Glendale Bid Denied in Water Fight

Dismissing concerns of chromium 6 contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday turned down Glendale’s request to delay sending treated water from a polluted underground aquifer into homes.

In a letter rejecting the request, EPA attorney Marie M. Rongone said the city must begin taking water from a new treatment plant because it was tested at or below the state standard for chromium, which is 50 parts per billion.

Rongone acknowledged the public concern over chromium 6 in the water, but said granting the extension would be inappropriate because the water meets safety standards.

“Testing of the treatment system shows that the treated water will meet or be below all drinking water standards,” she wrote in the letter Friday.

The EPA has made bringing the Glendale plant into full operation a priority because it is crucial in removing toxic solvents from the contaminated ground water basin in the east San Fernando Valley.

Those solvents--perchloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE--are present in untreated ground water at levels exceeding the EPA standards.

“We have a vested interest in having that treatment plant operate,” Loren Henning, who oversees the East Valley Superfund site for the EPA, said this week.

The plant was not designed to remove chromium or its more toxic byproduct, chromium 6. Removal of chromium, a heavy metal, requires a different treatment process.

The state currently limits chromium to 50 parts per billion, but is considering lowering that to 2.5 ppb. The tougher standard is intended to reduce levels of chromium 6 to 0.2 ppb.

After The Times reported that adopting the new standard may take five years, Glendale officials asked the EPA to give them 90 days to assess the risk of chromium 6 before they supply it to homes.

In response to the EPA decision Friday, a Glendale official said the city would accept the water from the plant but would not deliver it to residents. Instead, it will be dumped into the Los Angeles River.

“They want us to start pumping the water,” said Glendale public information officer Ritch Wells. “We are going to comply but we are going to discharge the water into the Los Angeles River versus putting it in our water system.”

Rongone said the EPA would not force the city to deliver the water. But she said in her letter that “there is concern over the scientific basis” for the proposed 2.5 ppb standard for chromium.

Chromium 6, a suspected carcinogen, was the chemical at issue in the Hinkley, Calif., case dramatized in the film “Erin Brockovich.” But federal, state and local water officials are still debating the health threat posed by the chemical.

The Glendale treatment plant is one of three separate water treatment plants built by polluters in the east San Fernando Valley to clean up a 13-square-mile plume of TCE and PCE in the ground water basin. The others, in Burbank and North Hollywood, are already in use.

Under the current EPA proposal, it will take at least 12 years of continuous operation for the Glendale treatment plant to remove the toxins. The city will operate the plant, but maintenance and operation, estimated to cost an additional $24 million, will be paid by the Superfund site polluters.

The Superfund site focused on TCE and PCE and not chromium, EPA officials said, because those compounds presented the greatest environmental risks in the late 1980s, when the investigation began. Although chromium has been found at the site for decades, it was not in levels sufficient to alarm health officials until recently.

The EPA classifies TCE as a possible human carcinogen and PCE as a probable human carcinogen, and limits each compound to no more than 5 parts per 1 billion parts of water.

In contrast, the EPA’s limit for chromium in the water is 100 parts per billion, less stringent than the state standard of 50 ppb.

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

“We need to know some answers about chromium 6,” Wells, the Glendale spokesman, said. “Chromium 6 has become a very important issue to the people of Southern California.”

Under the EPA plan, when the Glendale treatment plant is in use, 7.2 million gallons of water a day will be pumped from the ground, treated and delivered to homes and businesses in Glendale. It will replace costly state water the city has had to buy since the contamination was discovered in the early 1980s.