basin, the subject of years of study but little action by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is finally cleansed of industrial pollutants.

Regional water authorities look to the proposal as a means for providing a home to $15 million worth of water annually--more than enough to fill the empty Santa Barbara reservoir--and ensure a constant supply to as many as 2 million.

“It’s going to help MWD with their storage problem. It’s going to help us with our contamination problem,” said Carol Montano, a leader with the East Valleys Organization, a community activist group. “At this time, I don’t see controversy. But I don’t think all questions have been answered.”

One in four of the San Gabriel Valley’s 400 wells has been shut down in the last 11 years due to pollution. About 30% of the basin is now fouled, principally in the center of the valley.

Once the aquifer is cleaned up, it can be of benefit in rainy years, when water is cheap and plentiful. Excess water from throughout California and the West could be distributed throughout a series of football-field-size above-ground spreading basins and allowed to percolate beneath the San Gabriel Valley. Then in drought years, the stored water could be pumped out.

“It’s like a huge savings account,” said Stanley Yarbrough, general manager of Valley County Water District in Baldwin Park.

Because of complicated water rights issues and economics, Helm said, “were it not for the contamination, no one in the San Gabriel Valley would be interested in allowing the rest of Southern California to tap their water.”

The plan was among a number of suggestions proposed this spring to deal with the contamination and received support from the State Water Resources Control Board and the EPA.

Federal officials say it could take decades and $1 billion to clean up the basin. Even with that, EPA officials say it is impossible to rid the basin of all its cancer-causing contaminants.

Nonetheless, the EPA concluded in a report that “Southern California and the state as a whole have a large stake in taking action to preserve the San Gabriel Basin.”

For most of the 1980s, local and state officials hoped the EPA would solve the contamination problem and provide money to clean up the aquifer. Now, it has become clear the EPA is bowing out, focusing instead on the difficult task of finding the polluters to make them pay.

As many as hundreds of unidentified businesses disposed of industrial solvents and toxics in the San Gabriel Valley over decades, allowing the substances to wend their way underground. Scientists have identified four major plumes, or clusters of contamination, in the water supply of 1 million people from Alhambra to La Verne. The pollution was discovered in 1979.

To date, little water has been cleaned, though the EPA has spent $15 million since 1984 to identify how widespread the problem is. In addition, in April the EPA and state water officials detailed a five-year, $106-million short-term solution that would focus only of the most polluted wells in Baldwin Park, Azusa and Irwindale.

The basin’s size and geologic makeup make it difficult to clean up. It is wide and deep, a huge subterranean lake stretching across nearly 200 square miles and reaching down 4,000 to 8,000 feet.

The plumes move slowly, traveling one mile laterally in 10 years. As they go, they contaminate wells, which supply 90% of the water from the basin.

If the spread is not stopped, the basin will become completely polluted and the San Gabriel Valley will have to rely more on imported water from the MWD, which now supplies 10% of the area’s water. A further risk is that the pollution will migrate through Whittier Narrows to the adjoining Central Basin, which supplies 1 million people in cities such as Downey and Norwalk.

At the same time, the chemicals underground are transformed into even worse cancer-causing toxics as they come into contact with other elements. But there are no immediate public health risks because the severely contaminated wells have been shut down.

Because of the lack of treatment, the water is cheap--a fourth to a sixth less than MWD’s imported water, which costs $225 an acre-foot. An acre-foot will supply two families for a year.

The rising cost of importing water from Northern California and the Colorado River have caused regional water officials to consider using the basin as a natural storage facility. Within the next five years, water officials expect rates for the imported water to increase by 50%, reaching costs of $350 an acre-foot.

But there are jurisdictional complications to cleaning up the basin, expanding it into a huge water bank and making withdrawals. Dozens of cities, 45 private and public water companies, two water masters, three municipal water districts and 105 water-rights holders have vested interests.

EPA officials have noted that one major obstacle to water storage expansion is that no single governmental agency has the authority needed to undertake any cleanup. This has caused delays and has frustrated local community leaders, politicians, environmentalists and water company executives.

WATER POLLUTION IN SAN GABRIEL VALLEY BASIN

Four major plumes or clusters of contamination have been identified in the San Gabriel Valley Basin. They move slowly underground, fouling wells. The basin includes much of the San Gabriel Valley and provides water to 1 million people, except those in areas around Pasadena and Pomona. Because of the severity of the ground water pollution, in 1984 environmental officials placed the basin on the national priority list of 1,200 federal Superfund sites.