Forging a Consensus on Cleanup

Environmentalists, water company and water agency managers, business owners, politicians and squadrons of health and environmental officials have fought for more than a decade over how to clean up the pervasive pollution of the San Gabriel Basin.

Faced with this daunting task, the opposing interests are just starting to forge a consensus that would create a new era of cooperation to solve one of the nation’s worst underground contamination problems.

“We’re starting to act like one organism,” James A. Goodrich, executive director of the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority, said of the divergent groups.

Momentum for compromise has been building in recent months, in part because the Environmental Protection Agency is paying more attention to the basin, placed by federal officials on the list of national Superfund sites in 1984.

Last month the EPA announced plans to construct $47 million worth of facilities to clean up one of the filthiest pockets of pollution, located underneath the cities of Azusa, Baldwin Park and Irwindale. This proposal is the revised version of an earlier plan to spend $106 million to clean up part of the basin.

Also in recent months, two other local water agencies--the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority and the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, at odds in the past--have been trying to coordinate their own separate proposals for cleanup projects and link them with those of the EPA.

This spirit of cooperation is the exception rather than the rule in the history of water politics in the fractious San Gabriel Valley, where the rights to pump water, dig irrigation ditches and draw water from the mountain canyons were long ago thrashed out.

“It’s the worst chopped-up situation in the state of California,” water official Linn Magoffin said of the water ownership and delivery systems of the San Gabriel Valley.

Fifty-five public and private water companies distribute water from Pasadena to Pomona. There are more than 100 holders of the legal right to pump water from the underground aquifers or take it from the mountains. “Wherever you had the missions,” Magoffin said, “that’s where the settlers came in and developed water rights for orchards, ranches and vineyards.”

For more than a century in the region, water has been an incendiary liquid, producing fiery conflict after fiery conflict.

The modern history of water development began with the 18th and 19th Century ranchos and with the mission padres who oversaw Indian workers digging ditches to bring mountain runoff to sustain groves of grapes, oranges and avocados.

Throughout the 19th Century, farmers and squatters squared off against one another with rifles to shoot out the question of who would control a particular zanja, or ditch.

Some disputes were more formal. “Litigation over canyon water rights alone would fill a law library,” local historian John W. Robinson wrote his 1991 book, “The San Gabriel Mountains.”

The legal agreements that often resulted, such as the one after what was called the Duarte-Azusa War of 1887, involved complicated calculations. One part of the settlement after that dispute noted that “17/108th of the remaining two-thirds allocated to the old ditch was turned into the new ditch for the benefit of the old irrigators. . . .”

Court decisions in the 19th and 20th centuries determined who had the ownership and right to every drop of water that would fall in the San Gabriel Mountains or flow under the San Gabriel Valley.

As cities such as Pasadena and Pomona began to grow in the late 19th Century, water from the mountains took on even more importance with the development of hydroelectric power. And the San Gabriel Valley communities burgeoning with Midwestern transplants became aware of the furious power of the flood waters that could come tumbling down from the mountains.

Extensive flooding in the early 20th Century prompted creation of the Los Angeles County Flood Control District under the Department of Public Works. The district’s twin missions were to prevent floods and to conserve rainwater and runoff for replenishment of the underground basins.

Also at the turn of the century, the city of Los Angeles set its sights much farther northward than the San Gabriel Mountains and saw the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra as a source of water for the city’s growth.

In turn, that development indirectly led to the formation in 1928 of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which was established to import water from the Colorado River and Northern California.

Over time, as the San Gabriel Valley’s water needs shifted from agriculture to suburban and urban growth, the MWD would play a role in creating two local water districts: in 1950, the Three Valleys Water District, based in Claremont and serving the eastern end of the valley, and in 1960, the Upper San Gabriel Valley Water District, based in El Monte and covering much of the region.

Indirectly, the MWD in 1959 helped to prompt the creation of the San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. An oddly fashioned district, it is made up of four disparate cities, Sierra Madre, Azusa, Monterey Park and Alhambra. They had refused to be a part of the MWD and decided to rely on their own wells and on supplies from what is called the State Water Project.

For decades, as the San Gabriel Valley grew, the water industry focused solely on quantity and supply. Quality hardly was an issue. The mountain waters and the underground supply appeared to be untainted, except from some problems related to nitrate pollution from agricultural fertilizers and livestock wastes.

So it was like a bomb going off when defense industry contractor Aerojet in 1979 discovered pollution in wells near its plant on the Azusa-Irwindale border.

The company, based on pollution problems at an Aerojet facility in Northern California, decided to check its operations in Azusa and found volatile organic chemicals at levels far exceeding state and federal standards. That prompted testing of wells throughout the San Gabriel Valley. Widespread contamination was found from several chemicals, often used in common solvents and degreasing agents. Some of these chemicals are now considered to be potentially cancer-causing.

Five years later, federal environmental officials put the entire San Gabriel Basin on its Superfund list of environmental cleanup priorities, making the site the largest of any in the country.

But little happened in terms of direct action to clean up the pollution even after the state passed a law mandating the testing of San Gabriel Valley water wells for the volatile organic chemicals, such as trichlorethylene, perchlorethylene and carbon tetrachloride.

Over the next decade many a public meeting was held. Consultants were hired. Studies begun. Wells were shut down to curb the spread of contamination. Politicians made speeches and passed laws. And health officials assured residents that the water coming out of their taps was safe.

These assurances did little to calm a town meeting in Hacienda Heights in 1985, when there was a public outcry over the discovery that all five wells of a small water company there were polluted.

Controversy ensued about who the valley’s polluters were, how much the cleanup would cost, who would pay for it and who would oversee it.

The questions remained largely unanswered, though, partly because no single governmental or water agency had the authority to supervise the cleanup or to finance it. Cleanup figures varied wildly from several hundred million dollars to even $1 billion.

Sally Tanner, then an assemblywoman from Baldwin Park, U.S. Rep. Esteban Torres (D-La Puente), and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) held hearings. Alan Cranston, then one of California’s U.S. Senators, came to Azusa to promise he would make federal environmental officials more responsive.

The state Department of Health and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board entered the picture.

Environmental groups staged protests and rallies and implored federal officials to take swift action and demanded that EPA Administrator William K. Reilly personally come to the San Gabriel Valley to explain the Bush Administration’s position on the issue. Reilly never came.

Lawsuits and press conferences occurred with regularity. Coalitions of business owners, fearing that they would be hit with huge bills to pay for the cleanup, banded together to protect their interests.

Agencies such as the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, which oversees pumping rights in the region, constantly had to deflect criticism from environmentalists who said water agencies were looking out only for business interests instead of helping to solve the pollution problem.

But slowly things began to change.

Over the last five years, some environmentalists fought their way onto the district boards, which for decades had rarely seen contested elections.

Local water agencies, mad that the federal environmental officials had seemingly taken little action to clean up any of the tainted water, formed a water quality authority in 1990.

Also in recent years, the courts and state Legislature gave more power to the San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority and the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster.

And this year, federal environmental officials made the cleanup a higher priority.

Now the water quality authority, EPA officials and representatives of the Main San Gabriel Watermaster are talking formally and informally with industry and business community leaders about how to identify polluters and their potential liability.

Ideally, federal officials have said, those responsible for the pollution will pay. The problem has been identifying who might be responsible among the 11,000 firms that may have handled the kinds of chemicals contributing to the pollution.

EPA officials say that by year’s end they hope to identify at least several dozen that may be responsible for pollution beneath Azusa, Baldwin Park and Irwindale.

Though some industry representatives are bickering over the EPA’s proposal, all sides agree that the era of hard feelings is coming to an end and cooperation and compromise are helping the cleanup to move forward.

That, Rep. Torres said, “is long overdue.”