Firms to Pay $200 Million to Clean Up Water Supply

Federal environmental officials announced Wednesday that 11 companies will pay $200 million to remove dangerous chemicals in San Gabriel Valley ground water--one of the largest offers in Superfund history to clean up a drinking water supply.

The deal, which still requires a legally binding agreement, comes more than two decades after industrial chemicals were discovered in the ground water beneath Azusa, Baldwin Park and Irwindale. The pollution forced residents to pay more for their water because it had to be cleaned or imported.

“This is a huge victory for the people of the San Gabriel Valley,” said Keith Takata, regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund division.

The agency deemed the massive aquifer, which serves a million people, to be a Superfund site in 1984, five years after tests showed volatile organic compounds in some of the water.

Nineteen companies later were named as potentially responsible for the contaminants. They included defense giant GenCorp Aerojet.

Now, EPA officials say that Aerojet and 10 other companies have agreed in principle to pay for construction of an $85-million treatment facility in Baldwin Park, as well as the $10-million estimated annual operating cost of the plant over the next three decades. That will cost them a total of $200 million if the money is set aside today, said Wayne Praskins, the EPA administrator overseeing the project.

Among the firms committed to building the treatment plant within 2 1/2 years are GenCorp Aerojet, Huffy Co. and Mobil Corp., Praskins said.

Aerojet officials issued a statement late Wednesday confirming the company’s role in the deal.

San Gabriel Basin Water Quality Authority officials said, however, that they are concerned that the EPA’s deal will go ahead without the participation of local water companies. That could raise the specter of contaminated water being cleaned up and then dumped into the ocean rather than put back into circulation in the San Gabriel Valley.

“There is a prospect the water may be treated and dumped in the [San Gabriel] river,” said Kirby Brill, the authority’s executive director. “That wouldn’t address the water supply issues. I hope this can be worked out before a final agreement.”

Praskins said the remaining eight of the 19 companies considered responsible for the contamination still have an opportunity to become part of the deal.

Under the Superfund law, the EPA can sue the companies, forcing them to pay for the cleanup.

Wednesday’s announcement comes a little more than a month after Assemblyman Thomas Calderon (D-Montebello) accused the EPA of failing to aggressively pursue the polluters through litigation, as has been done at other Superfund sites.

But EPA officials say the latest offer came after the agency rejected two proposals from the companies in July.

In 1997, a cleanup agreement fell apart after costs doubled when it was discovered that a toxic rocket fuel used by Aerojet during the 1940s and 1950s has seeped into the aquifer. Since then, nine drinking water wells have been abandoned because of the presence of perchlorate, a compound in the rocket fuel.

Perchlorate--which can interfere with the functioning of the thyroid gland and cause fatal anemia in adults--cannot be removed through traditional water treatment, as was planned in the original EPA settlement. That sent the companies and federal government back to the drawing board.

EPA officials said the deal announced Wednesday will provide for the removal of perchlorate, which state health officials were only recently able to detect in water testing. The treatment facility will also take care of another toxic substance, NDMA, recently found in a 27-square-mile plume of water, officials said.

If the companies back out of the deal, the EPA is prepared to take legal action against the firms, federal officials added. The agency was on the verge of taking such action when the current offer was received. Federal officials have stressed that no drinking water is being drawn from contaminated wells and that all water supplied to customers in the San Gabriel Valley meets federal standards.

But to make sure, water firms are spending more money to import water or maintain expensive well-head treatment.