Coalition Steps Up Effort to Protect Water Quality : Pollution: A group of cities and water companies is working to block a plume of contamination before it seeps south.

The thought sends chills down the spines of local officials: A giant plume of heavily polluted ground water in the San Gabriel Valley is creeping toward the Southeast area.

The underground water is so polluted with industrial solvents that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed the entire San Gabriel Basin on its Superfund list of environmental hazards in 1984 and targeted it for priority cleanup.

Local officials fear that the Southeast area could end up with similar pollution problems if action is not taken soon to stop the contaminated water before it flows through the Whittier Narrows, a two-mile-wide gap in the Puente Hills just north of Pico Rivera and Whittier.

The Southeast has its own ground water pollution, which has forced well closures in Downey, South Gate and other cities in recent years. But contamination levels in the San Gabriel Valley are 10 to 100 times higher than those in Southeast cities, officials said.

“It has the ability to virtually wipe out all the underground water supply of the entire Southeast area,” Norwalk City Manager Richard R. Powers said.

Those underground supplies are vital to Southeast cities and Long Beach. Municipal water departments and independent water companies supplying area residents and businesses obtain a little more than half of their water from the ground. They buy the rest from the Metropolitan Water District.

If the contaminated water were to make it into the Southeast, it probably would be decades before it could travel as far as Long Beach, a water official said.

Powers and officials of eight other local cities and two regional water agencies recently joined together as the Southeast Water Coalition to try to keep that from happening.

In May, Lakewood Mayor Robert Wagner traveled to Washington on behalf of the coalition and urged a U.S. Senate appropriations subcommittee to spur the EPA to take quick action. The group also has hired Washington-based consultant Bill Ferguson, who is working to secure federal funding for the cleanup, Powers said.

Each of the coalition members contributed $10,000 to cover expenses for the year, Powers said. The members are Commerce, Downey, Lakewood, La Mirada, Norwalk, Paramount, Pico Rivera, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, the Central Basin Municipal Water District and the Central Basin Water Replenishment District. Cerritos is considering joining, a city spokeswoman said.

Experts agree that it probably will be about five or more years before the San Gabriel Valley’s heavily contaminated water flows into the Southeast.

The EPA is developing a plan to clean up the ground water contamination in the San Gabriel Valley and to keep it from spreading. One small treatment plant has been built so far.

But EPA officials, citing their workload, have delayed releasing a plan to keep contaminated water from passing through the Whittier Narrows. The plan probably will include water extraction and treatment plants on both sides of Whittier Narrows, said Neil Ziemba, project manager of the EPA’s San Gabriel Valley cleanup.

The remedy was to have been unveiled in 1990, but its release has been delayed until 1992, Ziemba said. That delay has frustrated Southeast officials.

“It is urgent that something be initiated,” Wagner, Lakewood’s mayor, said in a recent interview. “The problem is that if everyone waits it could be too late to do anything about it.”

But Ziemba said the EPA is trying to deal with the much larger problem of cleaning up the San Gabriel Basin and that there is still plenty of time to keep heavily contaminated water from flowing through the Whittier Narrows.

“We don’t expect anything major (in the narrows) in the next five to 10 years,” Ziemba said. “I think in 30 years we expect substantial contamination to get (to the narrows).”

Money problems also are hampering the cleanup, the costs of which have been estimated as high as $1 billion. Federal officials have said that the Superfund program does not have enough money to pay the bill. As a result, Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente) announced that he will propose legislation to hasten the cleanup. Business and industry would be asked to cover most of the costs.

Water coming from the San Gabriel Valley passes underground through the Whittier Narrows and seeps deeper into the earth just to the south, in the so-called Montebello Forebay. Water from the San Gabriel Valley--and any contamination--eventually makes its way throughout aquifers under the Southeast area, said Harold Morgan, a water quality engineer and a consultant to the Central Basin Water Replenishment District. The water reaches Long Beach years later.

The aquifers are porous underground formations that hold water, which is drawn back to the surface through wells.

Samples taken from monitoring wells in the Whittier Narrows last January indicated that water contaminated with relatively small amounts of the industrial solvents tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene is making its way from the San Gabriel Valley into the Southeast, Morgan said. But the levels did not exceed legal limits for consumable water, and the heavily contaminated water is still miles away from the narrows.

The two solvents are the main contaminants in Southeast-area wells. But significant contamination--about twice as high as state limits--is limited to a handful of areas, Morgan said. Wells in those areas have been shut down in some cases. In other instances, water from the wells has been mixed with clean water to bring the concentration of contaminants below state limits.

The polluted San Gabriel Valley water would only make matters worse. Contamination levels in some San Gabriel Valley ground water supplies are as much as 200 times the legal limit, Ziemba said. And Southeast officials are careful to note that they cannot predict with certainty when the heavily contaminated water will arrive.

“We’re trying to estimate that and predict it,” said Richard Atwater, general manager of the Central Basin Municipal Water District.

“It’s something to be concerned with. There’s a need to act now and to act prudently.”