Water Officials Hopeful About Cleanup Plan : Pollution: $47-million EPA proposal announced Friday would build treatment plants in the basin to contain contamination.

For the first time since massive underground water pollution of the San Gabriel Valley was uncovered more than a decade ago, local, regional and federal environmental officials are upbeat that at least a part of the cleanup will finally begin.

Their hope springs from the announcement Friday of a plan to build $47 million in treatment facilities to tackle some of the filthiest water sites in all of the San Gabriel Basin: Azusa, Baldwin Park and Irwindale.

The optimism is new but the plan isn’t: Just three years ago federal officials proposed spending more than twice as much--$106 million--to clean up the basin.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency never got beyond studying the problem after that proposal three years ago. And the myriad local water districts in the area squabbled over exactly how to clean up the pollution.

The new plan represents one small chunk of that 3-year-old proposal.

Although the EPA has not worked out the details of how and where it will attack the worst spots of pollution in the San Gabriel Valley, one of the nation’s worst underground pollution sites, it now has the support of the water districts.

For their part, local water chiefs said they are heartened that the EPA is paying more attention to the problem and that the cleanup seems to be getting off the ground.

“We’re further down the line now than we’ve ever been,” said Linn Magoffin, chairman of the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, the board that oversees the rights to pump water in the region. Much more cooperation exists now, he said, among local water agencies, which had always been bickering.

The new cooperation helped to create an agency to oversee the cleanup--the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority, a five-member board representing cities and water districts in the San Gabriel Valley.

“Now we’re starting to act like one organism,” said James A. Goodrich, executive director of the water quality authority.

In the past, Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente) has been highly critical of the EPA for not taking charge of the local problem and getting the cleanup started. But Fran McPoland, who specializes in pollution issues as an aide to Torres, said: “We’re very pleased they came out with this proposal.”

Federal environmental officials said they have made the San Gabriel Basin a higher priority in the last several months.

“It was a very conscious decision by upper management here,” said Jeff Rosenbloom, an EPA official in the regional San Francisco office responsible for working on the San Gabriel Basin cleanup. “We realized we needed to spend more time concentrating on the San Gabriel Valley.”

And, he said, part of the inspiration to put more EPA emphasis here stemmed from the fact that the local and regional water officials were working together better.

Rosenbloom and others from the EPA regional office this week have been briefing state and local water officials on the project.

The pollution was discovered in 1979. Tests then on a well near the defense contractor Aerojet-Gencorp in Azusa showed the first signs of the existence of a huge, underground chemical cocktail--made from degreasing agents and solvents used in businesses ranging from small dry cleaners to large manufacturers.

About 100 of nearly 400 wells were shut down to keep tainted water from going to approximately 1 million consumers stretching from Alhambra to La Verne. In 1984 the basin was put on the national Superfund list of major environmental problems to be solved.

The new federal proposal--designed to block the pollution from sullying surrounding, clean wells--calls for annually cleaning up enough water each year to supply about 62,000 households.

For the last several years, federal, state and regional environmental officials, along with local water agencies and businesses, have undertaken studies to determine the extent and location of the pollution in the region. But only a few relatively small projects have been completed to treat the dirty water.

Federal officials say the $47-million proposal will go a long way toward determining the extent of the problem and stemming the pollution before it can move further downstream toward Whittier Narrows.

A top local water official, John Maulding, executive director of the Main San Gabriel Watermaster, called the EPA proposal “a reasonable approach.”

“It’s certainly not a cleanup of the basin, but it’s containment. This is a monstrous basin and containment is probably the best approach.”

In the last decade, estimates of the cost to clean the basin have ranged from several hundred million dollars to $1 billion. At one point, officials regularly referred to the cleanup as an $800-million problem for which the financing was uncertain.

Federal officials say that ideally those responsible for the pollution will pay. The difficulty for years, however, has been to determine who is responsible; more than 11,000 businesses are thought to have used chemicals that could have caused the pollution during the last half-century.

The EPA says that by year’s end it will have narrowed down a list and negotiated with perhaps two to three dozens firms that will be asked to finance the cleanup.

“We don’t expect to ask the state to contribute anything,” said Wayne Praskins, the EPA’s Superfund project manager for the San Gabriel Basin.

Nor does Praskins expect consumers to ante up.

However, consumers still may face cleanup costs related to work by the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority that is designed to complement the work under the EPA plan.

Under a mandate from the state Legislature to oversee the region’s cleanup, the agency is empowered to raise up to $8 million a year to clean up pollution. But there is a limit of about $20 per year per household.

Within the next year, design could begin on the federal project and soon afterward, construction. It is expected to cost about $4 million annually to run the treatment plants.

Details are still being worked out, Praskins said, and will be refined in response to how local water agencies and the public reacts to the proposal.

To solicit opinions on the plan, federal officials have scheduled a public hearing from 7 to 9 p.m. May 30 at the Baldwin Park City Hall, 14403 E. Pacific Ave.