Superfund Well Cleanup Drains Money, Confidence : Pollution: San Gabriel Valley businesses face a huge bill. Slow progress raises doubts about federal program.

It has been 15 years since the first evidence of chemical contamination showed up in a San Gabriel Valley water well. It has been 10 years since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the valley’s huge aquifer a national Superfund site.

Since then, one quarter of the valley’s public water wells have been shut down and at least $50 million has been spent investigating the problem. Hundreds of private firms have been tapped by the EPA to cleanse the aquifer, which supplies drinking water to more than 1 million people.

But except for a treatment plant providing water for a few hundred people, the cleanup effort has yet to begin. After a decade of federal intervention, the aquifer remains one of the most heavily contaminated potable ground water basins in the nation.

Now, the EPA is talking about a final cleanup bill between $200 million and $800 million that will be handed directly to local businesses. The potential impact on the valley’s economy, along with nagging doubts about the effectiveness of the proposed cleanup technology, is sapping what’s left of public confidence in the EPA and the Superfund program.

“After 10 years of confusion, power struggles and bureaucratic inaction, the community in the San Gabriel Valley is no longer convinced that Superfund, under the direction of the EPA, is going to solve their problem,” Rep. Esteban Torres (D-La Puente), wrote in a recent analysis.

In some ways, the San Gabriel Valley quagmire epitomizes the entire Superfund program. Nationwide, it has consumed $30 billion since its inception in 1980 while managing to clean up fewer than 10% of the country’s 2,000 toxic waste sites. The mounting frustration of business and environmental groups has sparked demands for overhauling the Superfund law and led to a recent set of restructuring proposals by the White House.

But in many ways, the San Gabriel Valley situation is in a class by itself.

Although the Superfund law is designed to make polluters foot the bill for the nation’s most lethal accumulations of waste, it is not easy to say who created the toxic soup under the San Gabriel Valley.

The ingredients have been percolating for nearly half a century, fed by fertilizer when the valley was a farming community, by household septic tanks and by chemical waste from many of the 48,000 firms that set up shop after World War II. A variety of chemicals have turned up in the water; the most potent are volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which can break down into human carcinogens.

The task of identifying the polluters is further complicated by the nature of the pollution, which is hidden from view and moving around beneath the 170-square-mile valley. Contaminated water under a piece of property may have come from that site or may have drifted “downstream” from some other source.

Superfund critics argue that society caused the contamination and ought to pay for eliminating it through taxes or an increase in water rates. Under the law, however, the EPA must try to track the contamination back to its above-ground sources and bill the property owners.

So far, the EPA has compiled a list of about 400 businesses that may be asked to pay the final cleanup bill.

Targeted companies could be looking at costs ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than a million. That does not include the $135 million that officials estimate must be spent to detect and remove chemical contaminants from the soil above the water table.

The EPA’s dealings with local firms have been widely assailed. “It may be futile, excessively expensive and unfair” to try to tie the contamination to specific businesses, Torres wrote in his report on the issue last year.

“There’s been a tendency to see the businesses as criminals,” said Jim Goodrich, the director of the San Gabriel Valley Water Quality Authority, a public agency created four years ago to look for new solutions.

“Some of the regulators seemed to forget that for a very long time there were no regulations on how to dispose of this stuff. It wasn’t all that long ago you could buy one of the most notorious solvents around to clean your carburetor, and if you happened to spill some of it on the ground, you weren’t breaking any laws.”

Defending the government’s work, Wayne Praskins, the EPA’s project manager for the San Gabriel Valley Superfund, argues that the agency is doing a good job of pinpointing responsible companies, although he concedes that not all of them will be found.

Praskins said the EPA is on the verge of releasing its first detailed ground water treatment plan. It will focus, he said, on two dozen to three dozen firms in the Baldwin Park area, which will be asked to pay as much as $90 million in cleanup costs.

“We feel reasonably confident we have singled out the significant sources of contamination,” he said.

Admitting that the project has been a long, often exasperating experience, Praskins said, “In hindsight, you probably could identify ways we could have done things faster,” but he also blamed the delays on the recalcitrance of some businesses. He is not alone in that opinion.

“The immediate reaction of businessmen was to say, ‘To hell with ‘em’, sue ‘em,’ ” said Richard Nichols, executive director of the Baldwin Hills Chamber of Commerce. “That didn’t work. The EPA isn’t fearful of that kind of thing, but it took a while for that realization to sink in.”

The EPA’s list of 400 companies represents only about 20% of all those scrutinized by government inspectors. But if the past is any guide, the Superfund’s economic impact is likely to extend well beyond the 400, because any one of them can attempt to recover costs by implicating others. As more people are dragged into the Superfund morass and as more lawyers and consultants are hired, costs will go up and the cleanup will take longer.

Many of the businesses targeted by the EPA are large corporations, such as Aerojet General, a world leader in rocket propulsion systems. It was in an Aerojet well in Azusa where the first ground water contamination was detected 15 years ago. And it is in that neighborhood where wells continue to yield some of the highest levels of contamination.

But the EPA list also includes small enterprises struggling to survive the recession, according to the San Gabriel Valley Economic Council.

One government survey recently found that 142 firms have already paid a total of $15 million to conduct soil tests or install monitoring wells required by the EPA or its local affiliate, the California Regional Water Quality Board.

Many of these firms worry that their initial investment is just the beginning of a never-ending process of compliance. They fear that the specter of liability will hang over their property indefinitely once they have been put on the EPA’s list of potentially responsible parties.

Those fears are not entirely groundless.

In 1988, Leon Wilton, the owner of a small machine shop in South El Monte, was visited by a state water quality inspector looking for sources of contamination. The visit, on the EPA’s behalf, marked the beginning of a costly, six-year compliance process that has yet to end.

Wilton, a high school dropout from Indiana, landed in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s after a tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Korea. After a dozen years on aerospace assembly lines, Wilton bought a dozen used machine drills and went into business for himself in 1970.

In 1987, he filled out a routine questionnaire indicating that he stored certain chemicals on his property used to lubricate his machines. The questionnaire triggered the inspection. The inspector, noting oily stains on Wilton’s concrete loading area, recommended soil tests to determine if leaks contributed to contamination of the aquifer.

The tests detected chemical residue, but well below the levels at which soil cleanup is required by state and county laws. The tests revealed 0.02 parts per billion of tetrachloroethane, a minuscule amount of one of the volatile organic compounds contaminating the aquifer. Elsewhere in the valley’s soil, the same contaminants have exceeded 1,000 p.p.b. The safe level for drinking water in California is 5 p.p.b.

The tests on Wilton’s property also detected 193 p.p.b. of toluene, a petroleum derivative that also has turned up in the aquifer. Under Los Angeles County regulations, Wilton does not have to clean up the toluene in the ground unless it reaches 300 p.p.b. Toluene has been found in other parts of the valley at levels of 20,000 p.p.b.

Nevertheless, Wilton was asked to perform another round of soil analyses in 1992. Those tests showed no increase in contaminant levels.

By then, Wilton’s business, which depends heavily on aerospace customers, was caught in the industry’s downward spiral. He said he had to cut his work force in half and cash in an insurance policy to make ends meet. His lawyer told the EPA he was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Saying that the government’s demands had already cost him $70,000, Wilton asked the agency to release him from any further Superfund responsibility.

Wilton, who is in his 60s, says he wants to sell his business or borrow against it to pay his debts. But he shares the fears of other businessmen in the valley that the threat of Superfund liability will turn away prospective buyers or lenders.

The EPA, however, refused to take Wilton off its list of potentially liable firms. Instead, the agency asked him to perform yet another soil analysis. Officials said Wilton had not proved that the contamination showing up in nearby wells did not come from his property.

“The problem,” said Wilton’s lawyer, Melissa McKeith, “is there is no point at which the EPA is required to say, ‘OK, your property is clean, you don’t have to do any more work.’ There are no standards. Nothing to shoot for. It’s totally discretionary. You’re clean when some EPA official says your clean.”

Torres has also criticized the EPA for its unwillingness to go easy on minor players such as Wilton.

“The EPA has the authority to take the small guys out of the deal and protect them from future liability,” said Fran McPoland, Torres’ staff expert on the San Gabriel Valley Superfund. “I’ve been working on this issue for six years, and EPA keeps saying they are just a few steps away from making what we refer to as de minimus settlements with these companies. But the fact is they haven’t done it.”

Praskins said the EPA has yet to set its own “clean site” criteria, but added that the agency is “evaluating whether we can come up with numbers that people can use” to gauge how much cleanup work they need to do.

As for Wilton’s situation, Praskins acknowledged that test results from his property “did not indicate a problem.”

Asked why the agency refused to grant Wilton the sort of liability waiver he could take to the bank, EPA lawyer Mark Klaiman said it was because Wilton’s request for indemnity was part of a collective appeal by a group of South El Monte businesses. Some of the others, Klaiman said, had significant amounts of contamination on their property.

Records of the regional board indicate, however, that Wilton was pursuing indemnity on his own behalf.

Wilton’s experience underscores the uncertainty continuing to plague the San Gabriel Valley Superfund program.

“The EPA hasn’t been able to tell business how much work it will take and how much it will cost because they don’t know. No one really knows,” said one public official close to the project who asked not to be identified.

Even now, with the EPA on the verge of releasing its first comprehensive plan for treating the aquifer, agency officials concede that the process will not get all of the contaminants out of the ground water. Known as pump and treat, the process draws water from the ground, aerates the pollutants and recycles the purified water back to the aquifer. But some of the contaminants tend to get left in the ground.

“It can be hard to get out the last part of the contamination. Getting down to 5 p.p.b. can be difficult,” Praskins said, referring to the state’s safe drinking water limit for the volatile organic compounds.

It’s not as if the drinking water can’t be made safe. Dozens of San Gabriel Valley water companies have been doing it successfully for years, cleaning the water as it flows through the wellhead and passing on the costs to consumers.

But that process does not attack the problem at its source--in the aquifer. And as long as the contaminants are down there, they can spread and mutate, ultimately threatening neighboring aquifers, EPA officials say.

As the EPA moves toward the first of seven planned cleanup phases in the San Gabriel Valley, officials elsewhere are scrambling to come up with a way of easing the cost burden on local firms.

Torres has proposed legislation to require the federal government to pick up 20% of the cleanup costs. But his bill has not gained much momentum in Congress and business representatives maintain that their costs could still be astronomical.

Another approach, this one more appealing to businesses, would allow companies to recapture a significant portion of their costs through credits received from the sale of treated water. The complex arrangement would involve the cooperation of the numerous companies and agencies that market water in the San Gabriel Valley.

Although businesses are making the biggest push for reform, they have gained allies as the recession has cut deeper into the local economy,

Six years ago, the East Valley Organization, a federation of neighborhood groups with a populist edge, put the aquifer cleanup at the top of its agenda. The group even offered rewards to people who turned in polluters. Today, East Valley Organization officials say they are equally concerned about the state of the economy.

“The EPA can come in and say to a small business, ‘We think you might be responsible. Drill here. Drill over there, at your expense,’ ” said organization representative John Korey. “A lot of our folks work for those businesses. A lot of those businesses are being driven batty. Some have moved out.

“We don’t want to lose any more of them.”

The Poison Below

In the San Gabriel Valley, fertilizer from old farms, chemicals used to unclog septic tanks and industrial solvents from many of the 48,000 firms that moved in after World War II are the for decades.

VOC Ranges

Volatile organic compounds, or VOC’s are a common byproduct of industry that can break ingredients of a toxic broth that has been contaminating the underground drinking water supply down into human carcinogens. Here is a look at the concentration of VOCs under surrounding areas.

Detectable level to the maximum contamination level (MCL) allowed by the state

MCL to 10 times MCL

10 to 100 times MCL

100 to 1,000 times MCL

Exceeding 1,000 times MCL

Sources of Contamination

Fertilizer: Left over from when the San Gabriel Valley was a farming community, nitrates from fertilizer have leached into the ground water.

Industry: Chemical products used by an array of firms have shown up in high concentrations throughout most of the valley’s aquifer.

Septic tanks: Toxic chemicals commonly used to open clogged septic tanks before the valley had a sewer system are found in the ground water.

Extraction well: More than 1 million people rely on the highly polluted San Gabriel aquifer for drinking water.

Superfund legislation: The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 set up a revolving fund to clean up several hundred of the worst abandoned hazardous waste disposal sites. Some sites have been treated, but implementation by the EPA has been criticized and available funds are not sufficient.

Sources: San Gabriel Valley Water Quality Authority, “Environmental Geology” by Edward A. Keller