EPA Orders Work Begun on Plant

Federal environmental officials Wednesday ordered work to begin on a plant to treat ground water in Glendale after a dispute over cost and responsibility threatened to stall the $61.4-million project.

Lockheed, ITT Corp. and Walt Disney Co. are among dozens of firms named by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as partly responsible for decades of industrial solvents leaking into water underlying a large area of Glendale.

The group has tentatively agreed to pay for construction and operation of the treatment facility, but a squabble over who should pay the lion’s share has threatened to delay the project, EPA officials said.

“We’re not happy about having to issue this order, but we have no other choice,” said Marie Rongone, an EPA staff attorney. “Because [the businesses] don’t have an agreement, this is the only way we can keep the project on schedule.”

The Glendale plant would be the third and final treatment facility in the EPA’s overall plan to clean up contaminated ground water. The businesses had jointly completed design of the plant on Nov. 11.

Similar cooperation among businesses, including Lockheed, had made possible the first treatment plant, opened in 1989 in North Hollywood, and a second facility that opened in Burbank this year.

About $4 million has already been spent on design of the facility, to be built on land owned by Glendale near the junction of the Golden State and Glendale freeways. The project also includes an extraction system to pump water to the plant from the city’s nearby ground water wells along the Los Angeles River, which have been closed for more than a decade due to the pollution.

The EPA order requires the firms to take steps to prepare for plant construction, including selecting a contractor and readying the site for technical work. Construction of the plant is expected to begin in about nine months, and the facility could be completed within a year after start of construction, Rongone said.

The order is enforceable under federal Superfund laws, which give the EPA authority to seek a federal court order if the responsible companies do not comply. If that occurs, the EPA could do the work itself and then bill the companies for the costs, plus damages, she said.

The businesses were supposed to sign a consent decree, a court-approved and enforceable agreement spelling out how much money each firm would contribute.

The cost-sharing negotiations--conducted confidentially by attorneys for the responsible companies--remain unresolved, largely due to Lockheed’s objections to the amount of money the other firms have asked it to pay.

“While we acknowledge that we have a responsibility in cleaning up this ground water in Glendale, we are disputing the amount,” Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Maureen Curow said.

Curow said the EPA’s work order was not unexpected, and “it forces us to get back together and come up with some sort of resolution to the dispute.”

She said Lockheed remains optimistic that a consent decree can still be reached among the affected firms.

Years of dumping and leaking of toxic and cancer-causing chemicals into the ground at Lockheed facilities, along with the alleged affect on the water supply and public health, have put the aerospace firm in a storm of controversy this year.

In addition to its responsibilities to the EPA cleanup, Lockheed also agreed earlier this year to pay $60 million to about 1,300 residents who filed a civil suit alleging that dumping at Lockheed’s defunct Burbank Skunk Works plant had left a legacy of health risks. In the wake of that settlement, several other civil actions have been filed by other residents’ groups.