Storm Brews Over Prospect of Recycled Water in Beer : Sewage: Miller Co. in Irwindale is suing to halt $25-million project. District dismisses concerns.

From “the land of sky-blue waters” to “pure, Rocky Mountain spring water,” the imagery of pristine lakes and streams has helped sell American beer for decades. So, what is a brewer to do when it finds out some of the water it uses to make beer is going to come from the sewer?

If the beermeister is Miller Brewing Co., the nation’s second-largest brewer, the answer is not to go with the flow. Late last week, Miller filed a lawsuit to stop one of the region’s most ambitious water reclamation projects, a $25-million plan by San Gabriel Valley water authorities to make drinking water out of effluent.

“The project will irreversibly pollute the basin,” the suit charges. The treated water will contain a host of contaminants--from harmful bacteria to industrial chemicals with the “only question being how disastrous the contamination will be,” it says.

Like many areas of Southern California, the San Gabriel Valley is trying to reduce its dependence on dwindling and increasingly costly water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River.

Last month, the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, which serves about 1 million people, voted to move ahead with plans for a nine-mile pipeline that would transport reclaimed drinking water from a sewage treatment plant in Whittier to land near Miller’s Irwindale brewery. From there, the treated water would trickle down into the valley’s underground water supply to replenish it.

Besides reducing the valley’s dependence on imported water by one-quarter to one-third, the project would capture some of the 50 million gallons of potable waste water now being flushed into the ocean every day from local sewage treatment plants, said Robert Berlien, general manager of the water district.

State and local officials insist that the project is no different from other reclamation efforts that have safely supplied recycled drinking water from sewage treatment plants to millions of people in about 50 Los Angeles and Orange County communities for more than 30 years.

Miller, the officials say, is suing to protect the company from bad publicity.

“Made from sewer water” is not the sort of slogan you sell beer with, Berlien said. But the lawsuit, he said, will only generate more unwanted publicity for the brewer.

Miller’s lawyers insist that they are trying to protect the valley’s principal water source--the San Gabriel aquifer--which would receive the treated waste water. “This is not a public relations thing,” Los Angeles attorney Terry Kelly said. “If you are making a food product you want to make sure that the ingredients are pure. Nor do we think that people ought to be drinking from a water source that’s getting a daily dose of effluent.”

Ironically, the San Gabriel aquifer is already so polluted that it has been a national Superfund site for 10 years because of high concentrations of volatile organic compounds, which come from agricultural runoff and industrial dumping and can break down into human carcinogens.

Even so, Kelly said, the brewery has never detected any chemical contamination in its water although its wells are close to one of several plumes, or heavy concentrations, of contamination in the aquifer. “It is extremely pure water that comes out of those wells,” Kelly said.

Miller’s Irwindale plant, one of seven operated by the company nationwide, employs 850 people and draws about 860 million gallons of water each year to produce more than 5 million gallons of beer.

The lawsuit acknowledges that some Southern Californians have been drinking recycled waste water for years, but contends that “scientific data leaves it unclear whether or not that use has harmed the health of local residents.”

The suit invokes an Orange County study of treated waste water that found “high levels” of the bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease.

Water officials respond by saying treated waste water from the same Whittier plant that would supply the San Gabriel Valley has been flowing to homes in 43 Los Angeles County communities since the 1960s. For more than a decade, plant personnel have conducted monthly tests for viruses.

In 761 samples, the testing turned up one virus, “the same you would find in regular old rainwater and even less than you might find in Colorado River water because of the tourists and other pollutants” affecting it, said Earle Hartling, the Whittier plant’s water recycling coordinator.

Hartling and Berlien also cite a 1984 study by UCLA’s School of Public Health that found no evidence of health problems among residents drinking reclaimed water.

“If the planned operation follows the treatment requirements that we’ve put forth and is consistent with existing operations, there should be little to no risk at all,” said David Spath, chief of the technical programs branch of the drinking water division of the state Department of Health Services.

Spath said the Orange County study that found legionella bacteria in treated water was inconclusive. “It’s not clear whether those organisms were alive and viable or whether their number was any greater than what is found in ordinary drinking water,” he said.

The proposed San Gabriel water recycling project is actually a five-step operation. Initially, solid waste is removed through sedimentation and then aeration. Next, the water is filtered through sand and charcoal, then chlorinated. But the most important step in the process, say many experts, occurs later, after the chlorinated water leaves the treatment plant and is piped onto the ground. There, percolation through the soil is supposed to filter out any remaining contaminants before the water reaches the aquifer.

“Chlorination doesn’t get everything. But chlorination and (percolation) usually work pretty well in tandem,” said Scott Summers, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in drinking-water treatment.

The Miller lawsuit argues that the ground near the brewery is too porous to allow natural filtration before the water reaches the aquifer. Water officials disagree, insisting that the water will be in the ground for at least six months--the minimum time prescribed by state regulations.

Even if the beer company were not suing, it would take two years to build the pipeline and bring the recycled waste water to Irwindale.

The bad jokes, however, have already started flowing. “The beer aged in porcelain, that sort of thing,” Berlien chuckled.

Correspondent Tally Goldstein contributed to this story.