Chromium 6 Probe Could Take Months

State water regulators said Thursday it could take months to identify hundreds of suspected chromium 6 polluters--and up to five years to clean those sites of the suspected carcinogen in soil and water.

“Our ability to do more is limited to our staff availability,” Dennis Dickerson, executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, said at a hearing on the issue in Camarillo.

Regional water board officials said they currently have only two staffers to investigate hundreds of suspected chromium 6 polluters in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

The board, one of nine statewide, governs drinking water safety in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Under state law, the board has the power to require chromium 6 testing and, if found, order its removal.

Members said they would ask the state Water Resources Control Board--which sets budgets for the nine local water boards--for additional staffing to investigate local polluters.

Westlake Village attorney Ed Masry said he and his legal investigator Erin Brockovich--the real-life duo behind Julia Roberts’ movie--were happy to hear the news.

“Erin and I feel gratified because we’ve been arguing for six years about the dangers of chromium 6 to water boards, and no one was listening to us,” Masry said. “Now there is a political groundswell.”

Officials at the Calleguas Municipal Water District, which serves Thousand Oaks and five other cities in Ventura County, released new test results Thursday that show no more than 0.11 parts per billion of chromium 6 in the local water supply. That is 20 times less than test results produced last week by Masry’s office and below the state’s recommended limit of 0.2 parts per billion.

Masry said he is still calling for weekly tests of chromium 6 in Thousand Oaks water because the levels have been shown to fluctuate dramatically in other areas.

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Meanwhile, the six-member board also voted unanimously to convene a special meeting of state and local regulators on Nov. 13 to discuss strategies for addressing the problem.

Board chairman H. David Nahai acknowledged growing public concerns about chromium 6 contamination and said the board must respond.

“If ground water quality is being questioned, it’s our responsibility to find what’s going on and fix it,” Nahai said.

So far, the board’s efforts have been concentrated in the east San Fernando Valley, which was named a federal Superfund site in 1986 because of contamination with solvents TCE and PCE. Chromium 6 contamination was detected in the 1990s, and the EPA gave the regional board $550,000 last year to investigate chromium 6 contamination in the Superfund area.

The board has already targeted 200 industrial sites for investigation in the east Valley. But they say they are investigating other polluters around the county, including Barkens Corp., a chrome plater in Compton, and a Xerox Corp. plant in Pomona, because of a record of contamination involving other chemicals.

Other polluters include former or current factory sites operated by Lockheed Martin Corp. in Burbank,, ITT Industries Inc. in Burbank, and Drilube in Glendale, according to board documents.

Noting chromium 6 pollution extends beyond the Valley and Los Angeles County, state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) called on the Davis Administration to take the lead role in the investigation and cleanup.

Board officials said that as the polluters are identified, they will be forced to clean up their property and, failing that, could be subject to fines.

Arthur Heath, the board’s environmental program manager for toxic cleanup, said cleanup already has begun at a few industrial sites in Los Angeles County, including the Barkens and Xerox sites.

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In the next few weeks, water board staff will begin inspecting the 210 potential chromium polluters in the Valley Superfund area, Heath said. They were targeted from among 4,000 Valley companies questioned more than two decades ago by state and federal regulators in the initial Superfund site investigation, he said.

Chromium 6 is considered a carcinogen when inhaled as dust, and a suspected carcinogen in water. It was the chemical at the center of the toxic case in Hinkley, Calif. dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.”

The Times reported Aug. 20 that a 1998 recommendation for tougher chromium 6 standards was still being studied by state Department of Health Services officials, and that adopting the standard may take another five years.

In response, Gov. Davis signed legislation to accelerate the study of the chromium 6 threat, and Los Angeles city and county officials have taken steps to assess the risk from chromium 6 in local drinking water wells.

Chromium is a naturally occurring element found in ground water, but high levels of chromium can indicate the presence of the toxic chromium 6. The state does not have a current standard for chromium 6 but instead limits concentrations of total chromium to 50 parts per billion. The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has recommended reducing that to 2.5 parts per billion, which officials say would keep chromium 6 levels below 0.2 parts per billion.

Tap water tests conducted by Los Angeles County, however, found chromium 6 levels at nearly 8 parts per billion, prompting the Board of Supervisors this week to call for testing wells that supply tap water.

According to documents presented to the regional water board Thursday, chromium 6 levels in the soil at the Xerox facility in Pomona reached as high as 3.4 million ppb. At Barkens Corp. in Compton, documents show chromium 6 in ground water as high as 296,000 ppb. That contaminated water, however, is not pumped for drinking water, according to board records.