Regulators Identify Valley Chromium 6 Sites

State water regulators on Monday released a list of 142 San Fernando Valley-area sites where high levels of chromium 6 may have been discharged into the soil and ground water.

Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board officials said they sent letters to the property owners Nov. 8, asking them to complete a five-page survey on the use and disposal of chromium 6 at their businesses by Dec. 1.

The list of sites ranges from defense suppliers to etching and chrome-plating firms and jewelry manufacturers.

The properties on the list are not necessarily contaminated with chromium 6, officials said. Instead, regulators have targeted sites where chromium 6 is being used, or has been used in the past, as they seek out those responsible for the pollution.

Burbank had the most sites with 64, followed by 27 in Glendale, 20 in North Hollywood and 15 in Sun Valley. The list included companies in other communities as well, including eight in the industrial corridor of Los Angeles bordering the Golden State Freeway near Griffith Park.

An additional 80 to 100 sites are expected to receive surveys at a later date, board officials said.

The letters are the first step toward cleaning up the industrial sites, said Dennis Dickerson, the board’s executive director, who released a list of the properties at a daylong workshop on chromium 6 in Glendale on Monday.

“We are not going to shy away from any enforcement, if needed,” Dickerson told the seven-member regional water board at Monday’s meeting. “It is something that we truly need to do.”

Early next year, the board’s staff will review the completed questionnaires and determine on which sites the owners will have to test their soil and ground water for high levels of chromium 6, Dickerson said.

Companies with high levels could be ordered to remove or treat tainted soil and water, but officials said it is not yet clear at what level remediation would be required.

The list of potential polluters was drawn from among 4,000 Valley-area companies compiled more than two decades ago by state and federal regulators investigating other kinds of industrial pollution in the Valley.

The new list does not include about a half-dozen other major properties in the area, including Lockheed Martin Corp.’s former defense factory in Burbank, where chromium 6 contamination is already being cleaned up. David Laliberte, who owns Alert Plating Co. in Burbank, was not surprised by the water board’s investigation given that toxic chemicals are used by his business.

“It comes with the territory,” he said.

But Norm Wischoff, owner of Pacer Performance Products, situated in Los Angeles near the zoo, questioned the effectiveness of the survey. “To try to do this completely and accurately would take a lot of time,” said Wischoff, whose company distributes auto accessories. “If they really wanted to find out [who is polluting], they would come run their own tests at their time and their expense.”

The properties targeted by the board have in some cases been converted to other uses. A former General Electric Co. property in North Hollywood, for example, was on the board’s list. But it is now being leased by the Los Angeles Times for use as a newspaper distribution center. “From what I understand, there are no chemicals being used in any production or processes,” said Los Angeles Times spokesman David Garcia. “It’s merely a transfer site for newspaper deliveries.”

Board officials said the questionnaires were designed to help regulators determine who is responsible for chromium 6 contamination.

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A spokesman for the National Resources Defense Council said the board should have taken steps to identify the sources of chromium 6 contamination long ago.

“Until we identify those sources and curtail them, these levels will continue to grow,” said Alex Helperin, an NRDC project manager. The level of ground water contamination “should have never gotten this far in the first place.”

Among those speaking at Monday’s workshop at a Glendale hotel was state Department of Health Services drinking water chief David Spath, who for the first time publicly acknowledged that the state could adopt a separate standard for chromium 6 in drinking water within two years.

There currently are no standards for chromium 6. Instead, the state limits total chromium to 50 parts per billion as a means of cutting levels of chromium 6, which is a component of the metal.

The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has proposed cutting the public health goal for total chromium to 2.5 parts per billion, which officials say would limit chromium 6 to about 0.2 parts per billion. That proposal is now under study by the Department of Health Services.

In his testimony, Spath said adopting a separate standard for chromium 6 makes sense because that is the toxic element that poses a possible health risk.

But Spath said that, based on current information, there is no reason to close wells that meet the current standard of 50 ppb.

In addition to Spath, the board was addressed by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Upper Los Angeles River Area Watermaster Mel Blevins and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power General Manager S. David Freeman.

In his remarks, Freeman said getting chromium 6 out of the water is a priority. But he said the technology to reduce the contamination to the low levels being proposed by health officials does not exist. “We would love to get it all out of the water, but we don’t have the technology to do it,” he said.

Freeman reiterated that water officials from Burbank, Glendale and Los Angeles are combining forces to hire consultants to develop technology that would reduce or remove chromium 6 in ground water. He also noted that importing water from Northern California creates its own problems, because that water also has its share of contaminants. “If we were to shut down all the wells in the San Fernando Valley we would not improve the water quality,” he said. “We would be substituting one [toxic] for another.”

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In 1986, the heavily industrialized corridor of the east San Fernando Valley--including parts of Burbank, Glendale and North Hollywood--were declared a Superfund cleanup site because of ground water contamination.

Ground water cleanup efforts primarily have focused solely on the volatile organic compounds perchloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE--not chromium 6. But it is chromium 6 that is now at the center of an escalating regulatory tug of war between Glendale and federal and state officials.

The regional board recently warned the city against dumping treated ground water with high levels of chromium 6 into the Los Angeles River, a city official said Monday.

That follows an order last month from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that said the city should dump more than $1 million worth of treated ground water into the river, if city officials didn’t want to deliver the water to homes until public concerns about chromium 6 could be addressed.

Although there are no drinking water standards for chromium 6, the state forbids industries to discharge water with more than 11 parts per billion of the chemical.

The treated Glendale water had chromium 6 levels as high as 15 parts per billion, according to Daniel W. Waters, director of Glendale Water and Power.