Sluicing of Reservoir to Resume : Court: Judge drops a restraining order after the county warns of potential floods. City officials say that drinking water is being harmed.

Warning of potential floods along the San Gabriel River in the approaching rainy season, Los Angeles County Department of Public Works officials have persuaded a Superior Court judge to let them resume sluicing silt and debris from the Morris Reservoir.

After hearing new arguments, Judge William Huss agreed Monday to dissolve a temporary restraining order he had granted last week at the request of Azusa city officials, who complained that the project was responsible for contaminating a private drinking-water well downstream of the reservoir, in the San Gabriel Mountains north of the city .

Tests at an Azusa horse ranch last month indicated severe bacterial contamination of the well, and city officials maintained that the county project, aimed at washing a thick layer of silt and mud out of the reservoir, had caused the pollution.

In granting the restraining order, Huss had originally scheduled an Oct. 10 hearing to consider Azusa’s claim that the project should be halted until more environmental studies can be undertaken. Monday he postponed that hearing until Oct. 28.

That was exactly what county officials wanted. They contend they need to do the work before Oct. 15, the official start of the rainy season.

“There is an emergency situation, with the storm season and with two recent rains,” said Deputy County Counsel Paul I. Yoshinaga. Silt and mud have collected for decades in the reservoir bottom and reduced its capacity to hold floodwaters.

In the first stage of the project, beginning in midsummer, billions of gallons of water were drained from Morris Reservoir and sent into the San Gabriel River for distribution into the region’s underground water supply.

Upstream from Morris is the San Gabriel Reservoir, where water is now being stored so it can be released into the San Gabriel River, thus flowing into Morris and washing it out.

The San Gabriel Reservoir, Yoshinaga said, “is filled to the brim” because of rains last week. If the temporary restraining order were to remain in effect, and if more rain falls in the coming weeks, he said, mud could wash against the face of the Morris Dam and render inoperable its flood-control valves and gates.

Some Azusa city officials say the flooding argument is bogus and meant to draw attention away from the real issue of contamination and environmental harm to the river and its environs.

“They snowballed the judge,” Mayor Pro Tem Harry L. Stemrich said of the county officials. Furthermore, he said, the county project “has destroyed our river.”

Although City Councilman Anthony Naranjo said he also is concerned about the potential environmental harm, he doesn’t want the council to be responsible “for leading the public into a panic.” Still, he said, the county officials should have provided more detailed information about the effects of the project.

The whole controversy could have been avoided, Mayor Eugene F. Moses said, if the county had done a better job of informing city officials and the public by holding a meeting to explain the project.

But, Yoshinaga said, Azusa officials have been largely unresponsive to county officials’ pleas to negotiate the issues outside of court. Last month Azusa lost a bid in federal court to block the project.